Once again there is some eye-catching, counter-intuitive research coming out of Cornell’s research faculty, and once again it’s coming from the School of Industrial and Labor Relations (ILR).
The study shows that individuals with a heightened sense of entitlement performed more creatively than their less-entitled counterparts in a series of tasks typically associated with measuring human creativity. The paper was authored by ILR Assistant Professor Emily Zitek, Ph.D., and Vanderbilt University research scholar Lynne Vincent, Ph.D. ’13, and is entitled “Deserve and Diverge: Feeling Entitled Makes People More Creative.” It was originally published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.
Zitek and Lynne argue that because those who feel entitled often feel above others, or at least different from others, they tend to think differently too. These conclusions were drawn from the results four different experiments detailed in their paper.
In an interview with The Cornell Review, Zitek, whose area of expertise is in organizational behavior and entitlement, said a sense of entitlement “is generally bad, but has some benefits too.” According to Zitek, while there are numerous “costs of entitlement,” such as selfishness and annoyance, it is reasonable to desire “temporary boosts” in one’s sense of entitlement such that they lead to more creative work.
Zitek was quoted in the Cornell Chronicle saying, “On one hand, trying to make employees feel similar to others can reduce entitlement, but it might also reduce creativity… On the other hand, boosting entitlement to encourage temporary creativity might turn them into a nuisance, but the manager might accept that if creativity is the main goal.”
As with the previously-reported on Cornell study on political correctness and workplace creativity, this study’s methods seemed to fly in the face of common sense. The test that seemed most bizarre was one that asked participants to draw an alien unlike anything on Earth, and creativity was measured by how different the creature was from any Earth animal. Other tests involved word association tasks, sentence unscrambling, and coming up with uncommon uses for household items (for example, alternative uses for a paperclip).
Speaking with Zitek, she acknowledged that there are no all-inclusive ways to measure creativity, but that there are widely-accepted proxy measures, at least in the world of academia. She sympathized with the sentiment that non-academics and business people might find it hard to buy-in to the notion of drawing an alien, for example, as any sign of general, positive creativity, but maintained the overall validity of her study and its findings.
“It comes down to ecological validity,” says Zitek, commenting on the idea that research methods must approximate real-world settings and constraints.
However, a quick Wikipedia search for the term reveals that academic studies don’t require ecological validity, only external validity. Perhaps academics of all fields should re-evaluate this standard, and require ecological validity in order to legitimize their study methods and findings. It would certainly boost the acceptability of research findings in the eyes of many who are not academics themselves.
