Does being mindful help or hurt creative problem solving?
People high in trait mindfulness solved word puzzles better when they worked them out step by step, but not when they relied on a sudden 'aha', and overall they solved fewer puzzles.
Source
Mind wandering "Ahas" versus mindful reasoning: alternative routes to creative solutions
Study at a glance
- Design
- Human experiment — Study 1: correlational, trial-by-trial self-reports of insight vs. strategy; Study 2: instructions to use insight or analytic strategy manipulated within participants, plus a no-instruction control group
- N
- Two separate MTurk samples: 70 analysed in Study 1 and 99 analysed in Study 2, split between a no-instruction control group and an instruction group
- Population
- US adults recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk
- Outcome
- Accuracy, commission errors and omission errors on compound remote associates (CRA) problems, predicted from trait mindfulness (MAAS)
Structured fields used in claim comparison tables when every cited study has a complete layer.
What they did
Across two online studies, adults solved compound remote associates problems, where three words (such as board, magic, death) all combine with one hidden fourth word, and then completed a mindful attention questionnaire. In Study 1 (70 analysed participants), people rated after each of 30 puzzles whether they had solved it through systematic strategy or sudden insight. In Study 2 (99 analysed participants), people either got no instructions or were told to use an insight approach in one block and an analytic search in the other, over 48 puzzles.
What they found
In Study 1, higher mindfulness predicted lower overall accuracy, driven by more wrong answers. On puzzles people said they solved purely by insight, more mindful people did worse, whereas on puzzles solved purely by strategy they did better. In Study 2, mindfulness again predicted lower accuracy without instructions and higher accuracy under analytic instructions, but it was unrelated to accuracy under insight instructions. The instructions themselves did not change average accuracy, which was the same in both instructed blocks.
The limits
What it doesn't show
Mindfulness was only measured as a self-reported trait, so a third variable such as working memory could explain the links, and the study cannot say whether mindfulness training would have the same effects. Study 1 classified problem-solving style from people's own after-the-fact reports, and Study 2's insight instructions were probably hard to follow, which may explain why the insight result did not replicate. The error-pattern findings also differed between the two studies. Samples were online volunteers, with several dropped for solving no puzzles at all.
Key terms
- Compound remote associates (CRA) problem
- A puzzle giving three words that each form a compound with one unstated solution word; it can be solved either by sudden insight or by deliberate search.
- Insight ('aha') solution
- A solution that pops into awareness suddenly, without conscious access to the steps that produced it.
- Analytic strategy
- A deliberate, step-by-step search in which the solver is aware of candidate answers and tests them.
- Commission vs. omission error
- A commission error is giving a wrong answer; an omission error is timing out without answering.
- Trait mindfulness (MAAS)
- A person's general tendency to attend to the present moment, measured by the Mindful Attention Awareness Scale; low scores indicate more mind wandering.
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Quiz yourself
In Study 1, how did trait mindfulness relate to solving puzzles by pure insight?
Common questions
Does this mean mindfulness is bad for creativity?
Not simply. Mindfulness was linked to better creative problem solving when people searched analytically, and to worse performance mainly when they relied on insight. Creativity can be reached by different routes that benefit from different attentional styles.
Why look at types of errors, not just accuracy?
Insight solving tends to produce time-outs rather than wrong answers because solutions arrive all at once, while analytic solving produces more wrong candidate answers. Error patterns therefore hint at which process people were using.
Why add instructions in Study 2?
Self-reports of how a problem was solved might be biased, possibly differently for more and less mindful people, so manipulating the approach directly helps rule out that confound.
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