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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.
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 subjects were asked to rate how much fun they had making the art, preschoolers blew grown-ups out of the water — reporting they enjoyed the tasks more, felt more “creative confidence” and less anxiety than adults, according to a press release about the study.
Benedek said he was surprised to learn that adults actually tended to have more unique ideas than the preschoolers.
“Adults produced more original ideas too. For example, adults invented highly unusual fantasy animals, while many children drew unicorn-like creatures,” he said.
“I was surprised by how much children enjoyed the creative activities, especially when there was no clear goal, whereas adults preferred having a clear goal to work toward,” Benedek told The Post.
The perception that kids are more creative may ultimately be linked to their enthusiasm and desire to do art more frequently — similarly to how “a ‘sporty’ person is often someone who regularly engages in sports rather than wins competitions,” the study states.
“I hope this helps move us past simplistic ideas, such as that adults are simply uncreative or that schools stifle children’s creativity,” Benedek said.
But he added, “A key question remains: how can we nurture and keep creative confidence and curiosity alive in adulthood?”