Preferences for Insight and Effort Differ across Domains and Audiences

A creative process is “the sequence of thoughts and actions that lead to a novel, adaptive production” (Lubart 2001, 295). Narratives of the creative process can enhance the perceived quality of a product and stimulate inferences on the creator’s ability to produce additional high-quality ideas and outputs (Baas et al. 2015; Mourgues et al. 2016), improve empathy between creators and their audiences (Davis 1983; Friestad and Wright 1994), and increase process transparency (Buell and Norton 2011; Buell, Kim and Tsay 2017). These narratives can emphasize either the experience of insight (Schooler, Fallshore, and Fiore 1995) – the sudden, dream-like, spontaneous and illuminating experience facilitating the emergence of new ideas– or the application of effort (Lucas and Nordgren 2015) – the methodical, planned, and rational stage in which ideas are organized and transformed into a new product. People hold beliefs on how creative products are generated (e.g., Sternberg 1985; Runco and Bahleda 1986; O’Connor, Nemeth and Akutsu 2013), and these beliefs can influence product evaluations due to reliance on stereotypical knowledge and heuristics (Sternberg 1985; Levy, Stroessner, and Dweck 1998). We maintain that an insight-based narrative of the creative process (Rothenberg 1970; Kasof 1995) has greater fit with artistic domains, whereas an effortbased narrative of the creative process has greater fit with scientific domains (Lucas and Nordgren 2015). Because lay beliefs influence evaluations of creative products (Baas et al. 2015; Sternberg 1985), we expect artistic products to receive better evaluations when their creative process is described through insight-based narratives rather than effort-based narratives and that the opposite pattern holds for scientific products.