Being creative is a source of happiness for many people. Whether engaging in art, music, writing, cooking, gardening, crafting, or inventing, stretching your creativity muscle is good for you and for the world, helping fuel inspiration and innovation.
While there are many keys to becoming more creative, here’s one you may not have thought of: being empathic. According to a recent study, being able to consider another person’s point of view (what researchers call perspective taking or cognitive empathy) leads to more engagement in everyday creativity and creative achievement.
“People who identify as being more empathic not only tend to be more creative, but may be more productive with their creativity, too,” says Matthew Pelowski of the University of Vienna and a coauthor of the study.
Empathy and creativity in everyday life
In the study, researchers surveyed young Chinese adults about their perspective-taking ability by asking how much they agreed with statements like, “I sometimes try to understand my friends better by imagining how things look from their perspective” or “When I am reading an interesting story or novel, I imagine how I would feel if the events in the story were happening to me.”
The researchers also measured “emotional empathy” (to feel for and care about other people) by asking how much they agreed with statements like, “I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me” and “I am happy when I am with a cheerful group and sad when others are glum.”
In exploring creativity, researchers asked whether or not participants had engaged in the past year in things like designing and planting a garden, developing a unique recipe for a dessert, producing a video, drawing, starting a club, publishing an article, sculpting, writing, choreographing, or criticizing a scientific theory. Then, the researchers analyzed these answers to see how people’s perspective taking and emotional empathy related to their efforts at being creative.
They found that people who seemed to be better at seeing the world through another’s eyes—cognitive empathy—were more likely to be engaged in creative acts. This was true no matter their age or gender. That wasn’t true of people who reported being more likely to care for others and feel what they feel, which didn’t seem to correlate with more creative acts.
For Pelowski, this suggests a connection between cognitive empathy and creativity in everyday life.
“To be creative, you’re looking for new perspectives, you’re looking for novel takes on how you see the world and how to express what you see,” he says. “So, it makes perfect sense to me that there’s a lot of overlap there.”
Empathy leads to greater creative achievement
Still, these results don’t necessarily prove that having greater cognitive empathy makes someone more creative; it could be the other way around, as some of Pelowski’s own research implies. It’s also possible that people who report being more creative in everyday life don’t necessarily create works that others would perceive as accomplished.
To get at those questions, Pelowski and his team analyzed data from an ongoing, longitudinal study in China called the Gene-Brain-Behavior project. Having access to participants’ data on empathy, creativity, and many other factors at one point in time and again one to two years later, they could see how measures of empathy might predict future creativity.
In addition, they had access to a measure showing levels of achievement in creative areas of life—what some might call “Big C” creativity, as opposed to “little c” or everyday creativity. This included more objective evaluations of a participant’s creative accomplishments in the visual arts, music, dance, architectural design, creative writing, humor, inventing, scientific discovery, theater, film, and culinary arts.
Analyzing the results, he and his team found that greater perspective taking at one point in time was related to higher levels of everyday creativity at another, while the reverse was not true. This suggests that having greater cognitive empathy leads to more creativity rather than the other way around—something that Pelowski found surprising.
“[My previous work] would presume that engagement with creativity in the arts would be a vehicle towards empathy or towards more prosociality,” he says. “But finding this relationship makes sense, too.”
He and his colleagues also found that participants good at perspective taking tended to achieve more in the arts, suggesting that this kind of empathy leads to greater accomplishment.
“People who identify as more empathic tend to be more creative but also tend to produce,” says Pelowski. “Perhaps, having some of these cognitive empathic abilities gives you the tools to really be a productive creative person.”
Interestingly, greater empathy didn’t affect all achievement in the arts. While it was tied to accomplishment in visual art, creative writing, inventing, scientific discovery, and the culinary arts, it wasn’t tied to achievement in music, theater, film, and dance. Pelowski isn’t sure why that is, but it could be that he and his colleagues just didn’t have enough data to show a relationship or that achievement in these areas requires more time, training, or access to opportunity than other creative endeavors.
Still, there seems to be some relationship between cognitive empathy and creative achievement, but not emotional empathy and creativity—which seems counterintuitive. After all, art often stimulates strong emotional reactions in people; so, you might assume successful creatives feel others’ emotions more keenly. Plus, research finds that highly sensitive people tend to be more creative and emotionally empathic, suggesting a potential relationship.
Pelowski warns against drawing too many conclusions without more research, especially on mechanisms that can explain the findings. But he speculates that what you need to complete a creative endeavor—things like uninterrupted alone time, playing around with ideas, and the ability to plan and execute your vision—could explain why emotional empathy is less relevant than cognitive empathy. Or perhaps feeling for others and having concern for their welfare takes a toll on someone being available to focus on creativity, especially if they have caregiving responsibilities.
Whatever the case, his findings suggest that increasing your ability to take someone’s perspective might be a good thing for your creativity. Fortunately, empathy can be cultivated through deliberate effort. Reading books or watching TV or film and imagining how you would think and feel if you were in different characters’ positions can build your perspective-taking muscles. You can also build empathy by interacting with people who are different than you in some way, while being curious about their inner life and deeply listening to their perspectives.
So, if you want to do your creative life a favor, why not try to expand your empathy? Not only could it boost your creativity, it might also just make you a better person to boot.
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