Department of Psychology, University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany.
J Pers Soc Psychol. 2011 Dec;101(6):1262-77. doi: 10.1037/a0024407. Epub 2011 Jul 11.
Intuitively, as well as in light of prior research, distrust and creativity appear incompatible. The social consequences of distrust include reluctance to share information, a quality detrimental to creativity in social settings. At the same time, the cognitive concomitants of distrust bear resemblance to creative cognition: Distrust seems to foster thinking about nonobvious alternatives to potentially deceptive appearances. These cognitive underpinnings of distrust hold the provocative implication that distrust may foster creativity. Mirroring these contradictory findings, we suggest that the social versus cognitive consequences of distrust have diverging implications for creativity. We address this question in Study 1 by introducing private/public as a moderating variable for effects of distrust on creativity. Consistent with distrust's social consequences, subliminal distrust (vs. trust) priming had detrimental effects on creative generation presumed to be public. Consistent with distrust's cognitive consequences, though, an opposite tendency emerged in private. Study 2 confirmed a beneficial effect of distrust on private creative generation with a different priming method and pointed to cognitive flexibility as the mediating process. Studies 3 and 4 showed increased category inclusiveness versus increased remote semantic spread after distrust priming, consistent with enhanced cognitive flexibility as a consequence of distrust. Taken together, these results provide evidence for the creativity-enhancing potential of distrust and suggest cognitive flexibility as its underlying mechanism.
直觉上以及根据先前的研究，不信任和创造力似乎是不相容的。不信任的社会后果包括不愿意分享信息，这对社交环境中的创造力是有害的。同时，不信任的认知伴随物与创造性认知相似：不信任似乎促进了对潜在欺骗性表象的非明显替代方案的思考。这些不信任的认知基础具有挑衅性的含义，即不信任可能会促进创造力。反映这些矛盾的发现，我们认为不信任的社会后果与认知后果对创造力的影响是不同的。我们在研究 1 中通过引入私人/公共作为不信任对创造力影响的调节变量来解决这个问题。与不信任的社会后果一致，潜意识不信任（与信任相比）启动对假定为公共的创造性产生产生了不利影响。然而，与不信任的认知后果一致，在私人领域出现了相反的趋势。研究 2 通过使用不同的启动方法证实了不信任对私人创造性产生的有益影响，并指出认知灵活性是中介过程。研究 3 和 4 表明，在不信任启动后，类别包容性增加，而远程语义传播增加，这与不信任导致认知灵活性增强的结果一致。总之，这些结果为不信任的创造力增强潜力提供了证据，并表明认知灵活性是其潜在机制。
