Creativity in dialogues: How do children interact with parents vs. with strangers for generating creative ideas?

Background. It was increasingly pointed out that creativity does not occur in isolation within individual minds but rather through continuous interactions between people. Aims. This study investigated whether and how interactions revealing perspective taking within dyads influenced the generation of creative ideas. Sample. Participants were 103 4- to 6-year-old Chinese children, 60 parents, and 43 university students. Method. Children were randomly assigned to either work with a (grand)parent (child-parent dyads) or with an unfamiliar university student (child-stranger dyads) on the Alternative Uses Task (AUT), wherein they needed to “think together” of as many unusual uses as possible for five everyday objects. A novel coding scheme was designed and applied to analyze subjects’ verbalization, differentiating cognitive perspective taking (an exchange ideas and thoughts) and social-emotional perspective taking (creating an open, accepting atmosphere). Results. Child-parent dyads exhibited more cognitive perspective taking than child-stranger dyads, but no group differences were found pertaining to social-emotional perspective taking. Regardless of dyad type, dyads’ cognitive perspective taking showed positive influence on dyads’ fluency and originality but negative influence on dyads’ appropriateness, whereas dyads’ social-emotional perspective taking showed no influence. Finally, it was found that adults’ cognitive perspective taking and social-emotional perspective taking were found to positively influence children’s fluency (thus also originality). Conclusions. This study confirmed the importance of cognitive perspective taking in facilitating idea generation, more toward the originality than the appropriateness aspect of creativity. The hypothesized importance of social-emotional perspective taking on creativity was not confirmed.