Lack of control and creativity

The sense of lack of control has been shown to foster illusory pattern perception, superstition, conspiracy and religious beliefs. The aim of this study was to assess whether the feeling of lacking control in a given situation can also promote creative thinking. We manipulated the former via a recollection task (participants were asked to recall an incident in which they felt control vs. loss of control) and measured the latter with tasks related to divergent thinking (e.g. production of associative and dissociative combinations). Results showed higher scores in all creativity tasks for the group recalling lossof-control events than the group recalling in-control events. Effects of lack of control have been accounted for as resulting from compensatory attempts to re-gain control. Our findings suggest this compensatory process takes advantage of intuitive thinking