Frontiers in Social Science features new research in the flagship journals of the Social Science Research Council’s founding disciplinary associations. Every month we publish a new selection of articles from the most recent issues of these journals, marking the rapid advance of the frontiers of social and behavioral science.
Behavioral experiments and computational modeling reveal that more original and more relevant ideas emerge more quickly in the human creative process.
What drives us to search for creative ideas, and why does it feel good to find one? While previous studies demonstrated the positive influence of motivation on creative abilities, how reward and subjective values play a role in creativity remains unknown. This study proposes to characterize the role of individual preferences (how people value ideas) in creative ideation via behavioral experiments and computational modeling. Using the Free Generation of Associates Task coupled with rating tasks, we demonstrate the involvement of valuation processes during idea generation: Preferred ideas are provided faster. We found that valuation depends on the adequacy and originality of ideas and guides response selection and creativity. Finally, our computational model correctly predicts the speed and quality of human creative responses, as well as interindividual differences in creative abilities. Altogether, this model introduces the mechanistic role of valuation in creativity. It paves the way for a neurocomputational account of creativity mechanisms.
In her 2023 Nobel Lecture, Claudia Goldin surveys the entry of women into the workforce, the decrease in the gender gap in earnings, and the relevance of childbirth to the remaining gender gap in earnings.
This essay summarizes how women historically became an economic force and why, despite being vital to the world’s economies, they still earn less than comparable men even in nations with family-friendly policies and gender-neutral laws, norms, and values.