How the LEGO Kit Mentality Can Hurt Your Creativity
LEGOs are great toys to unleash your imagination, but recent research shows that following the instructions in a LEGO set can actually hurt your creativity.
Researchers from Wisconsin Business School and the University of Buskerud and Vestfold in Norway tested the creativity of over 130 undergraduate students after building or assembling for free with LEGO. Those who followed the instructions in the LEGO set were better at dealing with “vague” problems (those for which there were no rules and an infinite number of possible answers) than their counterparts. In addition, even viewing an image of a finished LEGO set prevented subjects from coming up with original answers in subsequent creativity tests.
Psychology Today explains that these discoveries, according to researchers, go beyond creative uses of LEGO or not:
“Instead of using the map, along with trial and error, to find the next destination, we can now ask Siri to direct us to that place without hindrance; Instead of following the Italian recipe, we can now fry a ready-made frozen Bertolli dish for dinner, and instead of trying to get an answer from our memory , we can instantly google information. In fact, the market offers more products that involve us in solving well-defined problems. The purpose of this article is to better understand the subsequent consequences of this behavior, ”write [researchers Moro and Angeset].
Taking these experiments at face value, the “better understanding ” of this study is that the more we face and solve well-defined problems, such as LEGO sets, word searches, or line-painted pictures, the less we choose to participate, and the more we’re worse at solving ill-defined problems: creating something beautiful, discovering something meaningful, finding someone to love .
In other words, if you have a creative challenge and need to think outside the box, try to avoid well-defined problem-solving tasks (things that come with instructions or set results). Forget leadership and start building freely.
The Consequences of Problem Solving: How LEGO Play Affects Creativity | Marketing Research Journals, American Marketing Association via Psychology Today
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