Creativity in social networks is enhanced by 'Goldilocks' dispersal of ideators' visibility

TL;DR

This study shows that dispersing the visibility of idea creators in social networks can enhance creativity by balancing idea stimulation and redundancy, with optimal dispersal levels being most effective.

Contribution

It demonstrates that external signals like popularity can be used to control ideator visibility, improving creativity through optimal dispersal in social networks.

Findings

Partial dispersal reduces idea redundancy and boosts creativity.

Extreme dispersal narrows idea stimulation, decreasing creativity.

Popularity signals influence peer perception and tie formation.

Abstract

Recent works suggest that striking a balance between maximizing idea stimulation and minimizing idea redundancy can elevate creativity in self-organizing social networks. We explore whether dispersing the visibility of idea generators can help achieve such a trade-off. We employ popularity signals (follower counts) of participants as an external source of variation in network structures, which we control across four randomized study conditions. We observe that popularity signals influence inspiration-seeking ties, partly by biasing people's perception of their peers' creativity. Networks that partially disperse the ideators' visibility using this external signal show reduced idea-redundancy and elevated creativity. However, extreme dispersal leads to inferior creativity by narrowing the range of idea stimulation. Our work holds future-of-work implications for elevating creativity.