Many of us drink coffee every day; research by Zabelina and Silvia indicates that doing so may not provide a creativity boost we’re planning on. The Zabelina-Silvia team found that “Caffeine is the most widely consumed psychotropic drug in the world, with numerous studies documenting the effects of caffeine on people’s alertness, vigilance, mood, concentration, and attentional focus. The effects of caffeine on creative thinking, however, remain unknown…the present study investigated the effect of moderate caffeine consumption on creative problem solving (i.e., convergent thinking) and creative idea generation (i.e., divergent thinking). We found that participants who consumed 200 mg of caffeine (approximately one 12 oz. cup of coffee…), compared to those in the placebo condition [no caffeine]…showed significantly enhanced problem-solving abilities. Caffeine had no significant effects on creative generation…The effects remained after controlling for participants’ caffeine expectancies, whether they believed they consumed caffeine or a placebo, and changes in mood.” Wikipedia defines convergent thinking, as the term is generally used: “as the opposite of divergent thinking. It generally means the ability to give the ‘correct’ answer to standard questions that do not require significant creativity, for instance in most tasks in school and on standardized multiple-choice tests for intelligence” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convergent_thinking).
Darya Zabelina and Paul Silvia. 2020. “Percolating Ideas: The Effects of Caffeine on Creative Thinking and Problem Solving.” Consciousness and Cognition, vol. 79, 102899, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2020.102899
Sally Augustin, PhD, a cognitive scientist, is the editor of Research Design Connections (www.researchdesignconnections.com), a monthly subscription newsletter and free daily blog, where recent and classic research in the social, design, and physical sciences that can inform designers’ work are presented in straightforward language. Readers learn about the latest research findings immediately, before they’re available elsewhere. Sally, who is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, is also the author of Place Advantage: Applied Psychology for Interior Architecture (Wiley, 2009) and, with Cindy Coleman, The Designer’s Guide to Doing Research: Applying Knowledge to Inform Design (Wiley, 2012). She is a principal at Design With Science (www.designwithscience.com) and can be reached at sallyaugustin@designwithscience.com.