{"id":463492,"date":"2020-12-09T10:18:27","date_gmt":"2020-12-09T15:18:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/?p=463492"},"modified":"2026-05-12T11:31:50","modified_gmt":"2026-05-12T15:31:50","slug":"can-social-networks-help-us-be-more-creative-463492","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/can-social-networks-help-us-be-more-creative-463492\/","title":{"rendered":"Can social networks help us be more creative?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Our interactions on social media could encourage new ways of thinking and different perspectives, if creativity was considered part of the network\u2019s algorithms, say Rochester researchers.<\/h2>\n

The algorithms that social media platforms use to recommend who we should \u201cfollow\u201d are designed to steer us to people who likely share the same ideas and interests.<\/p>\n

However, platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram could help us become more creative\u2014a quality that is increasingly valued in our society\u2014if they instead steered us to people with ideas and interests different from our own, say researchers at the University of Rochester<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In a new paper<\/a> in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface<\/em>, they describe conducting a novel experiment in which participants were asked to think of unusual, \u201ccreative\u201d uses for commonplace items\u2013using a pencil as a dart, for example, or a shoe as a hammer. They were also given the opportunity to view the ideas of other participants and then decide which of them they would like to \u201cfollow\u201d for creative inspiration.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe found that the participants overwhelmingly chose to follow peers who had the most creative ideas,\u201d says lead author Raiyan Abdul Baten, a PhD student in the human-computer interaction lab of Ehsan Hoque<\/a>, an associate professor of computer science.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe confirmed that following highly creative peers indeed helped people generate novel ideas themselves\u2014the intuition being, if you bump up against out-of-the-box ideas, chances are higher that you will be able to combine your own ideas with ideas you didn\u2019t originally think of. Such creative recombinations can lead to further novel ideas.\u201d<\/p>\n

However, the researchers also found that when many people share the same sources of inspiration, even their own independently generated ideas can become similar to each other. The finding suggests potential drawbacks if too many people follow a relatively small number of highly creative idea leaders, resulting in a decrease in the overall diversity of thinking across the network. The \u201cthought leaders\u201d themselves need to keep generating outlier ideas in order to \u201cstay relevant and remain ahead of others.\u201d<\/p>\n

As automation replaces people in jobs involving manual, predictable, and repetitive work, demand will continue to increase for people with creative skills, who can work with others, and \u201cthink outside of the box,\u201d says Hoque. \u201cThose are going to be the skills of the future.\u201d<\/p>\n

The researchers say social media companies could enable this process by providing members the option of receiving recommendations for a more diversified set of people to follow. This could be especially useful on platforms like ResearchGate, where researchers are specifically looking for new ideas, or Reddit, Behance, or Twitter, where graphic designers can find creative inspiration from interactions with their peers, Baten says.<\/p>\n

The lessons could be applied to offline social networks as well, including the workplace, he adds. \u201cIf I am the manager of an office and there are a bunch of teams under me, and I see that everyone looks toward one person for all the good ideas, I\u2019ll try to decentralize the teams and make sure that one person is not dominating the creative network. Otherwise, they are all going to generate similar ideas, and the company is going to fall behind.\u201d<\/p>\n