Consider, for instance, research by Carmit Tadmor, a psychologist at the Recanati School of Business at Tel Aviv University. In one 2013 paper, Tadmor and her colleagues showed that racial prejudice can play a direct and causal role in making people less creative. Were not talking about artistic creativity here, but more like seeing beyond the constraints of traditional categories—thinking outside the box. Tadmors team first uncovered a simple positive correlation between ones inclination to endorse an essentialist view of race (like associating racial differences with abilities and personality traits) and ones creativity. To measure the latter, the researchers used a simple open-ended test in which individuals are asked to list as many possible uses of a brick as they can think of. People who can think outside of traditional categories—realizing that a brick can be used for many things other than buildings (it can make a good paperweight, for starters)—score better. This study showed that people who essentialized racial categories tended to have fewer innovative ideas about a brick. But that was just the beginning. Next, a new set of research subjects read essays that described race either as a fundamental difference between people (an essentialist position) or as a construct, not reflecting anything more than skin-deep differences (a nonessentialist position). After reading the essays, the subjects moved on to a difficult creativity test that requires you to identify the one key word that unites three seemingly unassociated words. Thus, for instance, if you are given the words call, pay, and line, the correct answer is phone. Remarkably, subjects whod read the nonessentialist essay about race fared considerably better on the creativity test. m.motherjones/politics/2014/11/science-of-racism-prejudice
Posted on: Sun, 04 Jan 2015 18:52:30 +0000
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