A Study On The Influencing Factors Of Creativity In Different Ways Of Thinking

According to Evans' dual-system model,humans have two different ways of thinking,namely,link-based,bottom-up unconscious thinking,and rule-based and logical,top-down conscious thinking.Creativity is the ability to produce novel and practical products that are accepted by social culture,and it requires two ways of thinking.Dijksterhuis' theory of unconscious thinking suggests that unconscious thinking will show higher creativity.In contrast to individuals who concentrate on thinking about a problem,individuals who complete a distracted task without having the opportunity to concentrate on the problem can make better decisions.Many researchers used the same experimental paradigm to study unconscious thinking as Dijksterhuis,only to found that they can not reproduce the unconscious thinking effect,which indicated that there were other factors that affected the experimental results.Due to the different nature of the two ways of thinking,the relevant factors(processing time,task difficulty,etc.)which impact them is not equal.Previous studies have shown that in the dimension of time,conscious thinking and processing time is positively correlated.In the dimension of difficulty,conscious thinking is limited by rules and capacity,it is not suitable to deal with difficult and unconventional creativity problems.Unconscious thinking is more advantageous in complex decision-making.The accuracy of conscious thinking makes it easy to solve easy problems.As to the cognitive workload of distracting tasks,some researchers believe that distraction tasks with low cognitive load are more beneficial to creativity,while some researchers believe that when the task type is different the optimal load of distraction task is different too.It can be concluded that the previous study did not systematically examine the interaction between the influencing factors and different ways of thinking,and the research results are contradictory to some extent.The content of this study is about how processing time,difficulty of the tasks and the cognitive load of distracting tasks affect people's creativity under two different ways of thinking.Experiment 1 examines how processing time affects creativity under conscious thinking and unconscious thinking.Experiment 2 examines the impact of the two ways of thinking on creativity when the difficulty of the task is different.Experiment 3 contrasts theeffect of distraction tasks with different cognitive load on creativity in the same experimental paradigm.The main conclusions are as follows:(1)There is an interaction between processing time and the two different ways of thinking.In the conscious thinking condition,the processing time is positively correlated with creativity.In the unconscious thinking condition,the processing time and creativity are inverted U curve,medium processing time is most beneficial to creativity.Only when the processing time is moderate(3 minutes)is unconscious thinking better than the conscious thinking,showing the unconscious thinking effects mentioned by Dijksterhuis.(2)There is an interaction between task difficulty and the two different ways of thinking.For difficult creativity problems,the score under unconscious condition is significantly higher than the conscious condition,indicating that unconscious thinking can promote difficult problem solving.For easy creativity problems,the difference between the two ways of thinking is not significant.(3)Under the unconscious thinking condition,distracted tasks of different cognitive load could affect creativity.Subjects who excute low cognitive load distraction tasks show a more pronounced unconscious thinking effect.