Bernard A Nijstad
Biographic Data
| ID | 217027 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Bernard A Nijstad |
| GIVEN NAMES | Bernard A |
| FAMILY NAME | Nijstad |
| SIGNATURE | NIJSTAD B A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Amsterdam |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7882-8447 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 38 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 349 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 38 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1999 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
Creative Cognition: A Collaborative Research Agenda
Creative cognition research has flourished in recent decades, revealing how extraordinary creative outcomes emerge from ordinary cognitive processes. However, the field faces fragmentation that hinders consensus and integration. This research agenda, developed through a collaborative workshop of 50 European researchers at the Lorentz Centre in Leiden, the Netherlands, identifies four critical challenges for advancing creative cognition research. …
Creativity as It Unfolds: An Examination of Temporality in the Creative Process
Scholars view the creative process as a sequence of activities (e.g. problem construction, information search, idea generation, and idea development) that unfolds over time. This implies that time plays an important role in creativity. Unfortunately, however, the field lacks clear and explicit propositions about the temporal aspects of the creative process and lacks suitable methodology to examine this process in detail. In this paper, we firstly…
Leader Regulatory Goal Setting and Employee Creativity
Recent research suggests that leaders can influence employee creativity by shaping their followers' regulatory focus (promotion or prevention). We propose that this work has overlooked the nature of the regulatory goals (maximal or minimal) that leaders set for their followers. We performed two studies to test this: a vignette‐based experiment with 297 participants and a time‐lagged, multisource field survey involving 335 leader‐employee pairs ac…
Regulatory focus theory: Disentangling goals and strategies
The purpose of this research was to develop and test the Regulatory Goals and Strategies Questionnaire (RGSQ) to promote conceptual and empirical clarity in the literature on regulatory focus theory (RFT). According to RFT, construing an end‐state as a maximal goal (ideal, gain, and advancement) elicits the adoption of an eager promotion‐focused strategy, whereas construing an end‐state as a minimal goal (ought, non‐loss, and security) elicits th…
Membership change, idea generation, and group creativity: A motivated information processing perspective
Membership change has been found to stimulate collective idea generation but to not always benefit group creativity—the generation of final outcomes that are novel and useful. Based on motivated information processing theory, we propose that membership change challenges group members to generate more ideas, but that this only contributes to group creativity when members have high levels of prosocial motivation and are willing to process and integ…
Vulnerability to psychopathology and creativity: The role of approach-avoidance motivation and novelty seeking
Existing findings on the intriguing link between vulnerability to psychopathology and creativity are scattered and inconclusive. Here we report 3 studies (total N = 826) that tested a 2-step solution to the possible relationship between vulnerability to psychopathology and creativity. First, we propose that inclinations toward psychopathologies that are linked to the avoidance system (anxiety, depressive mood, negative schizotypy) can be clustere…
Female Dominance in Human Groups: Effects of Sex Ratio and Conflict Level
Compared to men, women less often attain high-level positions and generally have lower status in society. In smaller groups, the relative influence of men and women depends on gender composition, but research is inconclusive regarding the relation between gender composition and female influence. Studies of nonhuman primates show that when females are in the minority they become more dominant over males, but only when conflict levels are high, bec…
Mad genius revisited: Vulnerability to psychopathology, biobehavioral approach-avoidance, and creativity
Although many believe that creativity associates with a vulnerability to psychopathology, research findings are inconsistent. Here we address this possible linkage between risk of psychopathology and creativity in nonclinical samples. We propose that propensity for specific psychopathologies can be linked to basic motivational approach and avoidance systems, and that approach and avoidance motivation differentially influences creativity. Based on…
Tell Me the Gossip: The Self-Evaluative Function of Receiving Gossip About Others
We investigate the self-evaluative function of competence-related gossip for individuals who receive it. Using the Self-Concept Enhancing Tactician (SCENT) model, we propose that individuals use evaluative information about others (i.e., gossip) to improve, promote, and protect themselves. Results of a critical incident study and an experimental study showed that positive gossip had higher self-improvement value than negative gossip, whereas nega…
Emotions that associate with uncertainty lead to structured ideation
This study tested the role of emotion in structured ideation, a process in which newly generated ideas and insights closely follow previously generated ideas and insights. Emotions can be differentiated on a number of underlying dimensions, including uncertainty, and uncertainty can influence information processing. On these grounds, we proposed and tested the idea that (1) emotions that associate with appraisals of uncertainty (fear, sadness) le…
