Creative Cognition in Social Innovation Paul Thagard and Mingming Jiang University of Waterloo and Rice University
1
2
Outline 1. Domains of creativity 2. Social innovations
3. Hypotheses 4. Case studies 5. Procedural creativity 6. Agent-based modeling
3
Creativity Scientific discovery Technological invention Social innovation Artistic creativity
4
Creativity Questions 1. What is creativity? 2. What are the mental processes that promote creativity?
3. What are the social processes that promote creativity?
4. Do different domains of creativity require different mental and social processes?
5
What is Creativity? A product is creative if it is: 1. new (novel, original), 2. valuable (important, useful, appropriate, correct, accurate), and 3. surprising (unexpected, non-obvious).
Exemplars: relativity theory, television, public education, Starry Night Typical features: new, valuable, surprising Explanatory roles: Creativity explains success, etc.
6
Social Innovations Products include ideas, hypotheses, practices. Products are 1. motivated by social needs and, 2. bring value to society by meeting those social needs.
Sub-domains: education, health care, law
and regulation, technology, social movements, organizational methods, and finance
7
Case Studies Education: Teach for America (Wendy Kopp) Health care: Hospice (Cicely Saunders)
Technology: Facebook (Mark Zuckerberg) Social movements: Prison reform (Elizabeth Fry) Organizations: Habitat for Humanity (Millard Fuller) Finance: Microfinance (Muhammad Yunus)
8
Creativity Hypotheses S1. Every social innovation results from combination of mental representations. S2. Social innovation is generated by a problem-solving process that can include serendipity. S3. Social innovation is goal-oriented, including both short-term and long-term goals. S4. Social innovation involves both psychological and social mechanisms of emotions.
9
Creativity Hypotheses S5. Social innovation usually involves emotional reactions to risk. S6. Social innovation is prompted by two primary cognitive processes: association and analogy. S7. Social innovation is often procedural creativity, where the new product is a method consisting of new rules for doing things. S8. Social innovation requires interactions among people that including support, rejection, and reaction to rejection.
10
S1. Every social innovation results from combination of mental representations.
Facebook = paper face book (directory) + computer websites
Paper face book = verbal, visual, tactile, kinesthetic Website = verbal, visual, kinesthetic
11
S2. Social innovation is generated by a problemsolving process that can include serendipity.
S3. Social innovation is goal-oriented, including both short-term and long-term goals. Goals: produce online directory for Harvard; make the world more connected. Serendipity: Facemash + Crimson article
12
S4. Social innovation involves both psychological and social mechanisms of emotions.
S5. Social innovation usually involves emotional reactions to risk. Emotions: anger, fear, excitement. Risk: curiosity rather than cost-benefit calculation.
13
S6. Social innovation is prompted by two primary cognitive processes: association and analogy.
Analogies: Facemash, paper directory. Associations: chain of conceptual links leading to connection of Facemash and paper directory.
14
S7. Social innovation is often procedural creativity, where the new product is a method consisting of new rules for doing things. If your goal is to make social connections, then use Facebook.
If you want to connect with friends while maintaining privacy, then use Facebook’s privacy controls.
15
S8. Social innovation requires interactions among people that including support, rejection, and reaction to rejection. Support: Saverin, Moskovitz, Hughes, D’Angelo, Thiel
Resistance: Winklevoss twins
16
Comparisons 1. Social innovation has different goals from scientific discovery, technological invention, and artistic imagination: meeting social needs rather than truth, explanation, engineering, or beauty.
2. But social innovation accomplishes the goal of meeting social needs by the same cognitive processes: combining representations, analogy, procedural creativity, etc.
3. Social innovation results from BOTH psychological and social processes.
17
New Project 1 Procedural creativity: how does it produce new methods represented by rules? Goal-driven and techniquedriven. 1. Start with goals that indicate a specific problem to be solved. 2. Try to solve the problem by processes such as rulebased reasoning, association, analogy, and combining representations. 3. Arrive at a specific solution to the specific problem. 4. Generalize the successful problem solution into a method of the form: If your goal is to solve a problem of this type, then use a solution of the type discovered.
18
New Project 2 Social creativity: how do individuals interact to produce joint innovations? Agent-based model. 1. Adapt HOTCO 3 (Thagard 2006) model of interacting
2. 3. 4. 5.
emotional agents. Have agents generate new representations as vectors by combining previous vectors. Have agents evaluate new representations by emotions. Transfer new representations and emotions between agents. Track the spread of new representations through the social group.
19
Combining Social & Cognitive Modeling
20
Mechanisms Parts
Interactions
Neurons
Excitation, Representation by inhibition, synaptic firing patterns connections Recursive binding Semantic pointers
Neural populations Semantic pointers Interactive competition
People
Communication
Emergent result
Conscious experience
Consensus, polarization, innovation 21
Emergence Emergent properties are possessed by the whole, not by the parts, and are not simple aggregates of the properties of the parts because they result from interactions of parts.
22
Conclusions 1. Social innovation uses same cognitive and social mechanisms as other kinds of creativity. 2. Need for more work on procedural creativity and social processes.
23
24