Ask a five-year-old to paint a picture and they will almost instinctively reach for the brush, but ask an adult to do the same and they will often hesitate and shy away. Now researchers say they know why.
While it is widely assumed children are more creative than adults, a new study challenges this notion, finding adults outperform preschoolers on creative tasks but generally feel less confident and more anxious doing them.
Dr Mathias Benedek, the senior author of the study at the University of Graz in Austria, said: “Children are so intrinsically motivated and absorbed in play that we often mistake their engagement with greater creative ability.”
Writing in the journal Plos One, the researchers asked 92 preschool children aged four to seven and 70 adults largely in their 20s to complete three tasks.
The first involved coming up with as many creative uses for a tin as possible in three minutes; the second involved drawing anything they liked with no stated time limit; and the third involved drawing an imaginary animal within eight minutes.
The results were then rated by judges on originality, usefulness and overall creativity.
Participants were also asked to rate how much they enjoyed each task, how motivated and confident they felt, and how anxious they were doing it.
The judges deemed the work by adults to be more original, useful and creative than that of children, particularly when clear goals and time limits were set. Conversely, children reported feeling more confident, motivated and less anxious completing tasks.
“Adults outperformed children, demonstrating higher creative potential, but they had far less confidence. We need to look at what makes adults so anxious about their original ideas being rejected,” Benedek said.
He said children approached tasks with greater intrinsic motivation and enjoyed the process of play, “whereas adults place more focus on the goal or objective”, limiting their enjoyment.
As a result, children experimented more freely and treated mistakes as part of the process whereas adults, wary of judgment, often dismissed unusual ideas before trying them.
The study, conducted at the University of Graz in Austria in collaboration with UCLouvain in Belgium and Yale University, has limitations. Among them, the research is based on a snapshot comparison of just two age groups, making it hard to draw conclusions about the impact of ageing on creativity. Children are also more likely to pick extreme answers on rating scales and have obvious differences in cognition.
Nonetheless, Benedek and his colleagues suggest that the idea of creativity fading as we grow into adulthood is a misconception. “Adults don’t lose their creativity, instead they lose the confidence to use it,” Benedek said.