Motivated information processing and group decision refusal
Group decision making has attracted much scientific interest, but few studies have investigated group decisions that do not get made. Based on the Motivated Information Processing in Groups model, this study analysed the effect of epistemic motivation (low vs. high) and social motivation (proself vs. prosocial) on group decision refusal (the decision to delay choice and refuse all options). In a laboratory experiment, groups had to negotiate dive…
Necessity is the mother of invention: Avoidance motivation stimulates creativity through cognitive effort
Compared with approach motivation, avoidance motivation has often been related to reduced creativity because it evokes a relatively inflexible processing style. This finding seems inconsistent with the dual pathway to creativity model, which poses that both flexible and persistent processing styles can result in creative output. Reconciling these inconsistencies, the authors hypothesized that avoidance-motivated individuals are not unable to be c…
Behavioral Activation Links to Creativity Because of Increased Cognitive Flexibility
Previous work suggests that trait behavioral activation may link to creativity, a possibility the authors empirically examine in this article. This research is grounded in the dual pathway to creativity model and experiments on approach orientation, and the authors propose that behavioral activation potentiates creativity when and because it facilitates global and flexible processing. Four experiments support this hypothesis and also reveal that …
The Price of a Piece of Cheese: Value from Fit Between Epistemic Needs and a Learning Versus an Outcome Focus
In decision making, people can focus on decisional outcomes (outcome focus), but they can also focus on gaining knowledge about the decisional domain (learning focus). Furthermore, people differ in the strength of their epistemic needs—their preference for developing a rich and accurate understanding of the world. We invoke the regulatory fit theory to predict that higher epistemic needs better fit a learning focus than lower epistemic needs, res…
Creative production by angry people peaks early on, decreases over time, and is relatively unstructured
Power, stability of power, and creativity
When prevention promotes creativity: The role of mood, regulatory focus, and regulatory closure
Promotion-focused states generally boost creativity because they associate with enhanced activation and cognitive flexibility. With regard to prevention-focused states, research evidence is less consistent, with some findings suggesting prevention-focused states promote creativity and other findings pointing to no or even negative effects. We proposed and tested the hypothesis that whether prevention-focused states boost creativity depends on reg…
Self-Concept Clarity and the Management of Social Conflict
In 4 studies we examined the relationship between self-concept clarity and conflict management. Individuals with higher self-concept clarity were overall more active and showed more cooperative problem-solving behavior than people with low self-concept clarity. There were no relationships with contending or yielding. The positive relationship with cooperative behavior was mediated by less rumination (Study 2) and moderated by conflict intensity (…
The dual pathway to creativity model: Creative ideation as a function of flexibility and persistence
The dual pathway to creativity model argues that creativity—the generation of original and appropriate ideas—is a function of cognitive flexibility and cognitive persistence, and that dispositional or situational variables may influence creativity either through their effects on flexibility, on persistence, or both. This model is tested in a number of studies in which participants performed creative ideation tasks. We review work showing that cog…
Can expressions of anger enhance creativity? A test of the emotions as social information (Easi) model
Motivated information processing, social tuning, and group creativity
The extent to which groups are creative has wide implications for their overall performance, including the quality of their problem solutions, judgments, and decisions. To further understanding of group creativity, we integrate the motivated information processing in groups model (De Dreu, Nijstad, & Van Knippenberg, 2008) with work on epistemic social tuning (Lunn, Sinclair, Whitchurch, & Glenn, 2007). Three propositions were advanced: (a) Group…
The selection of creative ideas after individual idea generation: Choosing between creativity and impact
It is commonly assumed that successful innovation depends on creative idea generation: the more ideas are generated, the higher the probability of selecting a very good idea should be. However, research has shown that people do not perform optimally at idea selection and that ideational output may not contribute much to creative idea selection. The present studies aim to explain this phenomenon. We identified the strong tendency of our participan…
Motivated Information Processing in Group Judgment and Decision Making
This article expands the view of groups as information processors into a motivated information processing in groups (MIP-G) model by emphasizing, first, the mixed-motive structure of many group tasks and, second, the idea that individuals engage in more or less deliberate information search and processing. The MIP-G model postulates that social motivation drives the kind of information group members attend to, encode, and retrieve and that episte…
Choosing None of the Above: Persistence of Negativity after Group Discussion and Group Decision Refusal
