Why We Miss Creative Ideas That Are Right Under Our Noses

NPR:

There are times when I’ve thought about singing during the program or maybe telling a bad joke. I’m getting the feeling this morning that our producer and editor, Rachel Ward and Kenya Young, would shoot me down. You ever have this experience? Pitch what you think is a brilliantly creative idea and your boss or manager says nope. If so, it might be worth listening to Steve Inskeep’s conversation with NPR’s social science correspondent Shankar Vedantam. Shankar’s found some research explaining why good ideas get rejected.

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Well, the research seems to suggest that part of the reason we miss seeing creative ideas that are right under our nose is because the ideas are right under our nose. There’s this new research that looks at how people evaluate creativity. Jennifer Mueller at the University of San Diego and her colleagues, Cheryl Waxslack(ph) and Vishwin Athenkrisnan(ph), find that where the idea comes from appears to influence whether people think it’s creative. So in this experiment they ran, they told volunteers about a new shoe that uses nano technology to reduce blisters. They told some volunteers that this idea was developed far away and they told other volunteers this idea was developed nearby.

Read the whole story: NPR