Creativity in temporal social networks: How divergent thinking is impacted by one's choice of peers

• Published in: arXiv.org 2020-12
• Main Authors: Raiyan Abdul Baten, Bagley, Daryl, Tenesaca, Ashely, Clark, Famous, Bagrow, James P, Ghoshal, Gourab, Mohammed Ehsan Hoque
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Computer simulation; Creativity; Social networks
• ISSN: 2331-8422
• DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.1911.11395

Creativity is viewed as one of the most important skills in the context of future-of-work. In this paper, we explore how the dynamic (self-organizing) nature of social networks impacts the fostering of creative ideas. We run 6 trials (N=288) of a web-based experiment involving divergent ideation tasks. We find that network connections gradually adapt to individual creative performances, as the participants predominantly seek to follow high-performing peers for creative inspirations. We unearth both opportunities and bottlenecks afforded by such self-organization. While exposure to high-performing peers is associated with better creative performances of the followers, we see a counter-effect that choosing to follow the same peers introduces semantic similarities in the followers' ideas. We formulate an agent-based simulation model to capture these intuitions in a tractable manner, and experiment with corner cases of various simulation parameters to assess the generality of the findings. Our findings may help design large-scale interventions to improve the creative aptitude of people interacting in a social network.