engleski

The effect of promised reward on the creativity of the product

Under the socio-cognitive research paradigm, negative effect of reward is usually interpreted through motivational processes, i.e. extrinsic motivation has negative effect in heuristic task (such as a creativity task). Opposing this viewpoint, behaviourist perspective pinpoints the very specific and uncommon experimental conditions when a negative effect of reward is found, emphasizing the difficulties subjects usually have to understand the relation of reward and product's creativity. The aim of this experiment was to study in detail the complex relation of the promise of reward and subjects' understanding of "reward-creativity of the product" relation. Female psychology students (N=95), divided in 6 groups, participated in the study. They all engaged in collage making activity. A two-factor (2x3), between-subjects design was used, varying 3 types of task (or levels of specificity of the criteria) - heuristic, algorithmic and metacognitive, with or without the promise of reward. Eleven judges assessed creativity and other dimensions of the products through consensual assessment technique. Factor analysis showed two orthogonal factors – creativity factor and technical validity factor. Contrary to the expectations, no statistically significant interaction between reward and type of task was found, but main effects of the task and reward were found on certain dimensions of the product. Assigning a specific creativity goal (algorithmic task) had positive effects on the creativity of the product. Results indicate that the promised reward has positive effects on judged creativity, which is probably the result of increasing the level of adequacy of the product, not its originality. The results of this research do not confirm the hypothesis that promised reward has negative effects on the creativity of the product.

creativity; promise of reward; goal setting; metacognition; consensual assessment

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