BY: Laura Montini
For this group of people, high-stakes situations and stress can help to generate a myriad of ideas.
If your company is in need of some creative inspiration, try tapping into the brains of your most neurotic employees, a recent study suggests.
Researchers from Singapore and Taiwan found that when
neurotic people are put in high-stress situations, they're better at
generating ideas. This according to a post in Pacific Standard, which referred to the finding as "the Woody Allen effect."
To conduct the study, the researchers asked 274 Taiwanese
university students to fill out a questionnaire designed to measure
their "intrinsic neuroticism." From there, different students were asked
to recall a happy, worrisome, or neutral event they had experienced.
Next, researchers asked the participants to either
memorize an eight-digit number, which placed those students in a
high-cognitive load state, or a two-digit number--an easier task.
Finally, all were asked to come up with as many uses for a brick as
possible.
The researchers found that intrinsically neurotic people
came up with much more creative brick solutions after they had recalled a
worrisome event and were forced into in a high-cognitive load state. By
contrast, non-neurotics were better at flexible thinking after
recalling neutral events.
These aren't the first researchers interested in studying the traits that neurotic people display in the workplace. Recent research has also found that people who have neurotic tendencies are very productive remote workers.
LAURA MONTINI | Staff Writer
Laura Montini is a reporter at Inc. She previously
covered health care technology for Health 2.0 News and has served as an
associate editor at The Health Care Blog. She lives in San Francisco.www.inc.com
