Issue 1: Ruining Music and Creativity

Introducing The Fishbowl

Ruining Music and Creativity

Introducing The Fishbowl

DALL-E’s best attempt to render me looking into and out of a fishbowl.

“Aren’t you afraid it’ll ruin music for you?”

Robert worried what a music conservatory would do to me. For two years, we’d played together in Sal Paradise and the Apple Pie Blues Band, a bunch of high school students dressing up in suits, playing suburban White kid blues approximations, and opening for punk and grunge bands in the suburbs of Seattle in the 1990s. Robert was the guitarist and motor behind it. Without him, there were no rehearsals, no gigs, no self-released 7-inch vinyl record. I looked up to him. He was a year older, long-hair, self-assured enough to book tours for our half-baked group, and unafraid to speak his mind.

When he asked the question, it shook me. I was so excited to go to New England Conservatory. I’d never considered that it could ruin music for me.

Research suggests that Robert isn’t alone in worrying that learning can be dangerous. Expertise and creativity have a complex relationship. You need deep knowledge and skill to know what problems need solving and the state-of-the-art to address them. That knowledge is fuel for creativity. But immersing yourself in a profession leads you to think more like the majority view. As expertise deepens, some people become more rigid in their thinking and dependent on what has worked in the past, limiting their creativity.

I can happily report that studying music did not ruin anything, other than my chances of fame and fortune. My enjoyment of playing and listening to music is deeper than ever. “The magic is in the details,” one of my music theory teachers, Paul Burdick, told me. “The more you learn about theory and technique, the more you understand the parts that aren’t magical. And that brings you closer to the real magic.”

Paul’s view is closer to what research tells us than Robert’s. Deep and broad expertise are key contributors to creativity. Deepening my knowledge of music didn’t ruin it for me. But the job—a low-paying, odd-hours, frequent travel, hyper-competitive job—wore me down over the years. I eventually went back to school to study the things that I loved about jazz: creativity, improvisation, and collaboration. Even if that risked ruining them.

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I went on a vision quest at NYU’s Gallatin School: a Master’s degree in Interdisciplinary Studies. I studied improvising groups of all kinds - jazz, other musical genres and even different art forms, like dance, theater, comedy.

To my everlasting good fortune, my haphazard thesis research also led me to “The Social Psychology of Creativity: A Componential Conceptualization,” by Teresa Amabile. I looked her up and found she was in some field I’d never heard of—organizational behavior.

Organizational behavior is an odd melange of social psychology, sociology, and business devoted to understanding how people suffer, tolerate, and occassionally thrive within organized social structures like companies, professions, or teams. Or, as Adam Grant described it, organizational behavior is the science of “how to make work suck less.”

Teresa pioneered the social psychology of creativity. Most social scientists of the time thought that creativity was mysterious and unknowable. Teresa thought so too, but her insight was: Let’s pretend like it isn’t.

In the 1980s, Teresa developed what is known as The Consensual Assessment Technique. She noticed that experts in a given domain agreed well on what was creative and what wasn’t. Expert poets agreed on which student poems were most and least creative; expert artists did the same for collages. Even if they struggled to articulate why they thought something was creative, it didn’t matter: their agreement could be used to measure creativity. You test whether experts agree well in their ratings; if they do, you average them.

Before the Consensual Assessment Technique, creativity researchers wondered what individual traits separated the common folk from “eminent creators” — famous artists, Nobel Prize winners, and the like. The great debate was the “Mad Genius Hypothesis” — is creativity linked to mental illness? (Mostly, no. But sometimes maybe?).

Subsequent research has mostly thrown cold water on the Mad Genius Hypothesis (although it’s complicated). But chasing the traits of eminent creators was also a distraction from more useful research. Even if it were true that some psychopathologies made you more creative, what could you do with that information? Try to inspire psychopathology when we need creativity? Hire for psychopathology in creative jobs? Those seem farfetched. I guess it would be useful to know if being creative drives you mad.¹

The Consensual Assessment Technique offered an alternative to the methodologically questionable studies trying to diagnose mental illnesses from poems, letters, and articles written about long-dead creators. It allowed social psychologists to take creativity into the laboratory — and to examine everyday creativity, not just that of so-called eminent creators. “Teresa Amabile’s 1982 paper on the Consensual Assessment Technique (CAT) provided a breakthrough in the study of creativity,” creativity expert Roni Reiter-Palmon wrote. “Prior to this paper, the study of creativity was limited…The availability of a new approach to measure and evaluate creativity opened the door for increasing research on creativity including experimental studies and using normal adult populations. In fact, the CAT has been viewed as the ‘gold standard’ for creativity researchers.”

The CAT enabled Teresa and subsequent generations of researchers to study the effects of the work environment on creative performance, among many other things. Her work resonated with me. I never bought into the idea that creativity was only for special people or special occasions. The most interesting and practical things about creativity are in the creative process and the context in which that process unfolds. The Mad Genuis Hypothesis and other quests to discover the traits of creative people is like fishing in the River Thames here in London - you might catch something, but you probably don’t want to eat it.

Teresa’s research taught me three important things about creativity that you won’t get from trying to extract wisdom from lone geniuses. First, creativity is socially constructed. It is a social judgement by a particular audience at a particular point in time, not a state of nature. Second, creativity is for everyone. Its not reserved for some elite class of eminent creators. We are all more creative at some times and less creative at others. And third, just because something feels mystical or magical, that doesn’t mean we can’t (or shouldn’t) study it. Learning gets you closer to the magic - it’s nothing to be afraid of, Robert.

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It’s been twenty years since Teresa (and Richard Hackman) took the inexplicable risk to accept me, a musician with no background in social science, as a PhD student. I owe both of them so much. And I’ll tell you more in later issues.

In those twenty years, I’ve been researching and teaching about creativity, improvisation, and group dynamics. I think these topics cover two of the great challenges we face as humans. First, we need to live with other humans, who, unfortunately, kind of suck sometimes (group dynamics) Second, we need to adjust to an ever-changing world because of those pesky other humans and such (creativity, improvisation). As Charles Darwin didn’t actually say, “In the long history of humankind, those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.”

In this newsletter, The Fishbowl, I’ll share my thoughts on making work suck less, among other things. My hope is to help build a community where curious people can learn about and discuss the social science of creativity, improvisation, and group dynamics. Also, music, sports, news, nerd culture, and weird jokes.

Now, its tricky to do weird things AND try seriously to convey social science research. But I’ll give it a shot! And I’m gonna throw some weird stuff in too and see what sticks.

[Update: Please do subscribe, if you haven’t! I think I’ve fixed the links now and changed the settings for comments so you can use them.]

Questions

Please send questions about improving your work life to *The Fishbowl’’s advice columnist, Cooper, the Chinchilla.

Image: Chinchilla as an advice columnist, by Dall-E, via ChatGPT 4o

Music

I won’t be playing anywhere the next few weeks. But, in the mean time, check out Suedejazz Collective, a group in which I’m a peripheral member/occassional collaborator. The next gig is at Juju’s Bar on 28th June. Again, I won’t be there, but get tickets ahead to support them - the last few shows have sold out.

You can hear me (faintly) on Suedejazz Collective’s new single Elyne Road.

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1. The main influence of creativity on mental health problems is through job stress like what I described when I was a working musician. So, although there may be higher rates of psychopathology and worse mental health in some creative professions, that is mostly down to poverty and job stress. There isn’t good evidence that creative thinking itself harms mental health. In fact, it’s mostly the opposite: creative thinking promotes well-being.