Outside advantage: Can social rejection fuel creative thought?

Sharon H. Kim · Lynne Catherine Vincent · Jack Anthony Goncalo

57 citations0/0 files storedJournal of Experimental Psychology General

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Death Anxiety and Social Exclusion Social and Intergroup Psychology Creativity in Education and Neuroscience

Abstract

Eminently creative people working in fields as disparate as physics and literature refer to the experience of social rejection as fuel for creativity. Yet, the evidence of this relationship is anecdotal, and the psychological process that might explain it is as yet unknown. We theorize that the experience of social rejection may indeed stimulate creativity but only for individuals with an independent self-concept. In 3 studies, we show that individuals who hold an independent self-concept performed more creatively after social rejection relative to inclusion. We also show that this boost in creativity is mediated by a differentiation mind-set, or salient feelings of being different from others. Future research might investigate how the self-concept--for example, various cultural orientations-may shape responses to social rejection by mitigating some of the negative consequences of exclusion and potentially even motivating creative exploration.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 57 citations exist upstream.

References

1988Development and validation of brief measures of positive and negative affect: The PANAS scales.1995The need to belong: Desire for interpersonal attachments as a fundamental human motivation.1991Culture and the Self: Implications for Cognition, Emotion, and Motivation 1991The Social Self: On Being the Same and Different at the Same Time 1967The nature of human intelligence 1996Who is this "We"? Levels of collective identity and self representations.1983The Social Psychology of Creativity 1987Positive affect facilitates creative problem solving.

Cited by

2017Teaching originality? Common habits behind creative production in science and arts 2013Perceptual Symbols of Creativity: Coldness Elicits Referential, Warmth Elicits Relational Creativity 2021Divine inhibition: Does thinking about God make monotheistic believers less creative?

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.