How do people think differently? This has always been unusual. To search an answer, a scientist named J. P. Guilford started a famous study of creativity in the 1970s, known as the nine-dot puzzle (九点谜题). He asked the participants (参与者) to connect all nine dots using only four straight lines, without lifting their pencils from the page. All the participants looked for solutions within the square they imagined. Only 20 percent managed to break out of the square and continue their lines in the white space around the dots, while the rest of them were blinded by the boundaries (边界) of the square.
The results of Guilford’s study led him to a conclusion: creativity needs you to go outside the box. The idea was widely spread soon. Overnight, it seemed that creativity experts everywhere were teaching managers how to think outside the box. The idea was so popular that no one thought of checking the facts. No one, that is, before two different research teams— Clarke Burmham with Kenneth Davis, and Joseph Alba with Robert Weisberg—did another experiment.
To make sure that Guilford’s study is correct, both teams divided participants into two groups. The first group was given the same instructions as the participants in Guilford’s experiment. The second group was told to draw the lines outside the imagined box. Guess what? Only a little more than 20 percent solved the puzzle, which is no big difference from the result of Guilford’s experiment.
Let’s look a little more closely at the surprising result. Solving this problem requires people to think outside the box. However, direct and clear instructions to “think outside the box” do not help participants improve their performance. The widely spread idea that out-of-the-box thinking makes people more creative can, in some way, be dangerous. After all, with one simple but brilliant experiment, researchers had proved that the connection between thinking outside the box and creativity was a misunderstanding.
【小题1】The nine-dot puzzle study is mainly focused on ________.| A．how people do things in real life | B．what people see in the experiment |
| C．how people think in different ways | D．what knowledge people have learned |
| A．To discover the main idea of Guiford’s study. | B．To show different views against Guiford’s study. |
| C．To collect supporting details for Guiford’s study. | D．To double-check the correctness of Guiford’s study. |
| A．boundaries sometimes make people think less creatively |
| B．clear instructions influence how people solve problems |
| C．few people performed better with the clear instructions |
| D．the methods of nine-dot puzzle study need to be improved |
| A．Puzzle Solving: A Key To Creativity | B．Nine-Dot Puzzle: A Magic Test |
| C．Thinking Outside the Box: A Misleading Idea | D．Creative Thinking: An Unusual Topic |
