Creativity in temporal social networks: How divergent thinking is impacted by one's choice of peers

TL;DR

This study investigates how the self-organizing nature of social networks influences individual creativity, revealing that while following high-performing peers boosts creativity, it can also lead to semantic similarity in ideas.

Contribution

The paper introduces an experimental and simulation framework to analyze how peer selection impacts creativity and semantic diversity in dynamic social networks.

Findings

Following high-performing peers enhances creative output.

Peer selection leads to increased semantic similarity in ideas.

Self-organization can both foster and hinder creative diversity.

Abstract

Creativity is viewed as one of the most important skills in the context of future-of-work. In this paper, we explore how the dynamic (self-organizing) nature of social networks impacts the fostering of creative ideas. We run 6 trials (N=288) of a web-based experiment involving divergent ideation tasks. We find that network connections gradually adapt to individual creative performances, as the participants predominantly seek to follow high-performing peers for creative inspirations. We unearth both opportunities and bottlenecks afforded by such self-organization. While exposure to high-performing peers is associated with better creative performances of the followers, we see a counter-effect that choosing to follow the same peers introduces semantic similarities in the followers' ideas. We formulate an agent-based simulation model to capture these intuitions in a tractable manner, and experiment with corner cases of various simulation parameters to assess the generality of the findings. Our findings may help design large-scale interventions to improve the creative aptitude of people interacting in a social network.