The Silver Lining Around Fearful Living

TL;DR

This paper explores how fear influences exploration and creativity through human and computational studies, revealing that fear delays exploration and enhances perceived creativity in storytelling.

Contribution

It introduces a computational model linking fear to exploration delays and demonstrates that threat-related stimuli increase perceived creativity in stories.

Findings

Fear delays exploration in fish and models.

Threatening stimuli increase story creativity.

Computational model replicates exploration delay.

Abstract

This paper discusses in layperson's terms human and computational studies of the impact of threat and fear on exploration and creativity. A first study showed that both killifish from a lake with predators and from a lake without predators explore a new environment to the same degree and plotting number of new spaces covered over time generates a hump-shaped curve. However, for the fish from the lake with predators the curve is shifted to the right; they take longer. This pattern was replicated by a computer model of exploratory behavior varying only one parameter, the fear parameter. A second study showed that stories inspired by threatening photographs were rated as more creative than stories inspired by non-threatening photographs. Various explanations for the findings are discussed.