| The evaluation of creativity is very common in real life,such as reviewing academic papers,making investment decisions,and experiencing new products.As creative products or ideas are often closely associated with their creators(or designers,proposers),does the characteristics of creators influence the evaluation on their ideas? If the answer is yes,what is the underlying psychological mechanism? At present,these basic questions need to be systematically explored in academia.In recent years,as the concept of mini-c creativity was proposed,"products" that are novel and valuable(or meaningful)to oneself can also be defined as creative expressions.It means that by the new concept of creativity,we need to evaluate more creative expressions and face more creators,and characteristics of creators are more diverse.In the reality,especially in the school context,are people liable to be influenced by the characteristics of creators and then make some biased judgments about their mini-c creativity? The answer to this question is undoubtedly significant to innovation practice and creativity education.Given all that,the present study aims to explore whether creators’ information influence the evaluation of creative ideas,and the related psychological mechanism.This study includes three parts.In the first part,three studies were conducted to examine the effect of creators’ age information on evaluating creative ideas.In Study 1a,alien stories generated by sixth grade students were used as evaluation materials.In Study 1b,responses of sixth grade students in alternative uses tasks(AUT)were used.The influence of creators’ age information on creative evaluations was investigated.The results of Study 1a and Study 1b showed that,compared with the group without labeling creators’ information and the group with informing the creators as college students,participants in the group with labeling creators as sixth grade students(11-12 years old)scored higher on creative products.In Study 1c,AUT responses of sixth grade students and undergraduates were both used as evaluation materials.One withinsubjects design was adopted to further examine the effect of age information on creative evaluations.The results indicated that,compared with the condition of labeling the creators as college students,participants scored higher under the condition with informing creators as sixth grade students.In the second part,five studies(2,3a,3b,4,5)were conducted to examine the mechanisms underlying the effect of creators’ information on evaluating creative ideas.In Study 2,one 4(four groups were marked creators as: about 10 years old primary school students,about 20 year old college students,about 30 years old adults,and over 60 years old people)× 2(two stages in each group: without creators’ information and with different creators’ age information)mixed design was employed to examine the effect of creators’ age information on evaluating novelty and usefulness of creative ideas.In addition,we also measured explicit and implicit creative stereotypes to the certain age group of each participant.The results of Study 2 showed that,the interaction effects between two independent variables were both significant on two creativity indicators.Compared with other groups,participants in the group with labeling creators as 10 years old primary school students improved their scorings more in the second evaluating stage.Furthermore,participants had different creative stereotypes for different age groups.They were more positive for the young and more negative for older people.However,creative stereotypes had no predictive effect on increases in novelty and usefulness scores.Given that Study 1 and Study 2 both showed that marking the creators as minors would increase the scores.In Studies 3a and 3b,we further examined the role of perspective taking(i.e.putting raters in ratees’ shoes)for this age group in evaluating their creative ideas.It was found that,the sixth grade age information did not necessarily affect the evaluation,and the key was whether the age information activated raters’ perspective taking on the creators.The age information can increase the scores with raters’ perspective taking(3a).Once perspective taking was suppressed(3b),the age information can not influence evaluations any more.However,if raters were asked for taking the sixth grade students’ perspective by instructions,it was possible to steadily promote creative ratings on their ideas.Whereas previous studies have indicated that people’s stereotypes to creators might also influence creative evaluations.Therefore,we further explored the role of stereotypes and perspective taking under different conditions through Study 4 and Study 5.In Study 4,AUT responses were used as evaluation materials.The results showed that,for the undergraduate raters who were informed creators were elder people,negative stereotypes activation(see older people’s faces)and the instruction of perspective taking had no effect on creative ratings whether or not there was a time limit in the evaluation.The results of Study 5 indicated that,when the creator was some specific and familiar person to the rater,compared with the condition of objective evaluation,the manipulation of perspective taking can improve participants’ creativity scorings.In the third part,Study 6 was conducted to explore the role of the evaluation and feedback based on perspective taking in promoting individual creative performance and self-evaluation of mini-c creativity.The results showed that,in the real situation,compared with the objective evaluation condition,participants did not significantly improve creativity scorings under the perspective taking condition.However,under the condition of the evaluation and feedback based on perspective taking,the trend of gradually decreasing in the fluency of participants’ ideas can be alleviated during the course of creative problem solving,and their micro-creativity self-evaluation on the ideas generated after evaluating can be significantly improved.Based on the results a series of studies,the following conclusions can be drawn: 1.For domain-general creative products(short stories and AUT responses),undergraduate participants will increase ratings of creative products by knowing that the creators’ age is specific(minors).In this process,the raters’ perspective taking of the author rather than the stereotypes may play an important role.2.For non-specific creators(adulthood),perspective taking can also increase creative ratings when the ratee is a specific and familiar individual for the rater.3.The evaluation and feedback based on perspective taking have positive effects on enhancing individuals’ creative performance and mini-c creativity self-evaluation.In sum,the conclusions of present study have important reference value for interpreting the process of idea evaluation in the real situation,developing new methods of creativity assessment,and nurturing creativity in young students. |
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