关键词: 环境温度, 经验加工, 思维方式, 消费者创造力

Abstract: The importance of consumer creativity is gaining recognition, but simple strategies to enhance creativity are not well understood. Although extensive research has examined the effects of temperature on cognitive performance, the relation between ambient temperature and creativity is less often studied. Existing literature suffered from several limitations. We addressed these limitations by examining rigorously the effects of ambient temperature on consumer creativity. We examined the influence of commonly experienced warm and cool temperatures (within a comfortable range) on creative performance and attempted to shed light on the underlying mechanism. According to our hypothesis, as cold temperatures tend to deplete consumers' cognitive resources and induce primarily experiential processing, warm temperatures can enhance creativity performance. However, higher temperatures are not always beneficial; due to the negative mood that such temperatures induce, increasing temperature beyond a comfortable range may no longer enhance consumer creativity.
We conducted three experiments to test these hypotheses. In Experiment 1, we measured consumer creativity under the conditions of warm and cold temperature. Results showed that people exhibit greater creativity in warmer (vs. cooler) environment. In Experiment 2, we used a product-package design task to assess consumer creativity under warm and cold temperature conditions, and tested the boundary condition for the beneficial effect of warm temperatures on creativity. Results revealed that a relatively warm (vs. cool) temperature is more beneficial for creative thinking. However, mood, arousal, and involvement did not appear to drive the effect. As temperatures exceeded the comfortable range, participants reported more negative feelings, and the beneficial effect of warm temperature on creativity disappeared. In Experiment 3, by manipulating available cognitive resources, we examined our hypothesis regarding the mechanism underlying the influence of temperature on creativity. The findings of Experiment 3 confirmed our hypothesis that experiential processing prompted by resource depletion in warm temperature conditions underlies the beneficial effect of warm temperatures on creativity. Specifically, we found that when participants in a cooler environment were primed with a lack of cognitive resources to engage in experiential processing, they performed just as well in the creativity task as participants in the warmer environment.
This research adds to the existing literature in several ways. First, it contributes to the literature on environmental psychology and consumer creativity by empirically demonstrating that different temperatures within a comfortable range can have significantly different effects on people's creativity. Second, the inverted U-shaped relation between temperature and consumer creativity demonstrated in the current research sheds light on the complex influence of ambient temperature. Finally, because no rigorous empirical account of the mechanism of temperature influence has been provided in the literature to date, we filled this gap in the research on consumer creativity by illustrating both the basic effect of temperature on consumer creativity and the underlying mechanism of the temperature-creativity relation. The findings of this research have practical implications in terms of optimizing temperature conditions to increase consumer creativity. Organizations and companies that aim to improve consumer creativity should take the influence of ambient temperature into consideration. Setting an appropriate ambient temperature may enhance consumers' creative input, which in turn leads to more creative outcomes and greater satisfaction.

Key words: ambient temperature, experiential processing, thinking style, consumer creativity