Society Functions Best with an Intermediate Level of Creativity

TL;DR

This paper uses an agent-based model to show that society functions optimally with an intermediate level of individual creativity, balancing innovation and the propagation of proven ideas.

Contribution

It introduces a novel agent-based model analyzing how varying individual creativity levels impact societal evolution and identifies a tradeoff between creativity and societal fitness.

Findings

Society benefits from intermediate creativity levels.

Excess individual creativity can hinder societal progress.

A tradeoff exists between the proportion of creators and their creativity.

Abstract

In a society, a proportion of the individuals can benefit from creativity without being creative themselves by copying the creators. This paper uses an agent-based model of cultural evolution to investigate how society is affected by different levels of individual creativity. We performed a time series analysis of the mean fitness of ideas across the artificial society varying both the percentage of creators, C, and how creative they are, p using two discounting methods. Both analyses revealed a valley in the adaptive landscape, indicating a tradeoff between C and p. The results suggest that excess creativity at the individual level can be detrimental at the level of the society because creators invest in unproven ideas at the expense of propagating proven ideas.