Within psychology and other disciplines, group decision making is a much-studied topic. However, the conditions in which groups do not decide but rather refuse to choose among available options have not been studied systematically. This research begins to fill this void, studying the effects of the initial opinions of group members on group decision refusal. Based on the common knowledge effect, it is predicted and found that groups will often re…
Taking the easy way out: Preference diversity, decision strategies, and decision refusal in groups
It has often been argued and found that preference diversity is beneficial for the quality of group decisions. However, this literature has neglected the fact that in many situations, it is also possible not to choose. Further, preference diversity can be based on attractions, aversions, or both. The authors argue that some types of preference diversity can lead to biased discussions and choice refusal (i.e., the group refuses to choose any of th…
A meta-analysis of 25 years of mood-creativity research: Hedonic tone, activation, or regulatory focus
The routinization of innovation research: A constructively critical review of the state‐of‐the‐science
In this review we argue that facilitators of innovation at the individual, group, and organizational levels have been reliably identified, and that validated process models of innovation have been developed. However, a content analysis of selected research published between 1997 and 2002 suggests a routinization of innovation research, with a heavy focus on replication–extension, cross‐sectional designs, and a single level of analysis. We discuss…
Motivated information processing and group decision-making: Effects of process accountability on information processing and decision quality
Hedonic tone and activation level in the mood-creativity link: Toward a dual pathway to creativity model
To understand when and why mood states influence creativity, the authors developed and tested a dual pathway to creativity model; creative fluency (number of ideas or insights) and originality (novelty) are functions of cognitive flexibility, persistence, or some combination thereof. Invoking work on arousal, psychophysiological processes, and working memory capacity, the authors argue that activating moods (e.g., angry, fearful, happy, elated) l…
The selection of creative ideas after individual idea generation: Choosing between creativity and impact
It is commonly assumed that successful innovation depends on creative idea generation: the more ideas are generated, the higher the probability of selecting a very good idea should be. However, research has shown that people do not perform optimally at idea selection and that ideational output may not contribute much to creative idea selection. The present studies aim to explain this phenomenon. We identified the strong tendency of our participan…
Relative accessibility of domain knowledge and creativity: The effects of knowledge activation on the quantity and originality of generated ideas
Productivity is not enough: A comparison of interactive and nominal brainstorming groups on idea generation and selection
Motivated information processing, social tuning, and group creativity
The extent to which groups are creative has wide implications for their overall performance, including the quality of their problem solutions, judgments, and decisions. To further understanding of group creativity, we integrate the motivated information processing in groups model (De Dreu, Nijstad, & Van Knippenberg, 2008) with work on epistemic social tuning (Lunn, Sinclair, Whitchurch, & Glenn, 2007). Three propositions were advanced: (a) Group…
Production blocking and idea generation: Does blocking interfere with cognitive processes
Cognitive stimulation and interference in groups: Exposure effects in an idea generation task
When prevention promotes creativity: The role of mood, regulatory focus, and regulatory closure
Promotion-focused states generally boost creativity because they associate with enhanced activation and cognitive flexibility. With regard to prevention-focused states, research evidence is less consistent, with some findings suggesting prevention-focused states promote creativity and other findings pointing to no or even negative effects. We proposed and tested the hypothesis that whether prevention-focused states boost creativity depends on reg…
Mental set and creative thought in social conflict: Threat rigidity versus motivated focus
According to the traditional threat-rigidity reasoning, people in social conflict will be less flexible, less creative, more narrow-minded, and more rigid in their thinking when they adopt a conflict rather than a cooperation mental set. The authors propose and test an alternative, motivated focus account that better fits existing evidence. The authors report experimental results inconsistent with a threat-rigidity account, but supporting the ide…
Power, stability of power, and creativity
Tell Me the Gossip: The Self-Evaluative Function of Receiving Gossip About Others
We investigate the self-evaluative function of competence-related gossip for individuals who receive it. Using the Self-Concept Enhancing Tactician (SCENT) model, we propose that individuals use evaluative information about others (i.e., gossip) to improve, promote, and protect themselves. Results of a critical incident study and an experimental study showed that positive gossip had higher self-improvement value than negative gossip, whereas nega…
Persistence of Brainstorming Groups: How Do People Know When to Stop
Necessity is the mother of invention: Avoidance motivation stimulates creativity through cognitive effort
