According to some new research, being highly religious or even just thinking about god can make you less creative.
In a study entitled Divine inhibition: Does thinking about God make monotheistic believers less creative?, researchers conducted five experiments to see the impact which thinking about one’s belief in god had on the creative performance of individuals.
The researchers conducted a series of experiments with several hundred participants. One of the questions they were asked was simply “Do you believe in god?”, whatever their religion was. Several major religions including Christianity, Judaism and Islam were included, as were non-belivers. This was to analyse the statistical differences between believers and non believers.
But for several experiments, before the participants conducted a creativity-measuring experiment, they were prompted to either think actively about god or be in a control group which thought of a neutral topic. For example, in the group primed to think about god, they were asked to write a few paragraphs about:
“When people talk about God, they could mean a lot of things. We’re interested in your thoughts. What comes to mind when you think of God?”
Those in the control condition were given the following prompt:
“Please write about your day yesterday. For example, tell us where you were and what you did.”
This put people into either a netural (control) or god-primed mindset before they did the creativity test.
Results: the creativity tests clearly showed that for people who believed in god, those being primed to think about god not only solved fewer convergent thinking exercises, they also came up with fewer divergent thinking creative ideas.
So if you are religious, thinking about god makes you less creative.
The researchers indicate that this may be because religion and thinking about god train people to think in a “passive followership mindset”.
But also interestingly, the non-believers who were primed to think about god performed better on the creativity exercises than those primed to think of a neutral topic. It was as if writing about their lack of belief in god, or writing about the perspectives of other people and their religion, put them in a mindset to spark more ideas.
Last week, I wrote about creative stereotypes, and how people are more likely to think of someone as less creative if they are religious.
It turns out, this experiment indicates there might be some truth to that.
Nick Skillicorn
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This doesn’t prove that all Christians are somewhat uncreative. God created everything and is very diverse and gave humans the desire to create…the whole passive following can really just be because these people have found that following Gods way for our daily life is less burdensome instead having to find different ways to go about life…if that’s less creative then so be it life is hard enough, quite frankly I enjoy poetry and art and I watercolor, I enjoy creative writing. Jesus never stopped me from creating if anything I give Him all the credit for cultivating my desire of art. He really encouraged me to go for it! the difference is I don’t do it simply to enjoy it or gain man’s admiration but to give glory to God, that’s more meaningful than the latter. I think manmade standards in Christian circles are the reason why people outside may see less creativity but not because our bibles told us to, it seems like sin being normalized in modern culture is what people see as creative and new but its really not…its as old as time just in “different ways” but all the same. “Yet God made everything beautiful in its own time He has planted eternity in the human heart”… Ecclesiastes 3:11. I spend more time thinking and imagining heaven and come…when i was a lost soul I couldn’t see beyond what was in front of me…i was creative too but with sin in the mix nothing new or unique to God my nature only cared about self in different forms.