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Ross, Wendy, Agnoli, Sergio and Glăveanu, Vlad (2025) Incongruent objects are surprising but do not inspire more original ideas. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts. ISSN 1931-3896 (In Press)
This study investigates the relationship between surprise and creative ideation through four preregistered experiments (total N = 964). In Experiments 1a (N = 117) and 1b (N = 143), participants viewed images of objects with differing levels of congruence with the environmental context using stimuli from the SCEGRAM database, then completed an Alternative Uses Task for those objects. Experiment 2 (N = 316) replicated these findings using the objACT stimulus set, which depicted humans manipulating congruent versus incongruent objects. Experiment 3 (N = 388) controlled for order effects and stimulus believability using a reduced stimulus set. While the experimental manipulations successfully elicited different levels of reported surprise, this did not translate to increased originality in uses for the objects. Across all experiments, there was no significant relationship between ratings of surprise and the originality of ideas produced. The findings suggest that simple schema disruption or expectancy violation is not sufficient to enhance creative thinking, at least in the context of an online experimental task. Potential explanations for the null effect have implications for wider theories of surprise including the distinction between assessing something as surprising (cognitive surprise) versus feeling surprise (affective surprise), the role of agency and personal significance in surprise experiences, and the possibility that surprise may play a smaller role in creative tasks than theorised.
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