Concept
Creativity Cliff Illusion
creativity persistence cognitive-bias
People predict their best, most creative ideas will come early in a brainstorming or idea-generation session, and that ideas will get progressively worse the longer and harder the task becomes — reasoning that fluent, easily-generated ideas must be the good ones, while effortful, late-session ideas must be scraping the bottom of the barrel. Adam Alter calls this mistaken belief the creativity cliff illusion: in reality, the opposite tends to hold. As a task gets harder, a person is forced away from the first, most obvious, most conventional answers — both away from the "herd's" typical response and away from their own habitual way of thinking about the problem — which is exactly the condition genuine creativity requires. The point at which generating ideas starts to feel difficult is the point at which the most original ideas actually start to appear, not the point at which quality falls off a cliff.
The founding demonstration: researchers Lucas and Nordgren asked participants to spend 10 minutes generating as many original ideas as possible for a Thanksgiving dinner menu. Participants predicted most of their best ideas would arrive early in the 10 minutes; instead, 66% more ideas were generated in the final five minutes than the first five, and independent raters judged those later ideas as more creative than the earlier ones. The same pattern held when Lucas and Nordgren had participants generate ad slogans for a burger company and unscramble letters into words — later-generated outputs were consistently rated more original (see Lucas Nordgren Creativity Cliff Study).
Connects directly to the persistence paradox: people readily recognize that persistence and sustained effort matter for other people's achievements, but doubt that the same applies to their own creative sticking points, expecting their own creativity to arrive in a quick, effortless burst instead. Sketch comedians with years of professional experience mistakenly predict their ability to write punchlines will decline across a long working day — in practice, their best material tends to arrive later, after sustained effort, not earlier. A-ha's "Take On Me" took more than 10 years of iteration — on the melody, the arrangement, the production, the music video — before becoming one of the best-selling singles of the 1980s, credited by Alter as an example of persisting well past the point where the creative "cliff" illusion would have told the band to give up.
Discussed in
- Episode 201 — 201-how-messi-used-psychology-to-become-great