The lure of tradition: Just a bias against the “creative” label?

Creative ideas are publicly desired and highly praised. In contrast, a growing body of research indicates that humans are implicitly biased against creative solutions. On the one hand, this counterintuitive finding might be due to negative prejudice against the label “creative”. On the other hand, this bias might be a result of deeper-rooted associations between situational features and appropriate behavior in the given context, thus favoring the emergence of tried-and-tested instead of creative solutions. In a preregistered experiment, I unraveled these two possible reasons for implicit anti-creativity biases. Participants ( N = 156 adults) were prompted to select either a traditional or a creative use for an item by moving their mouse cursor to a corresponding target area. For one group, items were existing everyday objects. For the other group, items were fictitious terms for which no pre-experimental associations should exist. For the existing objects group, but not for the fictitious objects group, movements toward creative options were significantly slower and more torn towards the opposing option compared to traditional selections. I conclude that implicit aversion against creative ideas rests on cognitively deeply rooted associations between situational features and specific actions instead of on a mere bias against the “creative” label.