Who (and how many) made this? How crediting authorship affects creativity evaluations

The creative success of a team requires that those evaluating their work recognize their creativity. Despite increasing evidence that teams generate more real-world innovations, there is conflicting evidence about whether people’s evaluations of creative products are biased by whether and how authorship is credited to the product—particularly whether authorship is attributed to an individual or a team. In five online experiments, we examined how creativity evaluations changed as a function of whether evaluators were told the same products were created by individuals, teams, or given no authorship information. We found that crediting authorship of any kind increased evaluations of the product’s creativity, relative to no crediting of authorship. However, we did not find differences between overall evaluations of the team and individual creativity, although people evaluated products as more novel when they were told the product was authored by an individual. We suggest the implications of these findings for both research and practice.