Assessing the interaction of empathy and diversity in creative teams

Diversity, especially experiential diversity, has been shown to positively affect creativity in divergent thinking tasks, but issues like conflict, misunderstanding, and disagreement can arise due to diversity. This project explores empathy as a mechanism through which diversity fosters creativity in teams as it allows teammates to better understand each other when they differ in experience, knowledge, and characteristics. Consistent with previous research, I find that experiential diversity boosts creativity by increasing the number of ideas generated. When interacted with empathy, it increases originality and the use of unique words to describe ideas. Empathy also positively interacts with characteristic diversity (i.e., language, gender identity, and socioeconomic background) to increase the number of creative ideas. • Revisits effect of experiential diversity and characteristic diversity on creativity using uncommon or unfamiliar creative tasks. • Empathy proposed as a mechanism by which diversity positively affects creativity. • Participants’ empathy measured using Toronto Empathy Quotient. • Empathy positively interacts with experiential diversity to increase fluency, originality, and the use of unique words to describe ideas. • Empathy positively interacts with characteristic diversity to increase fluency.