Cognitive Conflict in Rule Violation and Creativity: Evidence for a Shared Cognitive Basis

ABSTRACT Societal traditions and rules guide human decision‐making and action. Yet, sometimes humans break with traditions by devising creative solutions and sometimes they break rules to increase personal gains. Here we asked whether creativity and rule‐breaking might have more in common than meets the eye, by exploring whether labeling identical actions as either creative or rule‐breaking shapes how these actions are semantically processed and cognitively represented. To assess differences in semantic processing we conducted two preregistered experiments, using a mouse‐tracking paradigm: Participants of the creativity group either applied a stimulus–response mapping labeled as “traditional”, or the opposing mapping labeled as “creative”. For the rule violation group, the same behaviors were labeled as “follow rule” and “violate rule”. Performance measures indicated a large bias against creative and rule violation options, but this bias did not differ between both groups. This observation indicates that the labels “creative” and “rule‐violating” are semantically similarly processed, as both require the agent to overcome automatically retrieved response tendencies.