# The Social Benefits of Balancing Creativity and Imitation: Evidence from an Agent-based Model

## TL;DR

This study uses an agent-based model to show that balancing creativity with imitation enhances societal benefits, with adaptive creativity levels leading to sustained improvements in output quality.

## Contribution

It introduces a novel agent-based model demonstrating how social regulation of creativity can optimize cultural evolution and output fitness.

## Key findings

- Excessive creativity hampers societal progress due to unproven ideas.
- Social regulation of creativity improves output quality temporarily.
- Open-ended output space allows sustained benefits of social regulation.

## Abstract

Although creativity is encouraged in the abstract it is often discouraged in educational and workplace settings. Using an agent-based model of cultural evolution, we investigated the idea that tempering the novelty-generating effects of creativity with the novelty-preserving effects of imitation is beneficial for society. In Experiment One we systematically introduced individual differences in creativity, and observed a trade-off between the ratio of creators to imitators, and how creative the creators were. Excess creativity was detrimental because creators invested in unproven ideas at the expense of propagating proven ones. Experiment Two tested the hypothesis that society as a whole benefits if individuals adjust how creative they are in accordance with their creative success. When effective creators created more, and ineffective creators created less (social regulation), the agents segregated into creators and imitators, and the mean fitness of outputs was temporarily higher. We hypothesized that the temporary nature of the effect was due to a ceiling on output fitness. In Experiment Three we made the space of possible outputs open-ended by giving agents the capacity to chain simple outputs into arbitrarily complex ones such that fitter outputs were always possible. With the capacity for chained outputs, the effect of social regulation could indeed be maintained indefinitely. The results are discussed in light of empirical data.