Templates in Creative Sparks

We question whether creativity requires functions exclusive to the human mind or it can rather be obtained by the mere performance of well-defined prescribed operations. The natural thinking process involves a complexity of sensory inputs, psychological factors, cognitive background, social rules and constraints which interfere (constructively and at times, destructively) with the results and evaluation of the creative process. It is therefore desirable to study the intrinsic properties of the creative thought dynamics in contexts in which creativity represents a dominant factor. Among the domains in which creativity plays an essential role is advertising. By structural analysis of a large mass of past advertising ideas we isolated a set of conceptual structures which characterize generically creative ideas. In order to validate these findings, we constructed idea-generating routines that lead to these conceptual structures. To ensure that human creativity does not interfere with the performance of those routines, we implemented them by computer. The computer-generated ideas ranked significantly higher on a creativity scale than the ideas produced by the human subjects. In view of the fact that the computerized routine is not performing any complex creation, the focal question raised is why do human judges perceive its outcomes as superior to human ideas performing the same task? 3