Perspective-Taking Feedback: A New Feedback Affecting Creativity

ABSTRACT

As two important aspects in creativity, creative performance and evaluation are influenced by many individual and contextual factors. One of such factors is feedback. Past research has also found that perspective taking increases creative performance and interpersonal creative evaluation. Although different forms of feedback, such as feedback valence, style, contents, have shown significant effects on creativity, feedback that incorporates perspective taking and its effect on creative performance and evaluations have not been examined in the literature. To fill these gaps, we examined how perspective-taking feedback affects creative performance and interpersonal and intrapersonal creative evaluations among participants who were friends in this study. We found that, compared with participants in the objective focus feedback group, those in the perspective-taking (PT) feedback group had a significantly smaller decrease of fluency between before and after experiment. Although no significant difference was found in interpersonal creative evaluation between two feedback conditions, participants in PT group had a significantly larger increase in intrapersonal creative evaluation between before and after experiment. Results and the implications were discussed under the context of creativity research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The power analysis was conducted with the total number of participants rather than total number of dyads because each participant was treated as an independent sample (please see more explanation in section 4.4). The correlations between repeated measures are usually larger than 0.20. But we kept the value of 0.20 in the analysis to obtain a more conservative estimate.

2. Because this result did not answer any of the research questions, we did not include it in the results section. However, we included it here as we think it is a finding worth discussing.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (61907001) to the first author.