Peter Gray - Free to Learn:

>Psychologist Theresa Amabile has devoted a distinguished career, mostly at Brandeis University, to studying creativity. In a typical experiment she would ask groups of people—sometimes kids, sometimes adults—to do a creative task, such as to paint a picture, make a collage, or write a poem, within a certain time period. Each experiment involved some sort of manipulation aimed at increasing the participants’ motivation. She would tell some but not others that their product would be evaluated and ranked for creativity, or that it would be entered into a contest, or that they could receive a reward for creative work.

When the projects were completed, she would have them all evaluated for creativity by a panel of judges who did not know about the experimental manipulations. Creativity is hard to define, but the judges showed significant consistency in their evaluations. They gave highest rankings to projects that were original and surprising yet also somehow satisfying, meaningful, and coherent.

The overriding result of the experiments was this: any intervention that increased the incentive to be creative had the effect of reducing creativity. In experiment after experiment, the most creative products were made by those who were in the non-incentive condition—the ones who worked under the impression that their products would not be evaluated or entered into contests and who were not offered any prizes. They thought they were just creating the product for fun. In the terminology of this chapter, they were playing.

If you want to increase the degree to which people will pull hard on a rope, or persist at some boring, repetitive task, such as shelling beans or copying sentences, you can succeed by giving them an incentive to perform better. If you enter them into a contest, or watch them conspicuously, or pay them well for excellent performance, their performance improves. But creativity doesn’t work that way. High incentive seems to foul up rather than improve the process. You can’t become creative by simply trying really, really hard. Creativity is a spark that comes when mental conditions are just right, and high incentive seems to mess up those conditions.

As Amabile herself points out, her findings are no surprise to people who make their living by being creative. Many highly successful novelists, playwrights, artists, musicians, and poets have written, or stated in interviews, that to think and produce creatively, they must forget about pleasing an audience, or pleasing critics, or winning prizes, or earning royalties. All such thoughts stifle creativity. Instead they must focus fully on the product they are trying to create, as if creating it for its own sake. For example, when the eminent novelist John Irving was asked whether he worried, when writing, about whether a book would sell, he responded, “No, no, oh no. You can’t, you can’t! ... When you’re writing, only think about the book.”<