Pseudo-creativity and authentic creativity differ in conceptual boundaries

Creativity requires both originality and effectiveness. Originality without effectiveness indicates pseudo-creativity, often due to deficits in idea evaluation. Research on the processes underlying pseudo-creativity and authentic creativity is limited. This study operationally identified individuals with pseudo-creative tendencies and compared them with authentically creative individuals using associative thinking tasks related to idea generation, focusing on memory search and semantic memory representations. In Experiment 1, moderation analysis classified participants into three groups based on multiple creativity measurements: authentic creativity, pseudo-creativity, and low creativity (control). These groups completed a goal-directed association task involving animal concept searching. Results showed that pseudo-creativity was associated with reduced clustering and cluster switching, along with more frequent hard switching. Experiment 2 constructed semantic networks for the three groups using free association, revealing that pseudo-creativity group exhibited a de-structured and hyperconnective semantic network. These findings provide the first characterization of the cognitive processes underlying pseudo-creativity. They reveal that pseudo-creativity exhibits looser conceptual boundaries and demonstrates differences from authentic creativity as early as the idea-generation phase. This offers a direct investigation for the theory that creativity requires a balance between the flexibility and rigidity of lexicon structure.