The Originality Ostrich Effect

Creativity is often defined as the generation of ideas that are novel and useful, but how does seeking novelty affect one’s creative output? While existing work has examined the evaluation of ideas themselves, little is known about how creators balance novelty-seeking (making the idea original) versus utility-seeking (making the idea useful or appealing to others). The results of multiple incentive-compatible studies (N = 7,940) find that although creators expect novelty-seeking to result in better ideas, novelty-seeking results in ideas that are rated as worse by others. Given that creators are unaware of the negative effect of novelty-seeking, we dub this phenomenon the Originality Ostrich effect. These results raise interesting questions about the extent to which people overweight novelty in the creative process and underestimate the difficulty of generating ideas that are both new and useful.