Sweet ideas: How the sensory experience of sweetness impacts creativity

• Taste experiences can have implications for workplace creative performance. • The effect of sensory experience of sweetness on creativity is not well understood. Prior research lacks a clear and unconfounded examination of this relationship and predominantly suggests positive affect as the potential reason driving the effect of sweet taste on creativity. • Examining the independent impact of sweet taste on creativity, we disentangle the role of taste modality from other potentially confounding sensory cues and show that sensory experience of sweetness serves as an implicit affective cue and positively impacts creativity by enhancing cognitive flexibility but without influencing the actual emotional experience. • If and when sweet taste’s association with positivity is interrupted, for example, through salience of the health risks associated with overconsumption of sweet foods, the positive impact of sweet taste on creativity is attenuated. The importance of creativity to organizations is significant, ergo, scholars have begun to investigate how sensory elements in the workplace might impact creative performance. Our research examines effects of the sensory experience of taste, specifically sweetness, on creativity. Using a range of real taste tests and imagination tasks, we demonstrate that sweet taste facilitates creative performance. We argue that this is because sweet taste, as a positive implicit affective cue, increases cognitive flexibility and creativity independent of the elicitation of positive emotions. However, when the positive associations of sweet taste are externally overridden, such as when health risks are made salient, the positive impact of sweet taste on creativity is attenuated. We further demonstrate that sensory experience of sweetness increases performance on related tasks that require cognitive flexibility, but does not increase performance on non-creative tasks.