"The Effort Heuristic" In The Evaluation Of Creativity

Creativity evaluation is an indispensable part of creativity study.However,many studies have shown that there are frequently biases in the creativity evaluation especially when subjective scoring technique is adopted.Previous studies have found that the factors such as characteristics of rater and ratee,the domain of creative products,the context of evaluation are related to evaluation bias.However,few studies have explored the influence of factors regarding creative process on creativity evaluation.In 2004,Kruger et al.proposed the effort heuristic,which means that higher value was not only assigned to what we poured effort into,but the information regarding effort will serve as a heuristic when the quality of product generated by other people is evaluated.Specifically,raters would rate the quality of other people’s product as higher when they are told that the producer had put more effort into the making process.Since creative products often result from various forms of effort in the creative process,we hypothesize that information relating to effort in the creative process may also influence creativity evaluation of the creative products;In other words,there may also be the effort heuristic in the process of creativity evaluation.In view of this,taking college student as subject and the creative products in daily life as materials,the purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between creator’s effort measured by time cost in production and the creative evaluation that others generated about the creator’s creative production.The study is mainly divided into three parts:In study 1,the effect of effort information on creativity evaluation under the model of comparative evaluation was investigated.In this study,we adopted the creative graphics generated by students in graphic completion task.Two homogeneous pictures were marked different extent of time needed in production to reflect the efforts of the creators,and the subjects were asked to use the subjective scoring method,comparing these two works and evaluate their level of creativity.The results showed that after excluding the possibility of quality difference between two pictures,there was no significant difference in the creativity rating of the two pictures with effort information,that is,the rater does not use the effort heuristic.In study 2,the effect of effort information on creativity evaluation was investigated under the sequential evaluation model which is high in ecological validity.In this study,18 creative graphics generated in complement task(6 pictures each with high,middle and low level of creativity)were selected as evaluation materials,and were evaluated by participants.The between-subject design and subjective scoring method were adopted.In the study,only 6 pictures belonged to the real target task,which reflected the effort of the creator by being marked two different creation time.The results showed that under the sequential evaluation model,there was the effort heuristic in the creativity evaluation,but this heuristic worked differently with the one adopted by people to evaluate product quality: if the creator worked with less effort,the rater gives the creative product a higher creativity rating.The purpose of study 3 was to explore the psychological mechanism of the effort heuristic in creativity evaluation.The study 3,based on study 2,added an assessment task to evaluate the creativity of the creators,in which participants were asked to rate the creativity of the creator before rating the product’s creativity.The results showed that there was no significant difference in creativity rating of products between the two kinds of effort information.That is to say,there was no effort heuristic effect in creativity rating regarding product.At the same time,participants’ assessment of creativity of creators showed a pattern similar to the effect in study 2: if the creator made less effort in the creative process,the rater will give a higher rating of creativity.This indicates that one of the psychological mechanisms of the effort heuristic used in creativity evaluation is ability attribution.Above all,this study shows that there is the effort heuristic in creativity evaluation:the less effort poured into production was regarded as a sign of individual creativity,and the creative product is spoken highly of;In the same time,people will think that the creators paying more efforts in the creative process lack of creativity,and then belittle the creative level of their works.Obviously,these findings have certain enlightenment significance for enriching the theory of creativity evaluation and improving the practice of creativity evaluation.