Improving by improvising: The impact of improvisational theatre, on handling expectation violation during social creativity

Diana Schwenke , Martin G. Bleichner , Tatiana Goregliad Fjaellingsdal , Joost Meekes , Sara Bögels , Anja Kräplin , Anna K. Kuhlen , Peggy Wehner , Stefan Scherbaum
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Abstract

In improvisational theatre (improv) dialog, characters, and story are created spontaneously by the actors on stage. Impro trainers posit that compelling stories in improv are the result of social creativity (as opposed to individual creativity), a process of social interaction in which every actor contributes small impulses to commonly create the story without individual intent. Hence, improv techniques which aim to foster this social creative process have gained increasing popularity and spread into fields beyond the performing arts (e.g., business trainings), claiming to improve, among other things, participants’ social interaction skills. However, these claims have barely been investigated empirically. Here, we compare improv-players with matched controls in a controlled adaptation of an improv paradigm to study how they handle expectation violations in a social interaction situation. This paradigm allows to insert experimentally intended expectation violations into a predetermined dialogue measure their response times to these violations. In Experiment 1, we investigated the suitability of the paradigm and in the pre-registered Experiment 2, we compared the performance of improv-players and controls. The results showed that controls seem to have more difficulties in dealing with unexpected than expected utterances than improv-players. Furthermore, we find that improv-players receive higher scores on creativity and tolerance of uncertainty. We conclude that our results present first humble evidence that the successful handling of expectation violations in social interaction situations is indeed pronounced in improv players and might hence contribute to the social creativity observed on the improv stage.

即兴改进:即兴戏剧对处理社会创造过程中的期望偏差的影响
在即兴戏剧(即兴表演)中,对话、人物和故事都是由舞台上的演员自发创作的。即兴表演培训师认为,即兴表演中引人入胜的故事是社会创造力(而非个人创造力)的结果,在社会互动的过程中,每个演员都贡献出微小的冲动,共同创造出没有个人意图的故事。因此,旨在促进这种社会创造过程的即兴表演技术越来越受欢迎,并扩展到表演艺术以外的领域(如商业培训),声称可以提高参与者的社会互动技能等。然而,这些说法几乎没有经过实证研究。在这里,我们将即兴表演者与匹配的对照组进行比较,对即兴表演范式进行控制性调整,以研究他们在社会交往情境中如何处理违反期望的情况。该范式允许在预先设定的对话中插入实验意图的期望违背,并测量他们对这些期望违背的反应时间。在实验 1 中,我们研究了该范式的适用性;在预先注册的实验 2 中,我们比较了即兴表演者和对照组的表现。结果表明,与即兴表演者相比,对照组在处理意料之外的话语时似乎比意料之中的话语更加困难。此外,我们还发现即兴表演者在创造力和对不确定性的容忍度方面得分更高。我们的结论是,我们的研究结果提供了第一个不起眼的证据,证明即兴表演者确实能够成功处理社会互动情境中的预期违规行为,因此可能有助于在即兴表演舞台上观察到的社会创造力。
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