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Abstract
Two experiments investigated competing hypotheses about the use of evaluation during the creative process. In particular, product-centered self-evaluations were studied. These evaluations are judgments of a developing product made by the creator. A key feature of the creative process--the sequence of actions that lead to a creative product--is the timing of cognitive events, such as evaluations. Three main possibilities on the timing of evaluations were tested. Benefits to creativity from a concentration of evaluations early in the productive process, a concentration of evaluations during a later portion of the process, and an evenly-paced distribution of evaluations throughout the process were compared. In the experiments, subjects followed designated timing patterns of self-evaluation and the effects on creativity were observed.
The first experiment tested competing views on the timing and quantity of evaluations. Subjects were prompted experimentally to evaluate their progress during either an early portion of their work, a later portion, or at an even pace throughout their work. Control subjects did not receive evaluation prompts. The evaluation-quantity variable consisted of two versus four evaluative episodes. Subjects completed short-story writing and drawing tasks, which were reliably rated for creativity by domain-experienced judges. Early evaluation was beneficial for creativity as compared to other timing-of-evaluation and control conditions. The benefits of early evaluation occurred primarily for the story-writing task. No quantity-of-evaluation effects were observed.
Experiment 2 further investigated timing-of-evaluation effects and varied both the degree to which evaluations were self-guided and the nature of the short-story tasks. Replicating the main result of Experiment 1, early evaluation led to higher creativity than did other evaluation patterns. This result occurred across groups that were experimentally-prompted to evaluate, moderately self-guided in their evaluations, and highly self-guided, the most naturalistic condition. The early-evaluation effect was clearer for the character-based stories than for the title-based stories. In general, the results show benefits of early evaluation during story writing and provide experimental evidence that creativity depends on the timing of high-level cognitive activities during the productive process.
