Chapter 26
What small BIG can encourage more creative thinking?
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significant amount of research has demonstrated the remarkable influence that environments and surroundings can have on our behaviors and decisions. For example, people tend to eat less food from the buffet if they are given smaller plates, give greater tips to food servers if a credit card logo appears on the tray containing the check, and vote more conservatively if the voting booth is located in a church rather than a school. In each of these examples, the decisions made, and the behaviors enacted, didn’t occur as a result of a direct request or appeal. Instead they were influenced by a single feature of the environment that then primed an automatic and unconscious change in behavior. Besides influencing voting choices via voting location or reducing calorie intake via plate size (politicians and nutritionists take note), do other opportunities exist where a small change in the environment could lead to big differences? For example, how about in your next business meeting or negotiation? Many organizations will host meetings to share best practices, generate new ideas between colleagues, and encourage new ways of thinking. If you have ever been to such a gathering you will likely recognize that a variety of environmental factors 131
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can influence its success, from the number of people attending (including the personality traits of those individuals) down to the quality of the lunch buffet and the drinks being offered. But is there something else that could also influence a team’s ability to think in a blue-sky way? Researchers Joan Meyers-Levy and Juliet Zhu believed that ceiling height can have a priming effect, influencing people to think more conceptually and creatively when the ceiling is high but in a much more specific and constrained way when the ceiling is low. In order to test their ideas, the researchers set up a series of studies in which participants were asked to solve a series of word jumbles (anagrams). One group solved the puzzles they were given in a room with a low ceiling height (8 feet), with the other group working in a room with a higher ceiling (10 feet). Some of the anagrams participants were asked to solve related to the concept of freedom and creativity—for example, words like liberated, unlimited, and emancipated were included. However, for others, the words related to the concept of confinement— for example, restricted, bound, and restrained. The researchers found that the participants solved freedombased anagrams quicker and the confinement-based anagrams slower when they were in the high-ceiling room. The opposite was the case in the room with the low ceiling; there, participants’ response times when solving the confinement-based anagrams were quicker than the freedom-based ones. A follow-up study also found that the participants located in the high-ceiling room were able to make relational connections between abstract ideas—a key feature of creative thinking—much more easily than those in the low-ceiling room. The results of this study suggest that when arranging your business meetings, team workshops, or training programs and a central goal of those meetings requires an element of creative 132
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What small BIG can encourage more creative thinking?
thinking, then a small change you could make in advance would simply be to select a facility with high ceilings. Doing so could increase the chances that your group is primed to think in a less constrained way. However, if the meeting you have called concerns working on a specific item or challenge where it is not new ideas you are looking to foster, but rather specific actions and plans, then selecting a room with a lower ceiling would be the way to go. If your meeting requires the group to first think creatively about new ideas and then specifically about how those tasks will be carried out, then selecting two rooms, while a little more expensive, might provide a worthwhile return on investment if it helps turn all the creative thinking into concrete plans and action. But what if your next business meeting is a negotiation, which, in contrast to a meeting that seeks to generate ideas, is more concerned with generating profits? Might the environment where your negotiation is actually conducted influence certain behaviors that change the outcome of the deal? For example, are you likely to be more persuasive in a business negotiation that is done in your own office rather than in a venue less familiar to you? In the next chapter we’ll take a closer look at the potential answers persuasion science can provide to these questions.
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