Sharing from Jihae
:
I recently conducted an experiment at the Brite lab for my paper on boredom and creativity. Recent research found that boredom can increase creativity (Gasper & Middlewood, 2014;
Mann & Cadman, 2014
). In my paper, I examine ‘especially when does boredom increase creativity?’ I hypothesized that boredom in one task increases creativity in another task especially when one engages in multitasking.
I conducted an experiment to examine this hypothesis. There were three conditions: a multitasking condition, a single-tasking condition, and a control condition. In the multitasking condition, participants worked on a boring task and a creativity task at the same time, and in the single-tasking condition, participants worked on the boring task and the creativity task separately and sequentially. In the control condition, participants only worked on the creativity task.
As hypothesized, I found that participants in the multitasking condition showed highest creativity. I propose that multitasking is a valuable strategy one can use to capture the power of boredom. We are now working on analyzing the rest of the data and hope to have a working paper soon.
