For Better Brainstorming, Tell an Embarrassing Story

My colleagues, Elizabeth Ruth Wilson and Brian Lucas, and I decided to explore whether people could also be primed for better brainstorming before the idea generation even starts. In our first experiment, we asked one set of participants to describe a time they’d felt embarrassed in the previous six months; we asked a second group to describe a time they’d felt proud. We then asked each individual to spend 10 minutes thinking of new uses for a paper clip.

Source: Research: For Better Brainstorming, Tell an Embarrassing Story