When elaboration leads to appropriation: unconscious plagiarism in a creative task

Brown and Murphy's (1989) three-stage paradigm (generation, recall-own, generate-new) was used to assess the effects of participant elaboration on rates of unconscious plagiarism in two experiments using a creative task. Following the generation phase, participants imagined and rated a quarter of the ideas (imagery elaboration), generated improvements to another quarter (generative elaboration), and listened to a quarter of the ideas again without elaboration, with the remaining ideas acting as control. A week later, participants attempted to recall their own ideas, and generate new solutions to the same cues. In Experiment 1 both forms of elaboration equally increased correct recall, and decreased plagiarism in the generate-new task. However, generative elaboration led to significantly greater plagiarism in the recall-own task, but imagery elaboration did not. Participants in Experiment 2 were encouraged not to plagiarise by means of a financial incentive. However, they showed the same pattern as seen in Experiment 1. Therefore, contrary to a simple strength account, the probability of a person plagiarising another's ideas is linked to the particular nature of the elaboration carried out on that idea, rather than its familiarity.     

Unconscious cues bias first saccades in a free-saccade task

Visual–spatial attention can be biased towards salient visual information without visual awareness. It is unclear, however, whether such bias can further influence free-choices such as saccades in a free viewing task. In our experiment, we presented visual cues below awareness threshold immediately before people made free saccades. Our results showed that masked cues could influence the direction and latency of the first free saccade, suggesting that salient visual information can unconsciously influence free actions.     

When envy leads to schadenfreude

Previous research has yielded inconsistent findings concerning the relationship between envy and schadenfreude. Three studies examined whether the distinction between benign and malicious envy can resolve this inconsistency. We found that malicious envy is related to schadenfreude, while benign envy is not. This result held both in the Netherlands where benign and malicious envy are indicated by separate words (Study 1: Sample A, N = 139; Sample B, N = 150), and in the USA where a single word is used to denote both types (Study 2, N = 180; Study 3, N = 349). Moreover, the effect of malicious envy on schadenfreude was independent of other antecedents of schadenfreude (such as feelings of inferiority, disliking the target person, anger, and perceived deservedness). These findings improve our understanding of the antecedents of schadenfreude and help reconcile seemingly contradictory findings on the relationship between envy and schadenfreude.     

Imitation of emotion: When meaning leads to aversion

Can imitation lead to less liking? Previous research on mimicry and imitation suggests that imitation should lead to more liking, at least when it concerns neutral behaviours. In the present studies, we looked at behaviour with a clear message: Facial expressions. As predicted, we found in two studies that an affiliative facial expression (happiness) leads to more liking when imitated, whereas a non‐affiliative facial expression (anger) leads to less liking when imitated. Thus, imitating someone does not always lead to more liking: Imitating behaviour that communicates an unfriendly message can have negative consequences. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The IKEA effect: When labor leads to love

In four studies in which consumers assembled IKEA boxes, folded origami, and built sets of Legos, we demonstrate and investigate boundary conditions for the IKEA effect—the increase in valuation of self-made products. Participants saw their amateurish creations as similar in value to experts' creations, and expected others to share their opinions. We show that labor leads to love only when labor results in successful completion of tasks; when participants built and then destroyed their creations, or failed to complete them, the IKEA effect dissipated. Finally, we show that labor increases valuation for both “do-it-yourselfers” and novices.     

Constraining effects of examples in a creative generation task

In three experiments we tested the conformity hypothesis—that subjects' ideas would conform to examples they had been shown—by using a creative generation paradigm in which subjects imagined and sketched new exemplars of experimenter-defined categories. Designs madeby subjects who had first seen three examples of ideas were compared with those of control subjects, who received no examples. In all three experiments, the designs of subjects who had seen the examples were more likely to contain features of the examples. This conformity effect did not significantly decrease in Experiment 2, when a 23-mm task was interpolated between viewing the examples and generating related ideas. The hypothesis that the observed conformity effects may have been caused by subjects' assumptions that they should try to generate ideas similar to the examples was refuted in Experiment 3; explicitly instructing subjects to create ideas that were verydifferent from the examples did not decrease conformity to the examples, and instructing them to conform to the examples significantly increased conformity. The results show that recent experience can lead to unintentional conformity, constraining the generation of creative ideas.     

