Personality
Does acting open-minded make you more creative or happier?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
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.
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
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Key findings
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.
Methodology
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.
Limitations
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.
How this study connects
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