Creativity
Does being mindful help or hurt creative problem solving?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
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.
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)
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Key findings
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.
Methodology
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.
Limitations
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.
How this study connects
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