Collaboration, Creation, & Imagination: Exploring the Effects of Co-Imagination on Divergent Thinking

Creativity is an essential cognitive tool in adaptively navigating the challenges of the future. While research on creativity has revealed the complex ways in which the social context—and particularly interpersonal collaboration—can influence creative outcomes, research on how we imagine the future has only just begun to explore imagination as a collaborative process (i.e., collaborative imagination, or co-imagination). How does collaborative imagination influence creative cognition? Across two studies (N = 164), we assess how imagining the future collaboratively rather than individually influences engagement in divergent thinking during the imagine task. This work adapted a recently developed natural language processing tool to quantify divergent thinking by measuring the semantic distance between all words spoken by a given participant in the narrative (i.e., Divergent Semantic Integration, or DSI). Study 1, run with university students in the lab, included pre-registered analyses testing the effect of condition (i.e., collaborative imagine vs. individual imagine) and found no significant effects on DSI scores. Exploratory analyses including social connection as a predictor found that participants in the co-imagine condition had significantly higher DSI scores, though this effect was counteracted by a negative effect of social connection on DSI scores. Study 2, run over video call with Prolific participants, did not replicate these exploratory findings. Taken together, these studies consider underexplored questions at the intersection of collaboration, imagination, and creativity, and provide both methodological and analytical tools for future research to further investigate creative cognition in co-imagination.