STATUS AND CREATIVITY y high-and low-staus paricipants.(.1. d a stal ANOVA led no significa n effect of ability n.F( vould be used to us and m.F2.2062 038 rship.After th scored.p vel ideas 77D :0.47)than high- (M= 210 istant (low status)po osition The )R6 040.an ould gra high and low-status oower.that is.the and makine fina On th when id e orce their s ()than thoe of 201,SD ed th r to uld pants told to 0g1 then giver Discussion a picture of our hypot sis tha ment all of the articipants in the s sion t he ndividiasEemerac Ity of the ideas generated w hen participants thought their Finally,participant pleted an implicit threat studies (DeMarre Pe 2005) Ve use Has.Katz,Riz ity ure of creativity to der the ity of the able to pe rceiv e it.They vere told that after the word left th te something new (Ward.94). word is kn wn to his task as indi word that had just b een flashed dy ko ble thos is that they fear their ideas will be criticized for bei rd.four words re pres nted and remained on the screen until idual ned by the prospect of evaluation we -relatco sked to ne of the four eoptions wasa threat-of-status-los Study 2 Method Following directly from previous research tud were blind to the study p dicti s:high vs.m ow) ngs and h War'e(1004 chem nts came to the laboratory ir and unusual configuration of the sensory organs (e.g..eyes locatederated by high- and low-status participants, t(69) 0.11, p .914. Idea novelty. ANOVA revealed no significant main effect of status, F(2, 206) 0.99, p .372, p 0.01, or evaluation, F(1, 206) 0.08, p .783, p 0.001. There was, however, a significant interaction between status and evaluation, F(2, 206) 3.32, p .038, p 0.031. Planned contrasts showed that when participants believed their ideas were being evaluated, middle-status participants generated less novel ideas (M 1.77, SD 0.47) than high-status (M 2.10, SD 0.45), t(65) 2.09, p .040, and low-status (M 2.13, SD 0.52), t(65) 2.09, p .040, participants. There was no significant difference in novelty of ideas generated by high- and low-status participants, t(70) 0.20, p .840. On the other hand, when ideas were anonymous, middle-status participants’ ideas were no less novel (M 2.06, SD 0.32) than those of high-status (M 2.01, SD 0.36), t(70) 0.66, p .511, and low-status (M 1.98, SD 0.34), t(69) 1.11, p .272, participants. There was also no significant difference in idea novelty for high- and low-status partic￾ipants, t(69) 0.40, p .691. Discussion In support of our hypothesis that status would bear a U-shaped relationship to creativity, the results demonstrate that when they expected to be evaluated, middle-status individuals generated fewer and less novel ideas compared with high- and low-status participants. However, there was no difference in the number and novelty of the ideas generated when participants thought their ideas would remain anonymous. In Study 2, we planned to repli￾cate and extend these findings. We used a different status manip￾ulation and investigated threat of status loss as the mechanism underlying the relationship between status and creativity. We also employed a different measure of creativity to demonstrate the robustness and generalizability of the effect to different tasks. An important part of the creative process is the ability to go beyond what is known to generate something new (Ward, 1994). This task is quite difficult, however, as individuals are constrained by what they already know and often generate products or ideas that very closely resemble those that already exist (Ward, 1994). One reason that individuals may find it difficult to break from what is already known is that they fear their ideas will be criticized for being too unusual (Camacho & Paulus, 1995; Mueller et al., 2011). There￾fore, in line with our general hypothesis that middle-status indi￾viduals are most threatened by the prospect of evaluation, we expect that they will be less creative in a structured imagination task in which they are asked to deliberately generate a novel entity. Study 2 Method Participants and design. One hundred thirty participants (mean age 19.91 years; females 41%) took part in the study, which consisted of a 3 (status: high vs. middle vs. low) 2 (evaluation: yes vs. no) between-participants design. Participants were undergraduate students who were given course credit for taking part in the study. Procedure. Participants came to the laboratory in groups and were told that they would be participating in several studies, the first of which would investigate status and group performance. Participants completed a status assessment consisting of questions that they were told measured ability on the upcoming group decision-making task, and therefore would be used to establish their status position (Pettit et al., 2010). The assessment consisted of a combination of questions related to reasoning, creativity, and leadership. After the assessment was ostensibly scored, partici￾pants were randomly assigned to a President (high status), Middle Manager (middle status), or Assistant (low status) position. They were told that their roles differed in how much others would grant them respect and prestige, but that they did not differ in the amount of power, that is, the amount of resources and making final decisions. Moreover, in order to reinforce their status, participants wrote their roles on nametags that they wore and also wrote three behaviors that would lead to individuals being granted their role. Participants were told that before meeting with their group, they would be completing a related individual task. They were given a structured imagination task in which they were told to “imagine going to another galaxy in the universe and visiting a planet very different from Earth” (Ward, 1994). Participants were then given 7 min to draw a picture of an animal that is “local to this other planet.” Participants were either told that at the end of the exper￾iment all of the participants in the session would compare all of the drawings and vote on the drawing that most closely followed the instructions given or they were told that none of the other partic￾ipants in the session would see their drawing so there would be no evaluation of the drawings. Finally, participants completed an implicit threat measure used in previous studies (DeMarree, Wheeler, & Petty, 2005). We used an implicit measure because individuals are not always forthcom￾ing about the level of threat they experience (Has, Katz, Rizzo, Bailey, & Moore, 1992). Participants were told a word would be flashed on-screen so quickly that only their subconscious would be able to perceive it. They were told that after the word left the screen, a list of words would appear, and they should use their feelings at the moment to select which word they thought was the word that had just been flashed. Trials began with a premask of “X”s serving as an orienting stimulus for 2,000 ms, followed by subliminal presentation (17 ms) of the target words, which was a nonsensical string of letters. A postmask of Xs covered the target word for 1,000 ms. After￾ward, four words were presented and remained on the screen until participants made their selection of which word they believed was flashed on-screen. Half of the 12 trials were target trials, in which one of the four response options was a threat-of-status-loss-related word (i.e., “loss,” “demote,” “threat,” “lower, “devalue,” and “downgrade”). The position of the threat-of-status-loss-related words in the response options was randomized, as was the order of the trials. Creativity coding. Following directly from previous research (e.g., Ward, 1994), structured imagination was coded for the atypicality of the space creatures’ sensory organs. Two trained coders who were blind to the study predictions assessed the draw￾ings and accompanying descriptions for evidence of “atypical” sensory organs. In accordance with Ward’s (1994) original coding scheme, space creatures were considered atypical if they (a) lacked a major sensory organ (i.e., eyes, ears, nose), (b) had atypical numbers of a sensory organ (e.g., three eyes), (c) demonstrated an unusual configuration of the sensory organs (e.g., eyes located This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly. STATUS AND CREATIVITY 5