Compared with approach motivation, avoidance motivation has often been related to reduced creativity because it evokes a relatively inflexible processing style. This finding seems inconsistent with the dual pathway to creativity model, which poses that both flexible and persistent processing styles can result in creative output. Reconciling these inconsistencies, the authors hypothesized that avoidance-motivated individuals are not unable to be c…
Can expressions of anger enhance creativity? A test of the emotions as social information (Easi) model
Taking the easy way out: Preference diversity, decision strategies, and decision refusal in groups
It has often been argued and found that preference diversity is beneficial for the quality of group decisions. However, this literature has neglected the fact that in many situations, it is also possible not to choose. Further, preference diversity can be based on attractions, aversions, or both. The authors argue that some types of preference diversity can lead to biased discussions and choice refusal (i.e., the group refuses to choose any of th…
Mad genius revisited: Vulnerability to psychopathology, biobehavioral approach-avoidance, and creativity
Although many believe that creativity associates with a vulnerability to psychopathology, research findings are inconsistent. Here we address this possible linkage between risk of psychopathology and creativity in nonclinical samples. We propose that propensity for specific psychopathologies can be linked to basic motivational approach and avoidance systems, and that approach and avoidance motivation differentially influences creativity. Based on…
Creative production by angry people peaks early on, decreases over time, and is relatively unstructured
In a Violent World a Just World Makes Sense: The Case of "Senseless Violence" in The Netherlands
Membership change, idea generation, and group creativity: A motivated information processing perspective
Membership change has been found to stimulate collective idea generation but to not always benefit group creativity—the generation of final outcomes that are novel and useful. Based on motivated information processing theory, we propose that membership change challenges group members to generate more ideas, but that this only contributes to group creativity when members have high levels of prosocial motivation and are willing to process and integ…
Motivated information processing and group decision refusal
Group decision making has attracted much scientific interest, but few studies have investigated group decisions that do not get made. Based on the Motivated Information Processing in Groups model, this study analysed the effect of epistemic motivation (low vs. high) and social motivation (proself vs. prosocial) on group decision refusal (the decision to delay choice and refuse all options). In a laboratory experiment, groups had to negotiate dive…
Persistence of Brainstorming Groups: How Do People Know When to Stop
In a Violent World a Just World Makes Sense: The Case of "Senseless Violence" in The Netherlands
Cognitive stimulation and interference in groups: Exposure effects in an idea generation task
Group Creativity: Innovation Through Collaboration
1. Group creativity: An Introduction PART I: GROUP PROCESS AND CREATIVITY 2. The constraining effects of initial ideas 3. Diversity and creativity in work groups 4. Better than individuals? The potential benefits of dissent and diversity for group creativity 5. Group creativity and collective choice 6. Ideational creativity in groups: Lessons from research on brainstorming 7. Cognitive stimulation and interference in idea generating groups 8. Ele…
Production blocking and idea generation: Does blocking interfere with cognitive processes
The routinization of innovation research: A constructively critical review of the state‐of‐the‐science
In this review we argue that facilitators of innovation at the individual, group, and organizational levels have been reliably identified, and that validated process models of innovation have been developed. However, a content analysis of selected research published between 1997 and 2002 suggests a routinization of innovation research, with a heavy focus on replication–extension, cross‐sectional designs, and a single level of analysis. We discuss…
Productivity is not enough: A comparison of interactive and nominal brainstorming groups on idea generation and selection
The illusion of group productivity: A reduction of failures explanation
It has consistently been found that people produce more ideas when working alone as compared to when working in a group. Yet, people generally believe that group brainstorming is more effective than individual brainstorming. Further, group members are more satisfied with their performance than individuals, whereas they have generated fewer ideas. We argue that this ‘illusion of group productivity’ is partly due to a reduction of cognitive failure…
Motivated information processing and group decision-making: Effects of process accountability on information processing and decision quality
Relative accessibility of domain knowledge and creativity: The effects of knowledge activation on the quantity and originality of generated ideas
Motivated Information Processing in Group Judgment and Decision Making
This article expands the view of groups as information processors into a motivated information processing in groups (MIP-G) model by emphasizing, first, the mixed-motive structure of many group tasks and, second, the idea that individuals engage in more or less deliberate information search and processing. The MIP-G model postulates that social motivation drives the kind of information group members attend to, encode, and retrieve and that episte…
Choosing None of the Above: Persistence of Negativity after Group Discussion and Group Decision Refusal
