Social media doesn’t often get portrayed in a good light these days, what with its role in the deterioration of our mental health and the spread of misinformation. New research from the University of Rochester suggests that it might, at least, provide us with a degree of help in terms of our creativity.
The research highlights how the algorithms that power the likes of Twitter and Facebook are largely designed at the moment to steer us towards like minds who share our interests and ideas. The researchers argue that if these algorithms instead steered us towards people with different ideas to ourselves, this would transform our creativity.
Sparking creativity
The researchers describe an experiment whereby people were encouraged to think of creative uses for various commonplace items. Each volunteer was also given the chance to view the ideas of the other participants to see if they could provide any inspiration.
“We found that the participants overwhelmingly chose to follow peers who had the most creative ideas,” the researchers explain. “We confirmed that following highly creative peers indeed helped people generate novel ideas themselves—the intuition being, if you bump up against out-of-the-box ideas, chances are higher that you will be able to combine your own ideas with ideas you didn’t originally think of. Such creative recombinations can lead to further novel ideas.”
When, however, people share the same source of inspiration, the ideas that they generate tend to converge, even as they generate them independently of one another. The researchers believe this illustrates the damage that can be caused by too many people following a small number of “influencers”.
Supporting creativity
The researchers highlight that the demand for creative skills is only going to grow, and the algorithms that power our social networks could help this by giving us recommendations from a more diverse set of people.
The authors believe this could be especially powerful on platforms such as ResearchGate or Behance, which are more specifically geared to the creative process. They also believe that lessons could be applied to offline networks as well.
“If I am the manager of an office and there are a bunch of teams under me, and I see that everyone looks toward one person for all the good ideas, I’ll try to decentralize the teams and make sure that one person is not dominating the creative network,” they explain. “Otherwise, they are all going to generate similar ideas, and the company is going to fall behind.”
Creativity and innovation are obviously hugely sought after in the workplace, so creating the optimum combination of people and ideas is something of great interest, whether to dedicated innovation platforms or innovation managers within organizations. As such, it’s a line of inquiry that the researchers plan to continue mining.
“There has been a lot of work on the optimal topologies (putting people together in the right way) to enhance team performance,” the researchers conclude. “This, however, has been treated from a static context. In reality, social networks are constantly evolving, and the counterintuitive results presented here, suggests the situation is far more complex. This has profound implications in how people interact on social media, or indeed, work together in teams.”