When reduction leads to construction: Design considerations in scientific methodology

Philosophers have paid little attention to the kind of reduction involved in transforming an analytically intractable equation into solvable form. I argue that this practice is important because it involves the design of a basic level theory for use in a specific domain. The design process can lead to the construction of a new theory. As a result of my analysis, theory design emerges as an important category of analysis for scientific methodology. Similarities between design in technology and science are explored to illuminate the heuristic function of such reductions.     

Unconscious choice: the dissociation of creative animus among writers and psychotherapists

The paper argues that writers and psychotherapists are drawn to their work through the desire to remedy an unconscious sense of lack brought about by early relational trauma. Often, because of its origins in psychic pain, the connection between these individuals' beginnings and their profession remains largely dissociated. The theme is developed with reference to the idea of the wounded healer taken up by Jung. It is proposed that the original wound is also the crack that lets the light in: a dissociated tough spirit that can be channelled into discriminating countertransference and strong writing. This paper is implicitly arguing against an objective or neutral analytic stance, and for the therapeutic and creative value of acquaintance with negative affect.     

When intended remembering leads to unintended forgetting

As a means of clarifying the memory dynamics that underlie retrieval-induced forgetting, we explored how instructing participants either to remember or to forget a previously presented list of items influences the susceptibility of those items to inhibition. According to the inhibitory account of retrieval-induced forgetting, it is the items that interfere most with retrieval practice that should be the most susceptible to the effects of inhibition. Consistent with this prediction, items from lists that participants were told to remember suffered from significantly more retrieval-induced forgetting than did items from lists that participants were told to forget.     

When intended remembering leads to unintended forgetting

As a means of clarifying the memory dynamics that underlie retrieval-induced forgetting, we explored how instructing participants either to remember or to forget a previously presented list of items influences the susceptibility of those items to inhibition. According to the inhibitory account of retrieval-induced forgetting, it is the items that interfere most with retrieval practice that should be the most susceptible to the effects of inhibition. Consistent with this prediction, items from lists that participants were told to remember suffered from significantly more retrieval-induced forgetting than did items from lists that participants were told to forget.     

When good news leads to bad choices

Pigeons and other animals sometimes deviate from optimal choice behavior when given informative signals for delayed outcomes. For example, when pigeons are given a choice between an alternative that always leads to food after a delay and an alternative that leads to food only half of the time after a delay, preference changes dramatically depending on whether the stimuli during the delays are correlated with (signal) the outcomes or not. With signaled outcomes, pigeons show a much greater preference for the suboptimal alternative than with unsignaled outcomes. Key variables and research findings related to this phenomenon are reviewed, including the effects of durations of the choice and delay periods, probability of reinforcement, and gaps in the signal. We interpret the available evidence as reflecting a preference induced by signals for good news in a context of uncertainty. Other explanations are briefly summarized and compared.     

Unconscious processing modulates creative problem solving: Evidence from an electrophysiological study

Previous behavioral studies have identified the significant role of subliminal cues in creative problem solving. However, neural mechanisms of such unconscious processing remain poorly understood. Here we utilized an event-related potential (ERP) approach and sandwich mask technique to investigate cerebral activities underlying the unconscious processing of cues in creative problem solving. College students were instructed to solve divergent problems under three different conditions (conscious cue, unconscious cue and no-cue conditions). Our data showed that creative problem solving can benefit from unconscious cues, although not as much as from conscious cues. More importantly, we found that there are crucial ERP components associated with unconscious processing of cues in solving divergent problems. Similar to the processing of conscious cues, processing unconscious cues in problem solving involves the semantic activation of unconscious cues (N280–340) in the right inferior parietal lobule (BA 40), new association formation (P350–450) in the right parahippocampal gyrus (BA 36), and mental representation transformation (P500–760) in the right superior temporal gyrus (BA 22). The present results suggest that creative problem solving can be modulated by unconscious processing of enlightening information that is weakly diffused in the semantic network beyond our conscious awareness.     

