Can Other People Make You Less Creative?

This paper explains in layperson’s terms how an agent-based model was used to investigate the hypothesis that culture evolves more effectively when novelty-generating creative processes are tempered by imitation processes that preserve proven successful ideas. Using EVOC, an agent-based model of cultural evolution we found that (1) the optimal ratio of inventing to imitating ranged from 1:1 to 2:1 depending on the fitness function, (2) there was a trade-off between the proportion of creators to conformers and how creative the creators were, and (3) when agents in increased or decreased their creativity depending on the success of their latest creative efforts, they segregated into creators and conformers, and the mean fitness of ideas across the society was higher. It is tentatively suggested that through the unconscious use of social cues, members of a society self-organizes to achieve a balanced mix of creators and conformers. Do you feel more creative in some social environments than others, or even when you are completely alone? Although it is widely believed that stimulating environments enhance creativity there is evidence that this is not always the case; indeed it turns out that creativity can be enhanced by spending time in an isolation tank blocked off from sensory stimulation entirely (Forgays & Forgays, 1992; Norlander, Bergman, & Archer, 1998; Vartanian, & Suedfeld, 2011). This suggests that social stimulation may not always enhance creativity, and may even decrease it. The idea that social environments could interfere with creativity came from thinking about creativity in the context of culture as an evolutionary process. Evolutionary processes require a balance between exploratory processes that generate new variants and conservative processes that perpetuate ‘tried and true’ variants. This is the case in biological evolution, and it seemed reasonable that it would also be the case for cultural evolution. In other words: people may send out social signals to each other that ensure that creativity---the process that fuels cultural novelty---is properly balanced by conformity,i.e., imitation of ideas that have already proven to be successful. The notion that society might aim to temper novelty-generating creativity with noveltyperpetuating imitation flies in the face of the widespread assumption that more creativity is necessarily better. It goes without saying that creativity is a good thing, and that everyone should be creative. Or does it? Sure, our capacity for self-expression, for