When Reflection Hinders Creative Problem-Solving: a Test of Alternative Reflection Strategies

A growing body of evidence suggests that reflecting on performance is an important source of individual learning. Given the importance of creativity in contemporary business settings, reflection has also been cast as a useful strategy to facilitate creative problem-solving. Challenging this idea, we conducted a series of lab experiments to examine the effects of reflection on creative problem-solving. Drawing from theory in cognitive psychology on knowledge structures, we argue that reflection may sometimes debilitate rather than improve creative problem-solving, due to the reinforcement of existing cognitive schemas and the resulting cognitive entrenchment. To test our theoretical arguments, we developed two alternative reflection strategies, imaginative reflection and vicarious elaboration. In Study 1 (N = 101), we observed a detrimental effect of task reflection on creative problem-solving, which was offset by having participants engage in imaginative reflection. In Study 2 (N = 191), vicarious elaboration, elaborating on another's creative experiences instead of reflecting on one's own creative experiences, was introduced as a second strategy to counter cognitive entrenchment. In Study 3 (N = 235), we combined the reflection strategies, demonstrating that imaginative thinking was more effective when focused on one's own experiences rather than on others' experiences (i.e., vicarious imaginative elaboration). Together, these findings increase our understanding of the effects of different reflection strategies, but also call for further research to address an intriguing observation: none of the reflection strategies led to better outcomes as compared to a control condition without reflection, suggesting that individual reflection might not help creative problem-solving at all.