Can persistence improve creativity? The effects of implicit beliefs about creativity on creative performance.

Prior research suggests that people have implicit beliefs about creativity that are often incomplete and may not be consistent with current empirical evidence. We conducted four studies to examine whether recognizing the importance of persistence in creativity leads to better creative performance. First, in a pilot study, a questionnaire survey of 199 people showed that people value flexible but not persistent thinking in creativity. In Studies 1 through 3, we investigated the purpose of this study using the experimental paradigm employing the Unusual Uses Task. Specifically, Study 1 (N = 94) and Study 2 (N = 80) showed that compared to participants who did not consider persistence to be valuable to creativity, individuals who did consider it to be valuable had a reduced persistence underestimation effect and an increased serial order effect. Study 3 (N = 365) showed that participants who received instruction on the importance of persistence in creativity improved their creativity in persistent creativity tasks compared with those who did not receive such instruction. In Study 3, we also examined the mechanism and showed that it was mediated by the time spent working on creativity task. The results of this study suggest that beliefs about creativity are determinants of creative performance and that if people can recognize the importance of persistence in creativity, they will be able to work on creative tasks more persistently and thus improve their creativity.