Wednesday’s Big Idea
Today's Big Idea: The Science of Creativity
Given that the relationship between the science of creativity and the media will continue to evolve, it will be interesting to see how the media’s portrayal of creativity affects the research.
Starting with Gladwell’s Blink or Levitt and Dubner’s Freakonomics, the public began to expect counter-intuitive results from cognitive science. Now we live in an era where readers of science books on human nature expect clever psychological studies to explain every nook and cranny of our complex nature.
Sam McNerney argues this trend is good because it gets otherwise uninterested lay readers excited about cognitive science. However, the popularity of these books may create a bad system of incentives for researchers, in which researchers are motivated to publish results just to create a stir at the expense of sound research techniques and less provocative but more important research.
