HOW CREATIVITY COMES OUT OF THE BLUE… OR NOT!
- LanguageENG
- URLhttp://db.koreascholar.com/Article/Detail/351708
p.1226
Facing competition in a context of saturated markets characterized by rapid technological transformations presumes more than ever the need for creativity (Runco 2004), i.e. the production of new and useful (or adapted) ideas (Amabile 1996). In this paper, we focus on individual creativity, which is a subject of growing interest in research in psychology, management, and education. Beyond supernatural or genetic views of individual creativity, researchers generally agree on a multi-variant approach to creativity, which would result from cognitive factors (i.e. intellectual capacities, domain or creativity expertise, cognitive style), personality traits, and individual motivation to complete the task as well as environmental factors (Amabile 1996). If some of these factors are intrinsically personal, thus stable in the short run, environmental factors could be organized in an “architecture” likely to foster individual creativity, stressing the non-negligible role of physical elements, such as forms, space or colors (Meusberger et al. 2009). In this perspective, our objective is twofold: first to explore whether the environment color – and more specifically a blue environment – can foster individual creativity, and second to interrogate the underlying emotional mechanisms likely to explain it. Using an experiment, we show that 1/ putting individuals in a blue (vs. white) environment has a direct positive influence on the volume of ideas, but not on the quality of ideas, and that 2/ emotions mediate the influence of the color blue (vs. white) on individual creativity. Specifically, the color blue enhances pleasantness, which enhances individual creativity (both in quantity and quality), especially when individuals also experience arousal. These findings both replicate and extend the literature on the influence of colors and mood on individual creativity, and call to further research on the mediating routes likely to explain the influence of colors on individual creativity.