Study Says Creativity Can Flow From Political Correctness

Interesting study on political correctness and the diversity of teams:

Duguid and her co-authors set up an experiment to see if the notion that politically correctness impedes creativity held up to scientific scrutiny.

They sat down students in groups of three to brainstorm ideas on how to use a vacant space on campus. Some of the groups were all men, some all women, others mixed. Control groups got to start right away on the brainstorming, but the test groups were primed with a script.

The research team told those groups that they were interested in gathering examples from college undergraduates of politically correct behavior on campus. They were instructed to, as a group, list examples of political correctness that they had either heard of or directly experienced on this campus.

“They did that for 10 minutes,” Duguid says.

In the same-sex groups, the old notion held true. Groups of three men or three women who were instructed to think about political correctness were less creative than the control group. But in the mixed-gender groups that got the politically correct instructions, creativity went up.

“They generated more ideas, and those ideas were more novel,” Duguid says. “Whether it was two men and one woman or two women and one man, the results were consistent.”

Study Says Creativity Can Flow From Political Correctness : NPR.