The Relationship Between Cognitive Inhibition And Social Creativity

Cognitive inhibition is the process of suppressing cognitive content.The research on the relationship between creativity and cognitive inhibition has become hot in creativity field.Though there are many researches,the results of them are conflicting.The domain specificity of creativity may lead to above inconsistent results.As a new domain of creativity,social creativity is observed when one proposes and solves social problem in the original,appropriate and effective ways(GU,2011).Currently,there are a few studies on social creativity,in which only measure interpersonal dimension.Few studies consider the societal dimension,another important aspect of social creativity,and measure it.Therefore,this study uses mature social creativity task(measuring interpersonal dimension)and self designed social situational questions(measuring social dimension)to measure the social level of creativity,exploring the relationship between cognitive inhibition and social creativity through two experiments.In experiment 1,participants need to complete Stroop task which consumes cognitive inhibition ability dissimilarly,then they are in different inhibition states,compared distinctions in three time blocks.Meanwhile we inspect if social skill has effect on social creativity.Experiment 2 increases relaxation phase which eliminates the effect of reducing inhibition.After Stroop task,participants rest for 3 or 6 minutes,and then complete social creativity task.We examine if social creativity in two inhibition-state conditions changes after different relax time.The results show that social skill doesn’t impact social creativity.Comparing to high inhibition state,the social creativity of participants in low inhibition state is better.However,there is no prominent difference between high and low inhibition state after relaxation.These findings suggest that when resources for inhibition are lacking,social creativity was facilitated.The tendencies of social creativity performance in two inhibition states are consistent,which indicates the relationship between cognitive inhibition and social creativity doesn’t vary with time.Besides,appropriate relaxation promotes social creativity.