HOW EXAMPLES MAY (AND MAY NOT) CONSTRAIN CREATIVITY

Three experiments were performed to test Smith, Ward, and Schumacher's (1993) conformity hypothesis-that people's ideas will conform to exam ples they are shown in a creative generation task. Conformity was obse rved in all three experiments; participants tended to incorporate crit ical features of experimenter-provided examples. However, examination of total output, elaborateness of design, and the noncritical features did not confirm that the conformity effect constrained creative outpu t in any of the three experiments. Increasing the number of examples i ncreased the conformity effect (Experiment 1). Examples that covaried features that are naturally uncorrelated in the real world led to a gr eater subjective rating of creativity (Experiment 2). A delay between presentation and test increased conformity (Experiment 3), just as mod els of inadvertent plagiarism would predict. The explanatory power of theoretical accounts such as activation, retrieval blocking, structure d imagination, and category abstraction are evaluated.