America
Creativity depends on where you are from
Montreal, Jan 28
When it comes to the creative
juices, some people have a faster flow than others as creativity is
closely tied to culture, new research at the Concordia University has
found.
The study compared nearly 300 individuals from Taiwan, a collectivist society, and Canada, a more individualistic country.
Results
show that those from individualist societies generate a greater number
of ideas as compared to their collectivist counterparts - though the
cultures were on nearly equal footing when it came to the quality of
that creative output.
"We found that the individualists came up
with many more ideas. They also uttered more negative statements - and
those statements were more strongly negative. They also displayed
greater overconfidence,"said Gad Saad, professor at Concordia's John
Molson School of Business.
For the study, the team recruited students from two universities in Taipei and Montreal.
When it came to the quality of ideas produced, the collectivists scored marginally higher than the individualists.
"This
is in line with another important cultural trait that some collectivist
societies are known to possess - namely being more reflective as
compared to action-oriented, having the reflex to think hard prior to
committing to a course of action," Saad explained.
Studies like
this one are instrumental in understanding cultural differences that
increasingly arise as the globe's economic centre of gravity shifts
towards East Asia, the authors concluded.
The paper was published in the Journal of Business Research.