#33. The Playful Mind is a Creative Mind

Many experiments reveal that inducing a playful state of mind improves insightful problem solving and creative artistic production.

Dear friends,

In Letter #28 I suggested that some, perhaps most, of the greatest innovations in science occurred in the spirit of play. In Letter #32 I suggested that play, not necessity, is the mother of invention. As examples, I described what we know about the human invention of the wheel-axle combination and the macaque monkey invention of the hammer. Now, here, I summarize results of controlled research studies showing that a playful disposition improves insightful problem solving and artistic creativity.

A Playful Mindset Improves Insightful Problem Solving

Several experiments have shown that induction of what I would describe as a playful mood improves participants’ abilities to solve insight problems. These are problems whose solutions at first seem impossible but then suddenly appear in a flash. That flash seems to come not from trying harder but from taking a more lighthearted, playful approach that results in seeing the problem materials in a new way.

iStock/Creative Commons

A classic example of such a problem, long used in psychological research, is Duncan’s candle problem. In this task, participants receive a small candle, a book of matches, and a box of tacks and are asked to attach the candle to a bulletin board in such a way that the candle can be lit and will burn properly. They are allowed to use no other objects. The trick to solving the problem is to realize that the tacks can be dumped out of the box and the box can then be tacked to the bulletin board and serve as a shelf on which to mount the candle with melted wax. In the typical test situation, most people, including most students at fancy colleges, fail to solve this problem within the allotted time. They fail to see that the tack box can be used for something other than a container for tacks.

Some years ago, Alice Isen and her colleagues (1987), at Cornell University, conducted an experiment to see if they could improve students’ success at this problem by altering their mood. In one experiment, some of the students watched a five-minute clip from a slapstick comedy film before being presented with the problem, while others saw five minutes of a serious film about mathematics and still others saw no film. The results were dramatic. Seventy five percent of those who saw the comedy film, compared to only 20 per cent and 13 per cent of those in the other two groups, respectively, solved the problem successfully. Just five minutes of a comedy film, which had nothing to do with the candle problem, made the problem solvable for most participants.

In subsequent experiments, Isen and her colleagues showed that mood manipulations can improve insight in many other situations as well, including situations that could have life-or-death significance. In one such experiment, the researchers presented real physicians with a case history of a difficult-to-diagnose liver disease (Estrada et al, 1997). The case included some irrelevant but seemingly relevant information (much as a good detective story does), which tended to divert the physicians’ attention from the relevant information and lead their thinking down a wrong track. Mood manipulation was accomplished by giving some of the doctors a little bag of candy before presenting them with the problem. Consistent with Isen’s prediction, those who got the candy arrived at the correct diagnosis more quickly than those who didn’t. They reasoned more flexibly, attended more to all the information, and were less likely to get stuck on false leads than were the others.

Isen and others who refer to her work describe such experiments as showing that a “positive mood” improves creative, insightful reasoning. I have a somewhat different interpretation. I think the relevant mood here was not just a “positive” mood but a playful mood. I suspect that the slapstick film led college students to feel, “Hey, this experiment is about having fun, not something like a test,” and I suspect the little bag of candy had a similar effect on the physicians. For a physician a little bag of candy isn’t a real-world huge prize, but it is likely a reminder of childhood and play. Of course, the real trick for a physician is to maintain that mood during the serious business of real diagnosis, not just during a test case as in this experiment. [I’ve noticed that my wife, who is an actual physician, lightens the atmosphere with good humor and sometimes a joke or two when she accompanies me in a doctor’s office. I suspect there’s method in her making light of something that seems serious.]

There is also evidence that priming with play improves performance on standard tests of creative thinking. In one such study, David Moffat and colleagues (2017) tested young adults with the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking, administered before and right after 30 minutes of playing a computer game. The game, for different groups, was Serious Sam (a shooter game), Portal-2 (a problem-solving game), or Minecraft (a sandbox game involving building and destroying whatever the player wishes). The result was a large, significant gain in creative thinking, especially in that aspect of creativity referred to as flexibility. The gain occurred regardless of which game they had played, though it was largest for Portal-2.

