Anonymity makes people creative: why hiding your name frees up ideas

Hiding your name takes the brakes off your ideas

Have you ever been asked for ideas in a meeting and held back because you thought "Will people think I'm stupid if I say this?" This fear of being judged is the biggest enemy of creativity.

In psychology, this is called evaluation apprehension. Because you care so much about how others see you, you censor your own wild ideas and unconventional thoughts before they come out. As a result, you only come up with safe, ordinary ideas.

When you're anonymous, this evaluation apprehension fades. If no one knows who said it, you don't have to worry about looking stupid. Even an idea you think is "probably impossible" is easy to put out there when you're anonymous. And it's often the ideas that look impossible at first glance that hold the seeds of truly new thinking.

The surprising effect of anonymous brainstorming

Research on brainstorming has turned up an interesting result. In a study by Cooper and colleagues (1998), anonymous brainstorming tended to produce more non-redundant ideas than brainstorming where names were shown, and controversial ideas were also more likely to come up.

This result goes against many people's intuition. We tend to think "Ideas should flow better when people talk face to face," but in reality it's the opposite. Face to face, people spend their energy watching the boss's mood, getting pulled along by whoever spoke first, and reading the room.

With anonymity, these limits get weaker. There are no bosses and no subordinates. You don't need to go along with the opinions that came first. You can put out only the ideas you yourself find interesting. This freedom is what unlocks creativity.

Some IT companies have put this research to use by setting up systems where only the idea stage is done anonymously.

Where the unexpected questions in your question box come from

When you run a question box, you're sometimes surprised: "I never would have thought of a question like this." "If you could be invisible for just one day, what would you do?" "If your life were a movie, what would the title be?" "If you could leave just one message for people 100 years from now, what would it be?"

Creative questions like these rarely come up in Q&A where people use their names. When your name shows, a brake kicks in: "I don't want people to think I send weird questions." It's because they're anonymous that people can think "Maybe I'll try sending this question."

What's interesting is that creative questions draw out creative answers. You get the question "What if you could be invisible for just one day?" and you think it over seriously before answering. That answer shows a side of you that you don't show in your usual posts. The sender's creativity sparks the creativity of the person answering. This chain reaction is what makes Q&A in a question box fun.

Anonymity tends to get attention only for its negative sides. But anonymity also has a positive power: it unlocks people's creativity. The unexpected questions that arrive in your question box are proof of that power.

Make your question box more fun with anonymous themes

You can put this effect, where anonymity makes people creative, to deliberate use when you run your question box.

The method is simple. Give a theme when you announce your question box. "If you had a time machine, which era would you want to go to? Send your answer to my question box with your reason." With a theme, senders don't have to struggle over what to ask, and they can focus on thinking up their own answer to the theme.

Ideally, a theme has no right answer. Rather than "What's your favorite season?" try "If you could add one more season, what kind of season would you create?" The second one sparks the senders' imagination, and you get more unique answers.

It's also a fun idea to share the answers you receive while keeping them anonymous. If you share a roundup like "Here are the answers I got about which era you'd visit with a time machine," your followers get to see how other people think. The surprise of "I never thought of that" becomes the motivation to send the next question.

Use the power of anonymity to bring out your followers' creativity. Depending on how you use it, a question box can also become a place where everyone's ideas come together.