Hawlina, Hana

2019-7-24, Hawlina, Hana, Gillespie, Alex, Zittoun, Tania

The relationship between diversity and creativity can be seen as paradoxical. A diversity of perspectives should be advantageous for collaborative creativity, yet its benefits are often offset by adverse social processes. One suggestion for overcoming these negative effects is perspective taking. We compared four dyads with low scores on trait perspective taking with four dyads who were high on trait perspective taking on a brainstorming task followed by reconstructive interviews. Trait‐based perspective taking was strongly associated with greater creativity. However, contrary with expectation, interactional perspective taking behaviors (including questioning, signaling understanding, repairing) were associated with lesser creativity. The dyads that generated the fewest ideas were most likely to get stuck within ideational domains, struggling to understand one‐another, having to elaborate and justify their ideas more. In contrast, the dyads that generated many ideas were more likely to recognize each other's ideas as valuable without extensive justification or negotiation. We suggest that perspective taking is crucially important for mediating diversity in the generation of new ideas not only because it enables understanding the perspective of the other, but because it entails an atmosphere of tolerance, playfulness, and mutual recognition.

2018, Jovchelovitch, Sandra, Hawlina, Hana

Utopias have a long and contested history of steering social change; bringing the imagined ideal collective future into reality has been seen as both a noble endeavour and the herald of totalitarian regimes and political violence. This chapter will investigate this tension in two parts: the first will explore the distinctly human future-oriented psychology and argue that imagination is central to human thinking and social organisation. The second part will discuss the role of utopias in motivating and guiding social change. We will explore the dangers of utopianism and conclude that while we need utopian visions to chart the shared path forward, it is essential that such visions are not hegemonic, but a polyphonic and ever-evolving collective imagination of the future.