Creativity, the ability to produce ideas that are both novel and useful, drives innovation across many fields. One component of creativity is divergent thinking (DT) – a process of generating multiple responses to open-ended questions. Changes in one’s environment prior to DT, specifically in the environment’s entropy (its degree of unpredictability), have been linked to altered DT outcomes. DT ability has also been associated with interference control – the capacity to suppress dominant response tendencies and resolve competition from interfering information. This study investigated whether exposure to environmental entropy during DT itself affects the originality of generated ideas and whether this effect varies with interference-control abilities. 

It was hypothesized that environmental entropy would increase DT originality, and that interference control would positively predict originality and moderate the effect of entropy. In an online experiment, ninety-seven adults completed the Alternative Uses Task, measuring DT, with either high- or low-entropy videos playing in the background, and performed a Stroop task to assess interference control. Contrary to expectations, environmental entropy and interference control did not significantly predict DT originality, and no moderation was observed. 

These results may possibly be explained by inward-directed attention during DT limiting processing of the videos, or by the videos imposing additional cognitive load restricting DT. This indicates the relevance of the timing of environmental manipulations in creativity research. Establishing whether and under what conditions entropic environments support creativity is a necessary step towards flexible, low-cost environmental interventions that could promote original thinking in settings such as education and creative professions.