Surprising study reveals if kids really are more creative than adults

Grown ups have self-consciousness down to a fine art!Preschoolers aren’t more creative than adults — they’re just less riddled by anxiety and insecurity when making art, according to a telling new study.Toddlers’ true colors were revealed by researchers at the University of Graz in Austria, who found the kids  were simply more confident at doing creative projects, not necessarily better at them.“Adults care more about how others might judge their ideas,” said one of the study’s authors, Mathias Benedek.“They may assess their own creativity more realistically, but that self-monitoring can also bring worry about being evaluated, and that worry can hold back the free flow of ideas.”“Children will happily start drawing or building without much of a plan,” said Benedek, who works at the Institute of Psychology at the University of Graz.For the study, researchers gathered a group of 92 pre-school-aged kids and 70 adults, mostly  in their 20s, and  gave them three artistic assignments, according to the peer-reviewed study, published Wednesday in the journal PLOS One.Everyone was  first given three minutes to dream up as many uses as possible for a simple tin can, according to the study.Researchers next armed everyone with colored markers and a blank sheet of paper and gave them eight minutes to draw anything they wanted.Last, participants were asked to invent and draw a “unique fantasy animal” in eight minutes.Formally trained “raters” then evaluated what participants made for “novelty, effectiveness, and creativity,” according to the study.

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Despite the commonly held belief that kids are more creative than adults, they found that adults actually rated better across all of the tasks. But when subjec...