TORONTO: How creative are you? Depends where you're from! When it comes to creative juices, some societies have a faster flow than others, according to a new study that suggests creativity is tied to culture.
The study compared nearly 300 individuals from Taiwan, a collectivist society, and Canada, a more individualistic country.
Results show that those from individualist societies generate a greater number of ideas as compared to their collectivist counterparts - though the cultures were on nearly equal footing when it came to the quality of that creative output.
Researchers theorised that where a country falls on the individualism vs collectivism continuum would affect the creative juices that might be "permitted" to flow from members of a particular culture.
"Brainstorming is often used as a proxy for creativity, so we decided to conduct brainstorming tasks using culturally neutral stimuli in Taiwan and in Canada," said Gad Saad, a professor at Concordia University's John Molson School of Business.
He and his co-authors hypothesised that members of an individualistic society would perform particularly well in a task that promotes out-of-the-box thinking such as coming up with the proverbial million-dollar idea, compared with those from a collectivist ethos, who wouldn't be as willing to engage in that kind of thinking because they would be more reluctant to stand out from the group.
"We found that the individualists came up with many more ideas. They also uttered more negative statements - and those statements were more strongly negative.
The Canadian group also displayed greater overconfidence than their Taiwanese counterparts," said Saad.
But when it came to the quality of ideas produced, the collectivists scored marginally higher than the individualists.
"This is in line with another important cultural trait that some collectivist societies are known to possess - namely being more reflective as compared to action-oriented, having the reflex to think hard prior to committing to a course of action," Saad said.
The study was published in The Journal of Business Research.