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The Beatles, Picasso, Bob Marley… The most famous stars – and their fans – sometimes attributed their artistic creativity to their consumption of weed. According to a study published by researchers from the University of Washington, it would not be.
Taking marijuana would make you more creative, according to a popular belief. This received idea would be totally false, according to the conclusions of an American study.
Two groups of consumers
The scientists recruited 191 participants to pass creativity tests. For this, they divided them into two groups and invited them, after giving them a brick, to imagine as many uses as possible in four minutes. Both groups were exercised either 15 minutes after smoking marijuana or 12 hours after.
No difference
Two researchers and 430 randomly recruited adults were then asked to write down the responses, without knowing which groups they came from. Result: no difference was noted between the people who smoked and the control group.
In reality, explain the authors of this work, the drug would make users more positive, giving them a better impression of their creativity.
Second study
To support these results, the scientists initiated a second study, in which 140 other occasional cannabis users were recruited and divided into groups. One of the two had just used cannabis and the other had not used it for at least 12 hours.
Both groups were then asked to complete a work-based creativity task. They needed to think of ideas for a local music group to increase their revenue in five minutes.
More enthusiastic consumers
Participants then evaluated each other’s ideas. Again, there was no difference in creativity between the two groups. In contrast, those who had smoked the drug tended to have more favorable evaluations of the creativity of others, compared to those who had not smoked it.
According to Dr. Christopher Barnes, a psychologist at the University of Washington who led the research, “Cannabis is unlikely to make you more or less creative. Our results suggest that cannabis use may positively bias ratings of creativity but has no impact on creativity” he concludes.