This is Part 2 of a two-part series. Read Part 1 here.
In the last post, we explored the background and rationale for conducting a study to investigate whether the framework of quantum cognition can shed light on the elusive phenomenon of creativity. We left off with two hypotheses. First, we expect there to be a positive relationship between the strength of a well-established and replicated effect: the question order effect (QOE) and creativity scores. Second, we expect there to be a stronger QOE for unfamiliar stimuli than for familiar ones. In this post, we move on to the study itself. As with the last post (Part 1), this one is co-authored by the two people with whom this study is being carried out: Iana Bashmakova and Emmanuel Pothos.
The participants will be approximately 400 native English-speaking people participating for partial class credit in a psychology class at the University of British Columbia or monetary reimbursement. They will be randomly sorted into four groups, and each group will go through the same tasks, but with two different stimuli and two different question orders (i.e., it is a 2x2 between-subjects design).
The procedure we will carry out is as follows. We first present to our participants a description of an emotion that is either familiar or unfamiliar to them. Participants in groups 1 and 3 will be prompted to read through a description of a familiar emotion, i.e., an emotion that has a name in the English language. Participants in groups 2 and 4 will be prompted to read through a description of an unfamiliar emotion (i.e., an emotion that has a name in a different language but has no direct equivalencies in the English language).
Next, the participants are asked several questions to gauge how familiar they are with this emotion. Specifically, they will be asked how likely the emotion described above corresponds to other emotions that have names in the English language. This enables us to assess the degree of novelty of the stimulus for each participant.
Finally, the participants will be given a creative task, and their performance on this task is rated for degree of creativity. Specifically, they will be prompted to engage in creative thinking by producing three metaphors on a given topic, related to the emotions employed in the second step (based on: Silvia & Beaty, 2012; Silvia & Benedek, 2023). The participants will be given a brief explanation of what is meant by "metaphor," followed by prompts with the topics for the creative task.
For those who may be interested, we now summarize how the results of this study will be analyzed. The data analysis for this study will consist of several steps, with all the statistical analysis methods being carried out using RStudio:
1. Obtain subjective creativity scores from three independent judges (subjective scoring method: Forthmann et al., 2017; Silvia et al., 2008; adapted for metaphor scoring in Bashmakova & Shcherbakova, 2021).
2. Descriptive statistics.
3. Group comparisons (chi-squared and t-test).
4. Calculating the QOE for each group.
5. Ordinal regression: dummy coded groups as IVs, creativity scores as the DV.
Our expectation is that group membership will predict creativity scores, with higher QOE groups (the unfamiliar emotion groups) obtaining higher creativity scores. That would support the hypothesis that creativity benefits from quantum-like thinking. This would constitute a paradigm shift in how creativity is understood and modeled, away from thinking of it as straightforward combinatoric procedures (memory retrieval and combination of concepts based on classical logic) to a more complex and nuanced quantum cognition approach that features the role of ambiguity and context in the production of novel ideas.
We also expect our analyses to show higher QOE for the unfamiliar stimuli groups (2 and 4) than groups presented with familiar stimuli (1 and 3), thus providing support for the hypothesis that novel information may indeed prompt people to think in a quantum-like way, i.e., a way that is better described using quantum formalisms.
And that’s it. I hope you’re as excited as we are to see how it turns out. If you have any thoughts on any aspect of this study, we’d love to hear from you.
References
Bashmakova, I., & Shcherbakova, O. (2021). Just open your mind? A randomized, controlled study on the effects of meditation on creativity. Frontiers in Psychology, 12. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.663881
Forthmann, B., Holling, H., Zandi, N., Gerwig, A., Çelik, P., Storme, M., & Lubart, T. (2017). Missing creativity: The effect of cognitive workload on rater (dis-)agreement in subjective divergent-thinking scores. Thinking Skills and Creativity, 23, 129–139. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tsc.2016.12.005
Silvia, P., & Beaty, R. (2012). Making creative metaphors: The importance of fluid intelligence for creative thought. Intelligence, 40(4), 343–351. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.intell.2012.02.005
Silvia, P., & Benedek, M. (2023). Creativity and Arts Tasks and Scales: Free for Public Use. OSF. https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/4S9P6
Silvia, P., Winterstein, B., Willse, J., Barona, C., Cram, J., Hess, K., Martinez, J., & Richard, C. (2008). Assessing creativity with divergent thinking tasks: Exploring the reliability and validity of new subjective scoring methods. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 2(2), 68–85. https://doi.org/10.1037/1931-3896.2.2.68
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