关键词: 年龄信息, 刻板印象, 创造性, 观念评价, 创作者

Abstract: "Little Smart" and "Old Fogey" are common phrases in the real life, they all reflect people's implicit theories of the relationship of age and creativity. As creative products or ideas are often closely associated with their creators (or designers, proposers), do the characteristics of creators influence the evaluation on their ideas? If the answer is yes, what is the underlying psychological mechanism? At present, these basic questions need to be systematically explored in academia. This study explores the impact of creators’ age information on the evaluation of creative ideas and the role of related stereotypes on it. We used responses of Alternative Uses Task (AUT) as rating materials, 60 target items were selected, and two responses for each target item, for a total of 120 ideas. One 4 (creators were falsely told as: about 10 years old primary school students, about 20 years old college students, about 30 years old adults, and over 60 years old people) × 2 (two stages in each group: without creators' information and with different creators' age information) mixed design was employed to examine the effect of creators' age information on evaluating novelty and usefulness of creative ideas. All subjects assessed novelty and usefulness on a 1-6 scale. In the first stage, the participants were not informed creators’ age information. In the second stage, the four groups were informed different creators’ age information. Participants were asked to rate 60 ideas at each stage, one half of them were assessed on novelty and the other half of them were assessed on usefulness. After the idea evaluation task, all participants completed the explicit age general stereotypes questionnaire, the explicit age creative stereotypes questionnaire, Runco Idea Behavior Scale (RIBS), and the IAT (Implicit Association Test) test of implicit age creative stereotypes. The results show that, the interaction effects between two independent variables are both significant on two creativity indicators. Participants in the group with labeling creators as 10 years old primary school students raise their novelty and usefulness scores in the second stage. The group with labeling creators as 30 years old adults raises novelty scores in the second stage. In the pattern of scores’ changing, the results of this study are inconsistent with "Little Smart" and "Old Fogey", and indicate that the influence of creators’ age information on the evaluation of creative ideas is more complex. Furthermore, participants have different explicit and implicit creative stereotypes for different age groups. They are more positive for the young and more negative for older people. However, creative stereotypes have no predictive effect on increases in novelty and usefulness scores. We speculate that the reason why stereotypes do not affect the evaluation of creative ideas may be materials using in this study is domain-general. Unlike domain-specific creative products (such as architecture, painting, music, etc.), people do not need specific knowledge to understand everyday creative products, and their evaluation may be less susceptible to stereotypes. Relevant research has the important practical value on developing evaluation methods for personal/mini-c creativity and reducing the tendency to underestimate the novelty of truly creative ideas.

Key words: age information, stereotypes, creativity, idea evaluation, creators