Other-Directed Creativity

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that people are more creative when working for others.

From the piece...

Two hundred sixty-two undergraduates were given seven minutes to draw an alien that could serve as the inspiration for a sci-fi tale. The students were told that the story would either be written by them or by an anonymous third party. Two coders rated the drawings according to the number of unusual, unearthly details they contained (three eyes instead of two, say). Consistently the drawings for other people were rated as more creative than those done for the self.

In a variation that measured a somewhat less subjective kind of creativity, 137 students were asked to solve a brain teaser that involved escaping from a tower.* Half were told to imagine themselves in the tower, half to picture someone else there. Two thirds of the students who imagined someone else in the tower solved the puzzle, but only 48% of those who pictured themselves there did.