Effects Of Intrinsic Motivation And Environmental Cues On Social Creativity

Social creativity refers to the creativity that individuals propose and solve social problems in a novel,unique,appropriate and effective way.This type of creativity plays an important role in solving various social and interpersonal problems,adapting to the environment and maintaining mental health.During the electronic brainstorming task,a large number of ideas from others promote cognitive stimuli,which can greatly facilitate the process of generating individual ideas.What is the difference in the social creativity of individuals with different intrinsic motivation when confronted with different environmental cues?This study explored the effects of intrinsic motivation and environmental cues on social creativity through two parallel experiments.Experiment 1 examined the effects of intrinsic motivation and the number of cues on social creativity.The total number of valid participants in Experiment 1 was 90.The need for cognition scale was used to screen out 43 high intrinsic motivation participants and 47 low intrinsic motivation participants,each of them were randomly assigned to different cue number conditions.They were asked to complete an electronic brainstorming task(interpersonal problem situation).We evaluated social creativity from four dimensions.The results showed that:(1)The main effect of intrinsic motivation on utility was not significant.(2)The main effect of the number of cues on fluency was significant,so as the main effect on flexibility and utility.The more number of ideas presented,the more ideas participant proposed,the more variety of ideas covered,and the lower the overall utility.(3)The interactions between intrinsic motivation and the number of cues on fluency and flexibility was significant.Individuals with high intrinsic motivation showed the highest level of fluency and flexibility when the number of cues was large.Experiment 2 examined the effects of intrinsic motivation and cue novelty on social creativity.The total number of valid participants in Experiment 1 was 90.The need for cognition scale was used to screen out 44 high intrinsic motivation participants and 46 low intrinsic motivation participants,each of them were randomly assigned to different cue novelty conditions.They were asked to complete an electronic brainstorming task(interpersonal problem situation).The results showed that:(1)The main effect of intrinsic motivation on utility was significant,individuals with high intrinsic motivation showed higher utility than those with low intrinsic motivation.(2)The main effect of cue novelty on idea novelty was significant,and the more novel the cue was,the higher the average novel the proposed ideas would be.(3)The interaction between intrinsic motivation and cue novelty on idea fluency was significant.Presenting novel ideas can improve the fluency of individuals with low intrinsic motivation,but not for individuals with high intrinsic motivation.This study examined the influence of different intrinsic motivation and environmental cues on social creativity,which not only enriched the research contents of different creative fields,but also provided a new theoretical perspective for the complex relationship between intrinsic motivation and creativity,and provided empirical support for the cultivation of social creativity.