Does acting open-minded make you more creative or happier?
Doing a week of open-minded writing and curiosity tasks raised positive mood but did not make students more creative, more authentic, or more growth-oriented.
Source
Testing Trait-State Isomorphism in a New Domain: An Exploratory Manipulation of Openness to Experience
Study at a glance
- Design
- Human experiment — Online randomised between-groups experiment: five daily openness-inducing tasks vs neutral diary/trivia control, with pre-test, post-test and 2-week follow-up
- N
- N=210 · Abstract reports N = 210 introductory psychology students; the Methods describe a slightly larger retained sample after exclusions (openness vs control groups).
- Population
- Canadian undergraduate introductory psychology students (mostly female, early twenties)
- Outcome
- Alternate uses creativity scores, state authenticity, personal growth, and positive affect
Structured fields used in claim comparison tables when every cited study has a complete layer.
What they did
Undergraduates were randomly assigned either to openness exercises or to a neutral control. On five days the openness group wrote for 15 minutes about beauty, their feelings, their values and interesting ideas, and answered curiosity-provoking trivia; the control group described their previous 24 hours and answered dull trivia. After each task everyone did a creativity test (listing uses for an object) and rated their mood and authenticity, with personal growth measured before, after and at a 2-week follow-up.
What they found
The curiosity manipulation worked strongly (d = 1.25 on rated curiosity). Trait openness predicted creativity, but doing the open tasks did not raise creativity, and the overall condition difference in authenticity was about zero (d = 0.01). Open tasks did produce more positive affect, and people high in trait openness felt more positive, more authentic and reported more personal growth in the openness condition than their less open peers.
The limits
What it doesn't show
It does not show that behaving openly is causally inert for creativity in general: the authors note there is no agreed list of behaviours that make up openness, so the manipulation was assembled from several taxonomies. The control task (writing about one's day) may itself feel authentic, weakening the authenticity comparison. Participants wrote more in the openness condition, so effort differences are a confound that the authors could only partly control statistically. It is a single exploratory study with a student sample and self-report outcomes.
Key terms
- Trait-state isomorphism
- The idea that a personality trait and momentary behaviour matching that trait have the same outcomes, e.g. trait and state extraversion both go with positive affect.
- Openness to experience
- A Big Five trait describing curiosity, imagination, appreciation of beauty, interest in ideas and awareness of one's feelings.
- Alternate uses test
- A divergent-thinking creativity task in which people list as many uses as possible for an everyday object, scored for fluency, flexibility, originality and elaboration.
- State authenticity
- The momentary feeling that one's behaviour expresses one's true self.
- Moderation
- When the effect of one variable (here, condition) depends on the level of another (here, trait openness).
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Quiz yourself
What was the main creativity finding?
Common questions
If open people are more creative, why didn't acting open raise creativity?
The trait-creativity link held, but a brief manipulated open state did not boost creativity scores; the authors suggest cognitive outcomes like creativity may not follow the trait-state pattern that affective outcomes do.
Did the openness tasks help everyone equally?
No. Benefits for positive affect, authenticity and growth were concentrated among people already high in trait openness; for low-openness people the tasks helped less or not at all.
How do we know the manipulation did anything?
On the curiosity day, the openness group rated themselves far more curious about the trivia answers than the control group, a very large difference.
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