Effects of social influence on idea selection in creativity workshops

Abstract

Different variants of brainstormings and brainwritings exist and are regularly used in companies. Several phenomena of social influence in the idea generation stage have been highlighted. The hypothesis of this research was that under specific conditions, social influence biases the idea selection stage. An experimental study was conducted with 30 participants who had to select ideas. The results indicate that seeing another person’s choice of ideas is enough to influence participants’ choices and thus bias their responses. This result is interpreted as the consequence of a phenomenon of social proof: when participants do not know what to choose, they decide to rely on the choice of their partner. Methodological recommendations are provided to avoid this bias during ideation sessions.