Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Why do people experience something as creative? We proposea perspective-change based account of creativity evaluation.Drawing upon structure mapping theory (Gentner, 1983), weshow that people evaluate a simile to be creative when theyspontaneously (Study 1) or are induced (Study 2) to experiencea change in perspective. This account further predicts thatpeople are unlikely to find a simile creative if they are unableto form a working perspective, as is in the case of anomalies.In addition, a simile is unlikely to be evaluated as creative whenpeople’s initial perspectives are sufficient to interpret thesimile, as in the case of literal statements. We further show thatrepeated use of the same perspective suppresses the experienceof perspective change and thus reduces creativity perception(Study 3).