The effect of self - censor and interaction anxiousness to creativity in brain storming

Even though the initral research has shown that the participants who experienced interaction anxiety tend to decrease their idea generation performance due to self-censorship, no research has investigated interaction anxiety as a contextual variable in the literature. Thus, in order to trigger interaction anxiousness with the participants, in Experiment 1 the participants were told that the ideas they would come up with were to be read out at the end of the experiment. The willingness to self-censorship was manipulated by a means of topic type (sexual life and paper clip topic). The results of Experiment 1 demonstrated that topic type did not have significant effect on the number of the original, flexible and deep ideas. On the other hand, it was found that the interaction anxiousness did have a significant effect on the number of those ideas. In Experiment 1, it was also found that flexibility and persistence played mediator roles for the relationship between interaction anxiety and creativity. In Experiment 2, the level of interaction anxiousness was manipulated by informing either one group of the participants that they would share their ideas with the opposite sex person or other one that they would share their ideas with same sex person. The willingness to self-censorship was manipulated by a means of topic type (sexual life and social life). Those participants who were told to tell about their ideas to the opposite sex person produced fewer original and flexible ideas than those being told to tell to the same sex one. The effect of self-censorship on the number of original ideas was not found to be of significance. However, it had a significant effect on the number of flexible and deep ideas. In Experiment 2, it was also found that flexibility played a mediator role for the relationship between interaction anxiety and creativity. The results of both two experiment indicated that interaction anxiousness does not cause self-censorship as Camacho and Paulus (1995) suggested. Instead, as was the case in Experiment 1 where interaction anxiety was either present or not, it decreased both flexibility and persistence (motivation). In Experiment 2 where the level of anxiety was manipulated, it decreased flexibility. These findings were discussed under the scope of related literature. Key words: Self-censorship, Interaction anxiousness, Brainstorming, Creativity