Within psychology and other disciplines, group decision making is a much-studied topic. However, the conditions in which groups do not decide but rather refuse to choose among available options have not been studied systematically. This research begins to fill this void, studying the effects of the initial opinions of group members on group decision refusal. Based on the common knowledge effect, it is predicted and found that groups will often re…
Taking the easy way out: Preference diversity, decision strategies, and decision refusal in groups
It has often been argued and found that preference diversity is beneficial for the quality of group decisions. However, this literature has neglected the fact that in many situations, it is also possible not to choose. Further, preference diversity can be based on attractions, aversions, or both. The authors argue that some types of preference diversity can lead to biased discussions and choice refusal (i.e., the group refuses to choose any of th…
Mental set and creative thought in social conflict: Threat rigidity versus motivated focus
According to the traditional threat-rigidity reasoning, people in social conflict will be less flexible, less creative, more narrow-minded, and more rigid in their thinking when they adopt a conflict rather than a cooperation mental set. The authors propose and test an alternative, motivated focus account that better fits existing evidence. The authors report experimental results inconsistent with a threat-rigidity account, but supporting the ide…
Hedonic tone and activation level in the mood-creativity link: Toward a dual pathway to creativity model
To understand when and why mood states influence creativity, the authors developed and tested a dual pathway to creativity model; creative fluency (number of ideas or insights) and originality (novelty) are functions of cognitive flexibility, persistence, or some combination thereof. Invoking work on arousal, psychophysiological processes, and working memory capacity, the authors argue that activating moods (e.g., angry, fearful, happy, elated) l…
A meta-analysis of 25 years of mood-creativity research: Hedonic tone, activation, or regulatory focus
Self-Concept Clarity and the Management of Social Conflict
In 4 studies we examined the relationship between self-concept clarity and conflict management. Individuals with higher self-concept clarity were overall more active and showed more cooperative problem-solving behavior than people with low self-concept clarity. There were no relationships with contending or yielding. The positive relationship with cooperative behavior was mediated by less rumination (Study 2) and moderated by conflict intensity (…
The dual pathway to creativity model: Creative ideation as a function of flexibility and persistence
The dual pathway to creativity model argues that creativity—the generation of original and appropriate ideas—is a function of cognitive flexibility and cognitive persistence, and that dispositional or situational variables may influence creativity either through their effects on flexibility, on persistence, or both. This model is tested in a number of studies in which participants performed creative ideation tasks. We review work showing that cog…
Can expressions of anger enhance creativity? A test of the emotions as social information (Easi) model
Motivated information processing, social tuning, and group creativity
The extent to which groups are creative has wide implications for their overall performance, including the quality of their problem solutions, judgments, and decisions. To further understanding of group creativity, we integrate the motivated information processing in groups model (De Dreu, Nijstad, & Van Knippenberg, 2008) with work on epistemic social tuning (Lunn, Sinclair, Whitchurch, & Glenn, 2007). Three propositions were advanced: (a) Group…
The selection of creative ideas after individual idea generation: Choosing between creativity and impact
It is commonly assumed that successful innovation depends on creative idea generation: the more ideas are generated, the higher the probability of selecting a very good idea should be. However, research has shown that people do not perform optimally at idea selection and that ideational output may not contribute much to creative idea selection. The present studies aim to explain this phenomenon. We identified the strong tendency of our participan…
Behavioral Activation Links to Creativity Because of Increased Cognitive Flexibility
Previous work suggests that trait behavioral activation may link to creativity, a possibility the authors empirically examine in this article. This research is grounded in the dual pathway to creativity model and experiments on approach orientation, and the authors propose that behavioral activation potentiates creativity when and because it facilitates global and flexible processing. Four experiments support this hypothesis and also reveal that …
The Price of a Piece of Cheese: Value from Fit Between Epistemic Needs and a Learning Versus an Outcome Focus
In decision making, people can focus on decisional outcomes (outcome focus), but they can also focus on gaining knowledge about the decisional domain (learning focus). Furthermore, people differ in the strength of their epistemic needs—their preference for developing a rich and accurate understanding of the world. We invoke the regulatory fit theory to predict that higher epistemic needs better fit a learning focus than lower epistemic needs, res…
Creative production by angry people peaks early on, decreases over time, and is relatively unstructured
Power, stability of power, and creativity
Psychology (35 works) · Social Psychology (32 works) · Creativity in Education and Neuroscience (22 works) · Cognitive psychology (19 works) · Creativity (19 works) · Social Psychology (16 works) · Team Dynamics and Performance (16 works) · Computer Science (15 works) · Social and Intergroup Psychology (12 works) · Cognition (10 works)