Lacking control increases creativity

In two experiments, we investigated whether the feeling of lacking control can foster creative thinking, which we operationalized as the ability to produce associative and dissociative combinations of either related and unrelated concepts. Participants were asked to think about an incident in their life wherein they felt either to be in control or to lose control of the situation. Immediately afterwards, they had to perform five different creative (divergent) thinking tasks. In both experiments, we observed higher scores in all creativity tasks for participants who recalled loss-of-control events than for those recalling in-control events. Our findings suggest that compensatory processes, triggered by loss of control, can promote divergent thinking.