Social Psychology Seminar: Lile Jia

You are cordially invited to join us for a Social Psychology Seminar.

Friday, September 11
3:30 p.m.
Psychology Building, Room 128

This week's talk will be given by Lile Jia, one of our own graduate students. Lile will talk about his recent research that investigates the relation of psychological temporal distance and creative cognition/insight problem solving. This work has been recently blogged by The Atlantic and has attracted a good deal of attention. Below you will find the title and a brief abstract of this talk. I hope that you all can make it to the talk.

Title: Lessons from a Faraway Land: The Effect of Spatial Distance on Creative Cognition

Abstract:
Recent research (Forster, Friedman, & Liberman) has identified temporal distance as a situational moderator of creativity. According to Construal Level Theory (Liberman, Trope, & Stephan, 2007), temporal distance is just one case of the broader construct of psychological distance. In the present research, we investigated the effect of another dimension of psychological distance, namely spatial distance, on creative cognition and insight problem solving. In two studies, we demonstrate that, when the creative task is portrayed as originating from a far rather than a close location, participants provide more creative responses (Study 1) and perform better on a problem solving task that requires creative insight (Study 2). Both theoretical and practical implications of this finding are discussed.

Announced by Professor Steven J. Sherman