Promised Reward and Creativity: Effects of Prior Experience

An experiment involving 283 preadolescent schoolchildren investigated how divergent-thinking training affected subsequent creativity for promised reward in a new task administered by a different individual. The promise of reward for picture drawing increased creativity if children had previously generated novel uses for physical objects with or without reward. In contrast, the promise of reward did not increase the creativity of picture drawings if the children had been rewarded for giving conventional object uses. Divergent-thinking training evidently conveys a task administrator's desire for creative performance; task participants generalize this discrimination to new tasks administered by other individuals and perform creatively when motivated to do so by the promise of reward. Thus, creativity is increased by the discrimination of a positive relationship between novel performance and reward.