The Effects Of Social Distance On Creativity

In the past two decades, the social psychologist found that creativity is not only the personal characteristics, but also may vary to response to the social context. Social psychologists have identified a number of factors that influence creativity. Based on the recent development of Construal Level Theory recent years, the effects of social distance on creativity have become a new topic.The effects of social distance on creativity are often explained by construal level theory and the theory of processing shifts. Construal level theory indicates that psychological distance (temporal distance, spatial distance, social distance, hypothetical) influences an individual's responses to events by changing the way people mentally represent these events. The greater the psychological distance, the more likely events are to be represented in terms of more abstract, general, and decontextualized features that convey the perceived essence of the events (high-level construals) rather than in terms of more concrete, contextual, and incidental details of the events (low-level construals). "Processing shift" is a phenomenon in which cognitive procedures activated in the course of engaging in one task remain active so that they are carried over or "transferred" to subsequent tasks. "Transfer-appropriate" processing shifts are said to result when the residually activated procedures are beneficial for subsequent processing, whereas "transfer-inappropriate" shifts are said to result when the procedures at hand impair subsequent processing. The abstract representations activated by psychological distance, which carried over or transferred to subsequent creative tasks, so facilitates creativity.Previous studies showed that the distant future time, will be facilitates creativity. However, the relationship between social distance and creativity has not been studied. Therefore, this study uses different creative tasks to study the effects of social distance on creativity. Social distance refers to the differences of social object and individual in the size (such as self--others; friends--strangers.). With different from the single dimension of temporal and spatial distance, the dimension of social distance involved more. In this study, we used the dimension of self--others, selected self and strangers, as the two levels of social distance.Study 1 was a preliminary experiment, initially exploring the effects of social distance on creativity.81 college students were randomly assigned to three groups, each of the subjects completed the divergent production test, insight problems, Remote Associates test. The result of these tests, no significant were obtained, which is not match to my expects of the experiment. Based on the improvements of study1, we carried out the subsequent experiments.In study 2, we explored the effects of social distance on the insight problems solving.112 college students were randomly assigned to three groups, each of the subjects completed the task of insight problems, For the verbal insight problem, compared to subjects for their own problem, and control group, subjects for their stranger's problem perform better on tasks. For the spatial insight problem, no significant were obtained.In study 3, we explored the effects of social distance on the divergent production test.107 college students were randomly assigned to three groups, each of the subjects completed the task of unusual uses of objects. Data showed that:compared to subjects for their own problem, and control group, subjects for their stranger's problem perform better on tasks. The Differences of fluency, flexibility, novelty, were all significant.In study 4, we explored the effects of social distance on the creative integrating of Information. 110 college students were randomly assigned to three groups, each of the subjects make decisions for market. For the creative integration of market information, no significant were obtained.This study used three different creative tasks, discusses the effects of social distance on creativity. We found that more social distance can promotes the verbal insight problem solving and creative generation. The results validated and enriched the interpretation of Construal level theory to some extent.