Abstract:

Humans like and seek variety. However, the effect of variety on people’s behavior and cognition has not been vigorously studied. In the current paper, we sought to test a novel hypothesis that high (vs. low) variety promotes creativity. We report four experiments which provided convergent evidence in supportive of our hypothesis. In Study 1 and study 2, we exposed participants to pictures of either low or high variety and we found that exposure to high variety (vs. low variety) boosted performance on a task that measures divergent creativity. In Study 3, we manipulated the number of colors participants saw to create low vs high variety primes. The results showed that high variety (vs. low variety) exposure led to heightened performance on a convergent creativity task. Lastly, we conducted a field study to investigate how wearing school uniform or not impacted high school students’ creativity performance. We found that students who were allowed to wear the clothes they liked (i.e. high variety) outperformed their counterparts who were required to wear school uniforms on the divergent creativity task used in the first two studies.

Key words: creativity, variety, behavioral priming, school uniform