Creativity in temporal social networks: how divergent thinking is impacted by one's choice of peers.

ABSTRACT: Creativity is viewed as one of the most important skills in the context of future-of-work. In this paper, we explore how the dynamic (self-organizing) nature of social networks impacts the fostering of creative ideas. We run six trials (N = 288) of a web-based experiment involving divergent ideation tasks. We find that network connections gradually adapt to individual creative performances, as the participants predominantly seek to follow high-performing peers for creative inspirations. We unearth both opportunities and bottlenecks afforded by such self-organization. While exposure to high-performing peers is associated with better creative performances of the followers, we see a counter-effect that choosing to follow the same peers introduces semantic similarities in the followers'

SUBMITTER: Baten RA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7653375 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature