The role of specificity and abstraction in creative idea generation

Three experiments examined the relationship between approaches to a creative generation task and the novelty of the resulting products. Participants were given the task of imagining life on other planets and they received instructions intended to encourage them to formulate the task in either very specific ways (e. g., thinking of specific Earth animals) or more abstract ways (e.g., thinking of environmental conditions and general survival needs). The latter instructions led to more novel creations. The results are discussed in terms of the malleability of people's approaches to creative generation, the role of problem formulation and the link between abstraction and novelty.