Marsh R L, Landau J D, Hicks J L
Department of Psychology, University of Georgia, Athens 30602-3013, USA.
Mem Cognit. 1996 Sep;24(5):669-80. doi: 10.3758/bf03201091.
Three experiments were performed to test Smith, Ward, and Schumacher's (1993) conformity hypothesis-that people's ideas will conform to examples they are shown in a creative generation task. Conformity was observed in all three experiments; participants tended to incorporate critical features of experimenter-provided examples. However, examination of total output, elaborateness of design, and the noncritical features did not confirm that the conformity effect constrained creative output in any of the three experiments. Increasing the number of examples increased the conformity effect (Experiment 1). Examples that covaried features that are naturally uncorrelated in the real world led to a greater subjective rating of creativity (Experiment 2). A delay between presentation and test increased conformity (Experiment 3), just as models of inadvertent plagiarism would predict. The explanatory power of theoretical accounts such as activation, retrieval blocking, structured imagination, and category abstraction are evaluated.
进行了三项实验来检验史密斯、沃德和舒马赫（1993）的从众假设，即人们的想法会在创造性生成任务中与他们所看到的示例保持一致。在所有三项实验中均观察到了从众现象；参与者倾向于纳入实验者提供示例的关键特征。然而，对总产出、设计的精细程度和非关键特征的考察并未证实从众效应在这三项实验中的任何一项中限制了创造性产出。增加示例数量会增强从众效应（实验1）。那些协变了现实世界中自然不相关特征的示例会带来更高的创造力主观评分（实验2）。正如无意抄袭模型所预测的那样，呈现与测试之间的延迟会增加从众现象（实验3）。对诸如激活、检索阻碍、结构化想象和类别抽象等理论解释的解释力进行了评估。
