Are angry people more creative? Can becoming angry make you creative? While the former question relates to the role one’s temperament plays in creativity, the latter relates to a causal relation and asks: Can provoking anger stimulate creativity?
Van Kleef, Anastasopoluou, and Nijstadt argued that receiving angry feedback from an evaluator could increase “a focal person’s motivation to perform well” on an idea generation task. They asserted that angry feedback increases task engagement leading to increased production of ideas, which in turn increases the likelihood of generating a good idea, an expectation consistent with Osborn’s principle of “quantity breeds quality.” However, they hypothesized that angry feedback is more likely to be effective with individual’s high, rather than low, on epistemic motivation. Such individuals take angry feedback as an indication of suboptimal performance and a need to work harder on the task. When not performing well, the highs, as opposed to lows, are more intrinsically inclined to look for diagnostic information and make efforts to understand the situation accurately. The highs are less likely to employ stereotypical heuristics and to reject divergent information in problem-solving.
In an initial study, the researchers found that feeling angry was indeed associated with brainstorming in a more unstructured manner, consistent with “creative” problem-solving. In a second study, the researchers first elicited anger from the study participants (or sadness, or a non-emotional state) and then asked them to engage in a brainstorming session in which they generated ideas to preserve and improve the environment. At the beginning of this task, angry participants generated more ideas (by volume) and generated more original ideas (that thought of by less than 1 percent or less of the other participants), compared to the other sad or non-emotional participants. However, this benefit was only present at the beginning of the task, and eventually, the angry participants generated only as many ideas as the other participants.
These findings reported by Baas and colleagues make sense, given what we already know about anger. Though anger may be unpleasant to feel, it is associated with a variety of attributes that may facilitate creativity. First, anger is an energizing feeling, important for the sustained attention needed to solve problems creatively. Second, anger leads to more flexible, unstructured thought processes. This flexibility involves the use of broad and inclusive categories and the increased ability to find new connections between categories. People who feel angry (vs. sad, for example) are less likely to think in systematic ways and are more likely to rely on broad, global cues when judging information. This kind of global processing tends to be associated with literally seeing the “bigger picture.”
That burst of productivity however is short-lived and ultimately creativity is reduced as a result. The authors found that anger leads to initially higher levels of creativity than sadness, but that anger depletes resources more. As a result, creative performance declines over time more for angry people than sad ones.
So, if it’s your job to be creative for long periods, better to be sad than angry. But if all you need are short bursts of sporadic creativity, rage away.
