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.

中文翻译：

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时间社交网络中的创造力：发散思维如何受到同龄人选择的影响

创造力被视为未来工作环境中最重要的技能之一。在本文中，我们探讨了社交网络的动态（自组织）性质如何影响创意的培养。我们对一项涉及不同构思任务的基于网络的实验进行了六次试验 (N = 288)。我们发现网络连接逐渐适应个人的创意表演，因为参与者主要寻求跟随高绩效同龄人的创意灵感。我们发现了这种自组织提供的机会和瓶颈。虽然与表现出色的同龄人接触与追随者更好的创造性表现相关，但我们看到了一种反作用，即选择追随相同的同龄人会在追随者的想法中引入语义相似性。我们制定了一个基于代理的模拟模型，以易于处理的方式捕捉这些直觉，并用各种模拟参数的极端情况进行实验，以评估结果的普遍性。我们的发现可能有助于设计大规模干预措施，以提高人们在社交网络中互动的创造性能力。