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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Do Deadlines Make Us Less Creative?, published by lynettebye on May 19, 2023 on LessWrong.
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Occasionally, my clients struggle to get things done, but worry that setting themselves deadlines will make them less creative.
Is this a reasonable worry?
To find out, let’s look at the psychology literature on pressure and creativity.
There’s a classic psychology experiment called the “candle problem”. Participants are shown matches, a box of thumbtacks, and a candle as in the picture below. The experimenter then instructs the participants to mount the candle on the wall using the available materials. "The problem is considered solved when the candle can be firmly affixed to the wall, burn properly, and does not drip wax on the table or floor."
If you’ve heard of this problem before, you probably know the answer. However, if this is new to you, take thirty seconds to try solving it before reading on.
Done?
If it’s still difficult, just imagine the thumbtacks on the table next to the box as in the picture below. Once you do that, suddenly it’s easy to guess that you should tack the empty box to the wall and put the candle inside it.
When the box is filled with tacks, our brain writes it off as a “tack holder”, instead of seeing it as a possible “candle holder.” This is called “functional fixedness.” It takes creativity to see an object being used in one way, and then break that default association to work out what other uses it could be put to.
This experiment is designed to study creativity, particularly the ability to find unusual or “out of the box” solutions to a problem. The experimenter can easily randomize whether the participants see the box full of tacks or empty (i.e. hard or easy creative thinking), plus add whatever other interactions they want to test.
Which brings us to the point of this whole experiment—how long does it take the participants to find the solution under different conditions?
In one study, the experimenters used a simple 2x2 design: participants were randomized so that half saw a picture of tacks in a box (which requires more creativity), and the rest saw tacks on the table and an empty box (which makes the puzzle easier). Half were told they’d receive a $20 bonus if they were the fastest in the group ($5 if they were in the top 25%); the other half heard no mention of a bonus.
Now, adjusted for inflation since 1962, $20 is almost $175 dollars. So, participants had a strong motive to complete the task faster when offered that bonus.
Did they?
Only when they saw the empty box. When the picture showed an empty box, participants solved the problem about a minute faster if they were offered a reward (taking on average 3.67 minutes, compared to 4.99 minutes for the non-rewarded group). If instead the participant saw the box full of tacks and was offered a reward, they took over three minutes longer than those who saw a full box but never heard about a reward (11.08 vs 7.41 minutes respectively).
What’s happening here?
The basic theory is that when you add pressure, people get better at tasks they already know how to do, but worse at doing novel tasks. This finding has been repeated in studies that use financial rewards, performance evaluation, and even self-evaluation as the source of pressure.
Think of it as tunnel vision. When you are particularly focused on one problem or motivated to get it done quickly, you get better at doing what you already know exactly how to do. But you get worse at looking around for novel solutions, because you get stuck thinking about the problem in one narrow way.
Are these findings sound?
I didn’t find any red flags: googling one of the papers plus the keywor...
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