Conceptual priming in a generative problem-solving task.

Three experiments explored how participants solved a very open-ended generative problem-solving task. Previous research has shown that when participants are shown examples, novel creations will tend to conform to features shared across those examples (Smith, Ward, & Schumacher, 1993). We made the shared features of the examples conceptually related to one another. We found that when the features were related to the concept of hostility, participants' creations contained hostile features that were not part of any of the examples. These results suggest that participants will design novel entities to be consistent with emergent properties of examples shown to them. We also found that a mild hostility prime from unscrambling sentences had a similar conceptual effect. Together, the two effects suggest that conceptual priming of generative cognitive tasks will influence the cognitive aspects of the creative process.

The credibility of a source influences the rate of unconscious plagiarism.

Three experiments were conducted to investigate the relationship between the credibility of information and later unconscious plagiarism of that information. In each experiment, ideas concerning ways to reduce traffic accidents were presented from a more credible source (traffic planners) and a less credible source (college freshmen). After a distractor task, participants were asked to generate novel ways to reduce traffic accidents. In Experiments 1 and 2, unconscious plagiarism of ideas presented from the more credible source was greater than from the less credible source. In neither experiment was explicit memory for ideas from each source different in tests of source monitoring or free recall. However, the difference in unconscious plagiarism was eliminated in Experiment 3 by having participants generate the implications of ideas at study. The results are discussed in terms of the explicit factors that affect the incidence of unconscious plagiarism.