Unconscious biases in task choices depend on conscious expectations

Recent studies highlight the influence of non-conscious information on task-set selection. However, it has not yet been tested whether this influence depends on conscious settings, as some theoretical models propose. In a series of three experiments, we explored whether non-conscious abstract cues could bias choices between a semantic and a perceptual task. In Experiment 1, we observed a non-conscious influence on task-set selection even when perceptual priming and cue-target compound confounds did not apply. Experiments 2 and 3 showed that, under restrictive conditions of visibility, cues only biased task selection when the conscious task-setting mindset led participants to search for information during the time period of the cue. However, this conscious strategy did not modulate the effect found when a subjective measure of consciousness was used. Altogether, our results show that the configuration of the conscious mindset determines the potential bias of non-conscious information on task-set selection.     

Unconscious priming of task sets: The role of spatial attention

Unconscious stimuli activate task sets, mental programs that orchestrate performance of complex tasks, but the role of attention in such effects has not been addressed. In previous studies, unconscious prime stimuli appeared at attended locations and were explicitly specified in the task instructions; spatial attention to the prime and/or a specific conscious attentional set may thus be required for such unconscious activation to arise. In the present experiments, a learning phase established associations between unconscious prime stimuli and performance of two tasks. These associations influenced task performance in a subsequent test phase, even though the primes were not specified in current task instructions. This is the first demonstration that unconscious stimuli can prime task sets independently of a current attentional set that specifies stimulus-task mappings. Such priming was not influenced by spatial attention cues, in contrast to clear attention influences in comparison trials that mimicked conditions employed by previous studies.     

Creativity and experience of a creative task: Person and environment effects

We examined the effects of a person factor (general causality orientation) and an environment factor (threat of evaluation) on creativity and personal experience of a creative collage-making task. Ninety college students completed questionnaires and made a collage under conditions of expected evaluation or no-evaluation. Creativity was a function of participants’ characterizations of themselves as artistic, and among men, of the interaction between environment and person factors. Task experience was affected by environment factors and, marginally, by the interaction of environment and person factors, with participants feeling less competent at the task under threat of evaluation, and exerting the greatest effort when they were under evaluation threat and were higher on control orientation. These findings may have implications for future motivation for creative tasks.     

When focusing on differences leads to similar perspectives

The current research investigated whether mind-sets and contexts that afford a focus on self-other differences can facilitate perceptual and conceptual forms of perspective taking. Supporting this hypothesis, results showed that directly priming a difference mind-set made perceivers more likely to spontaneously adopt other people's visual perspectives (Experiment 1) and less likely to overimpute their own privileged knowledge to others (Experiments 2 and 3). Given that intergroup encounters typically evoke a difference mind-set, we also explored the possibility that such contexts might help perceivers to step outside their own perspectives. As predicted, perceivers were less "cursed" by their own privileged knowledge when mentalizing about out-group targets than when mentalizing about in-group targets (Experiment 4) and communicated more effectively with interaction partners whose minimal-group membership differed from their own (Experiment 5). Overall, acknowledging self-other differences allowed perceivers to look beyond the limits of their own perspectives and thereby provided an efficacious route to intuiting other people's minds.     

When it hurts to be misled: A Stroop-like effect in a simple addition production task

In four experiments, subjects saw simple addition equations (e.g., 3 + 4 = 9) and produced the sums while ignoring the presented answer. If the presented answer was false, subjects took longer to produce the sum, as compared with when the presented answer was true (Experiment 1), when there was no answer presented (blanks; Experiment 2), when a letter was presented (Experiment 3), and when a symbol was presented (Experiment 4). The results suggest that subjects were unable to ignore the presented answers, which raises problems for theories of arithmetic verification (i.e., deciding whether 3 + 4 = 9 is true or false) that claim that subjects verify equations by first producing the sum and then comparing the produced sum with the presented answer. Our results are more compatible with theories that claim that in verification and production, an arithmetic knowledge base is used in different ways.