Problem Solving with Decoding, Repurposing, and Language Tasks in College Students: A Study in Creativity Priming

Indianapolis, IN

Problem Solving with Decoding, Repurposing, and Language Tasks in College Students: A Study in Creativity Priming
Nonconcious priming is effective in a multitude of behaviors, thought process, attitudinal adjustments (Cougle & Hawkins, 2013) and altering gender stereotypes (Blair & Banaji, 1996). The present study explores whether people can be primed for creative thinking by using different word scrambles to prime participants to think either creatively or rigidly. Creativity is assessed by asking participants to generate a list of uses for a book. In order to determine whether or not the impact of the primes are significant in this study, a One-Way Within Groups ANOVA will be run on the gathered data for the three levels of the independent variable (creative, rigid, and control). We anticipate that participants in the study who are exposed to the creative prime will generate longer, more detailed, and more creative lists of uses for the book. The creativity of responses will be judged based upon the detail of their descriptions of the uses. We also hypothesize that participants who are either primed for rigidity or are part of the control group will produce lists containing more concrete and less descriptive uses.