By NoCamels Team What do racism and lack of creativity have in
common? According to a new study from Tel Aviv University –
quite a lot. As it turns out, people who are of a racist mindset
were less creative when put to the test. “Although these two
concepts concern very different outcomes, they both occur when
people fixate on existing category information and conventional
mindsets,” researcher Carmit Tadmor and her colleagues write in
an article published in Psychological Science, a journal of the
Association for Psychological Science. Racism, or “racial
essentialism,” is basically the view that racial groups possess
underlying essences that represent deep-rooted, unalterable
traits and abilities. The researchers hypothesized that, once
activated, an essentialist mindset would lead to a reluctance to
consider alternative perspectives, resulting in a generalized
closed-mindedness. Triggering racism kills creativity The
researchers manipulated participants’ beliefs about racial
essentialism by having them read