Creativity in temporal social networks - new paper

We have a new paper out this week:

• Creativity in temporal social networks: how divergent thinking is impacted by one’s choice of peers ¹
  Raiyan Abdul Baten, Daryl Bagley, Ashely Tenesaca, Famous Clark, James P. Bagrow, Gourab Ghoshal and Ehsan Hoque, J. R. Soc. Interface. 1720200667 (2020)

The abstract:

Creativity is viewed as one of the most important skills in the context of future-of-work. In this paper, we explore how the dynamic (self-organizing) nature of social networks impacts the fostering of creative ideas. We run six trials (N = 288) of a web-based experiment involving divergent ideation tasks. We find that network connections gradually adapt to individual creative performances, as the participants predominantly seek to follow high-performing peers for creative inspirations. We unearth both opportunities and bottlenecks afforded by such self-organization. While exposure to high-performing peers is associated with better creative performances of the followers, we see a counter-effect that choosing to follow the same peers introduces semantic similarities in the followers’ ideas. We formulate an agent-based simulation model to capture these intuitions in a tractable manner, and experiment with corner cases of various simulation parameters to assess the generality of the findings. Our findings may help design large-scale interventions to improve the creative aptitude of people interacting in a social network.

Congrats to my collaborators, especially Raiyan for leading us. Fantastic group!

Check out the paper for more. And my collaborators have a cool followup paper you may be interested in.