Evaluation, Criticism, and Creativity: Criticism Content and Effects on Creative Problem Solving

Recent work has demonstrated the importance of evaluation to creative problem solving. How people go about evaluating creative ideas, however, may also influence their performance on creative problem-solving tasks. In the present study, undergraduates were asked to provide advertising campaigns for a marketing problem where solutions were evaluated for quality, originality, and elegance. Prior to preparing their campaigns they were presented with a set of candidate ideas and asked to critique these ideas. Attributes of criticisms were appraised with respect to amount, number, depth, usefulness, range, complexity, isolation, risk sensitivity, operational relevance, and specificity. It was found that more creative problem solutions were obtained when people provided a limited number of deep criticisms. Moreover, effective criticism was inhibited by problem complexity. The implications of these findings for improving performance on tasks calling for creative thinking are discussed.