Background
It is increasingly pointed out that creativity does not occur in isolation within individual minds but rather through continuous interactions between people.
Aims
This study investigated whether and how interactions revealing perspective taking within dyads influenced the generation of creative ideas.
Sample
Participants were 103 4- to 6-year-old Chinese children, 60 parents, and 43 university students.
Method
Children were semi-randomly assigned to working either with a (grand)parent (child-parent dyads, familiar context) or with a university student (child-stranger dyads, unfamiliar context) on the Alternative Uses Task (AUT), wherein the child and the adult subjects needed to “think together” of as many unusual uses as possible for five everyday objects. A novel coding scheme was designed and applied to analyze subjects’ verbalizations, differentiating two social processes: cognitive perspective taking, through which an exchange of ideas and thoughts takes place, and social-emotional perspective taking, which creates an open, accepting atmosphere.
Results
The child-parent dyads exhibited more cognitive perspective taking than the child-stranger dyads, but no group difference was found regarding their social-emotional perspective taking. Regardless of dyad type, dyads' cognitive perspective taking facilitated dyads' fluency and originality but hindered their appropriateness. Uniquely, people's perspective taking could differently influence their own and the their partner's creative performance, and these influences were often shaped by subject- (adult vs. child) and/or contextual-related (familiar vs. unfamiliar) characteristics.
Conclusions
Cognitive perspective taking is crucial for the emergence of creativity, whereas the role of social-emotional perspective taking remains unclear.
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