Sweet ideas: How the sensory experience of sweetness impacts creativity*

The importance of creativity to organizations is significant, ergo, scholars have begun to investigate how sensory elements in the workplace might impact creative performance. Our research examines effects of the sensory experience of taste, specifically sweetness, on creativity. Using a range of real taste tests and imagination tasks, we demonstrate that sweet taste facilitates creative performance. We argue that this is because sweet taste, as a positive implicit affective cue, increases cognitive flexibility and creativity independent of the elicitation of positive emotions. However, when the positive associations of sweet taste are externally overridden, such as when health risks are made salient, the positive impact of sweet taste on creativity is attenuated. We further demonstrate that sensory experience of sweetness increases performance on related tasks that require cognitive flexibility, but does not increase performance on non-creative tasks.