Schools often get a bad rap. One of the most popular charges: “schools kill creativity!” (One well-known speaker has gotten a lot of mileage out of this claim.) More specifically, critics often cite rigid academic expectations and constraints as the lethal agents. When schools and teachers insist inflexibly on A, then B, then C, we take all the joy out of learning…and thereby stifle improvisation and imagination.
Should we plead guilty to this charge? I’ve found a study that looks explicitly at the connection between constraint and creativity.
Here’s the story.
Happy Birthday to Someone
In a 2017 study, Dr. Catrinel Tromp explored a counterintutive question: can constraint make people more creative? She (imaginatively) calls this proposal the “Green Eggs and Ham Hypothesis” — because Dr. Seuss wrote Green Eggs and Ham with the explicit limitation of using no more than fifty different words.
Dr. Tromp’s proposal might sound surprising, but springs from an entirely logical thought process. If I’m asked to write a short birthday poem, I naturally think of typical birthday imagery: cake, candles, funny hats, etc. Because these familiar associations come so easily to mind, I’m likely to end up with a predictable — that is, less creative — poem.
If, however, I’m required to use atypical words or images — “dog” or “feather” or “vest” — then my short poems will automatically include vocabulary that doesnt’ appear in your everyday Hallmark card. This constraint, paradoxically, prompts me to be more creative.
To test the Green Eggs and Ham hypothesis, Dr. Tromp asked about 60 students to write two-line rhymes for typical greeting-card occasions: birthday, new year, “feel better,” “congratulations!”, “I’m so sorry,” and so forth.
- For half of those rhymes, students wrote whatever they wanted.
- For the other half, they were constrained to include specific nouns: “shirt, frog, doll, harp,” etc.
Some students wrote 4 unconstrained rhymes first, then the 4 constrained ones. Others reversed that order.
Tromp asked evaluators — who didn’t know her hypothesis — to rate the creativity of the rhymes on a ten-point scale. Sure enough: the “constrained” rhymes scored much higher than the “unconstrained” ones — almost a full point higher. (For stats people: the Cohen’s d values were in the 0.82 to 0.88 range.)
To explore her hypothesis further, Tromp had students create their own constraints. That is: she simply asked them to write down the first several nouns that came to mind: “sun,” “feather,” whatever. As in the first version of this study, the constrained rhymes got higher ratings for creativity than the unconstrained ones.
In sum: within a particular set of circumstances, constraints can enhance creativity.
Next Steps
Studies such as these might tempt us — or tempt Tromp — to make a bold pedagogical claim: “schools promote student creativity when they place firm limits!”
Tromp does NOT make that simplistic claim, and we shouldn’t either. Instead — in an article written in 2022 — she and Dr. John Baer argue that both too little constraint and too much constraint inhibit creativity. If we get the balance right — enough restriction without too much — we can help students do impressive creative work. (Think again of Green Eggs and Ham: those 50 words have inspired a lot of delight since 1960.)
Tromp and Baer propose two helpful categories:
- Exclusionary constraints: the things students have to omit
- Focusing constraints: the places students have to look, or the ideas/words/processes they must use
For instance:
- The game “Taboo” promotes creativity with exclusionary constraints; when giving clues, players can’t say the most useful words.
- The poem-writing task promotes creativity with focusing constraints; participants must use the word “vest” or “donut” or “toothpaste” when they create a happy-anniversary message.
Tromp and Baer also suggest that this fresh perspective can help teachers think about broad curricular and pedagogical questions. Imagine, for instance, I ask my students for a creative solution to cooling a hot room.
If my students don’t know much about cooling, they might propose this strategy: leaving the refrigerator door open. That seemingly creative idea sounds plausible, but it would in fact make a hot room hotter. In this case, the absence of relevant prior knowledge — the absence of useful constraints — tempts my students to pursue unhelpful ideas.
My students, however, might know the principle that evaporation causes cooling; that’s why I feel cold when I step out of the shower. This knowledge — a kind of focusing constraint — might help my students develop cooling systems that rely on evaporation. (Check out “swamp coolers,” or the “windcatchers” in Yazd, Iran.)
Bringing Creativity to Life
Contrary to popular reports, schools and constraints do not necessarily stifle our students’ inventiveness. The right kind of curriculum can steer students away from faulty thinking, or prompt them to focus on more useful, creative approaches. An assignment that includes appropriate constraints can push students past the everyday and obvious to once unimagined solutions.
Put another way: students can “think outside the box” only if they know that box, and understand its limits well enough to transcend them.
Haught-Tromp, C. (2017). The Green Eggs and Ham hypothesis: How constraints facilitate creativity. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 11(1), 10.
Tromp, C., & Baer, J. (2022). Creativity from constraints: Theory and applications to education. Thinking Skills and Creativity, 46, 101184.