Playful Conditions Improve Artistic Creativity

Many experiments have shown that artistic creativity is enhanced under conditions that I would describe as playful, compared with other conditions. The most systematic set of such experiments were conducted by psychologist Theresa Amabila (1996), at Brandeis University in the 1990s.

In a typical experiment, she would ask groups of volunteers to engage in a creative task. Depending on the experiment, the task might be to paint a picture, make a collage, or write a poem or short story, within an allotted time.  Each experiment involved some sort of manipulation aimed at increasing the participants’ motivation to produce a creative product. She would tell some but not others that their product would be evaluated and ranked for creativity, or that it would be entered into a contest for creativity, or that they would get a reward for producing a creative product.

Then, when the products were completed, she would have them evaluated for creativity by a panel of judges. Creativity is hard to define, but apparently not too hard to recognize. Even though the judges made their evaluations independently of one another, there was significant consistency among them. In general, the judges saw as creative those products that were original and surprising yet were also somehow satisfying, meaningful, and coherent.

The overriding result of the whole set of experiments was this: Anything that Amabile did that would seem to increase the incentive to be creative had the effect of reducing creativity. In experiment after experiment, the most creative products were produced by those who were in the non-incentive condition—the ones who believed their products were not going to be evaluated. They were the volunteers who thought of themselves as creating the product just for fun. I refer to this as the playful condition because there was no extrinsic reward.

Amabile (1996; 2001) also found, through interviews and examinations of autobiographies, that highly creative writers commonly reported that love for the process, not money or thought about fame, was essential for their creativity. For example, the novelist Steven King wrote, “Money is great stuff to have, but when it comes to the act of creation the best thing is not to think of money. It constipates the whole process.” And the novelist John Irving, when asked if he worried, when writing, about whether the book would succeed financially, responded: “No, no, oh no. You can’t, you can’t! … When you’re writing only think about the book.”

Final Thoughts

Our minds can be thought of as having a variety of operating modes. In the fear or stress mode we focus on avoiding or getting away from some immediate perceived danger, which in hunter-gatherers might be a tiger and in modern-day students might be a bad grade on a test. This mode narrows our range of thought to focus specifically on the source of danger and on instinctual or well-practiced ways of escape. It works quite well in the case of the tiger, not so well for the test. In the playful mode, in contrast, our minds broaden. We become aware of a broader range of stimuli and ideas and can make connections that we hadn’t thought of before. We become capable of make-believe, which is part and parcel of play. The playful mode is the best mode not just for creativity, but also for learning anything new, which requires a willingness to avoid well-worn mental paths and try out previously untested ones.

Sadly, our system of schooling—where motivation is induced by threat of failure—tends to mute the playful mode and amplify the fearful one. By doing so, schools interfere with creative and critical thinking, an issue discussed in Letters #30 and #31.

What do you think of these ideas? This letter is, among other things, a forum for discussions. Your thoughts, experiences, and questions, in the comments section, will be valued by me and other readers.

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With respect and best wishes,

Peter

References

Amabile, T. (1996). Creativity in context: update to the social psychology of creativity, Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press.

Amabile, T. (2001). Beyond talent: John Irving and the Passionate Craft of Creativity. American Psychologist, 56, 333-336.

Isen, A. M., Daubman, K. A., & Nowicki, G. P. (1987). “Positive affect facilitates creative problem solving,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 52, 1122-1131.

Estrada, C. A., Isen, A. M., & Young, M. J. (1997). Positive affect facilitates integration of information and decreases anchoring in reasoning among physicians. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 72, 117-135.

Moffat, D. (2017). Some video games can increase the player’s creativity. International Journal of Game-Based Learning, 7, 35-46.