Because they hadn’t, they were obviously not as creative or smart as they had previously thought, and needed to call in creative experts. Because the solution is, in hindsight, deceptively simple, clients tended to admit they should have thought of it themselves. Consultants in the 1970s and 1980s even used this puzzle when making sales pitches to prospective clients. Overnight, it seemed that creativity gurus everywhere were teaching managers how to think outside the box. The idea went viral (via 1970s-era media and word of mouth, of course). The symmetry, the beautiful simplicity of the solution, and the fact that 80 percent of the participants were effectively blinded by the boundaries of the square led Guilford and the readers of his books to leap to the sweeping conclusion that creativity requires you to go outside the box. Only 20 percent managed to break out of the illusory confinement and continue their lines in the white space surrounding the dots. At the first stages, all the participants in Guilford’s original study censored their own thinking by limiting the possible solutions to those within the imaginary square (even those who eventually solved the puzzle).Įven though they weren’t instructed to restrain themselves from considering such a solution, they were unable to “see” the white space beyond the square’s boundaries.
The correct solution, however, requires you to draw lines that extend beyond the area defined by the dots. If you have tried solving this puzzle, you can confirm that your first attempts usually involve sketching lines inside the imaginary square. In the 1970s, however, very few were even aware of its existence, even though it had been around for almost a century. Today many people are familiar with this puzzle and its solution.
He challenged research subjects to connect all nine dots using just four straight lines without lifting their pencils from the page. One of Guilford’s most famous studies was the nine-dot puzzle. Guilford was one of the first academic researchers who dared to conduct a study of creativity. In the early 1970s, a psychologist named J. Although studying is considered a legitimate scientific nowadays, it is still a very young one.
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