Suspicious spirits, flexible minds: When distrust enhances creativity.

Abstract

Intuitively, as well as in light of prior research, distrust and creativity appear incompatible. The social consequences of distrust include reluctance to share information, a quality detrimental to creativity in social settings. At the same time, the cognitive concomitants of distrust bear resemblance to creative cognition: Distrust seems to foster thinking about nonobvious alternatives to potentially deceptive appearances. These cognitive underpinnings of distrust hold the provocative implication that distrust may foster creativity. Mirroring these contradictory findings, we suggest that the social versus cognitive consequences of distrust have diverging implications for creativity. We address this question in Study 1 by introducing private/public as a moderating variable for effects of distrust on creativity. Consistent with distrust's social consequences, subliminal distrust (vs. trust) priming had detrimental effects on creative generation presumed to be public. Consistent with distrust's cognitive consequences, though, an opposite tendency emerged in private. Study 2 confirmed a beneficial effect of distrust on private creative generation with a different priming method and pointed to cognitive flexibility as the mediating process. Studies 3 and 4 showed increased category inclusiveness versus increased remote semantic spread after distrust priming, consistent with enhanced cognitive flexibility as a consequence of distrust. Taken together, these results provide evidence for the creativity-enhancing potential of distrust and suggest cognitive flexibility as its underlying mechanism.

Something smells fishy: Olfactory suspicion cues improve performance on the Moses illusion and Wason rule discovery task

“…For example, exposure to a given concept (e.g., "temporary") usually facilitates the subsequent identification of related congruent concepts (e.g., "transitory"); yet, distrust reverses this effect and facilitates the identification of conceptincongruent terms (e.g., "permanent"; Schul et al, 2004). Moreover, people in a distrustful mindset are more likely to entertain alternative interpretations of utterances (Fein, 1996; A C C E P T E D M A N U S C R I P T ACCEPTED MANUSCRIPT SUSPICION & COGNITIVE PROCESSING 5 Burnstein, & Bardi, 1996) and to generate more unusual solutions on creativity tasks (Mayer & Mussweiler, 2011). Furthermore, Mayo, Alfasi, and Schwarz (2014) reported that distrust improves performance on Wason's (1960) rule discovery task by increasing the prevalence of negative hypothesis testing.…”

How activating cognitive content shapes trust: A subliminal priming study

“…Also being exposed to trust-vs. suspicion-evoking information in one context may influence how one processes information in another, unrelated context (e.g. Mayer & Mussweiler, 2011;Schul, Mayo, & Burnstein, 2008;Schul et al, 2004). Thus, according to social psychological theorizing and research, reflective trust judgments and trust decisions should clearly be influenced by contents that have been activated in a previous, unrelated task and still exert their influence in the associative structures of the impulsive system.…”

Subliminal Priming of Motivation Magnitude

“…For example, words with a hostile connotation biased subjects' ratings of other persons' personality towards more hostile scores (Smith & Branscombe, 1988), words expressing distrust increased subjects' creativity (Mayer & Mussweiler, 2011) and words denoting narrowness or wideness narrowed or widened, respectively, subjects' focus of attention (Hüttermann, Memmert, & Bock, 2012). Conceptual priming doesn't require awareness as it was found with subliminally presented targets (Hüttermann et al, 2012) and in completely amnestic patients (Levy, Stark, & Squire, 2004).…”