The Power of Roles/Perspective-Taking in Generating New Ideas

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Roles capture a significant amount of information that people know from their everyday lives
Thinking about different roles can greatly enhance creativity and generate more unique and rare ideas
Compared to mind wandering or having no specific instructions, thinking about roles resulted in the highest effectiveness in generating new uses for objects

My guest today is acclaimed psychologist and longtime Stanford University professor Barbara Tversky who calls on her nearly 50 years in the field of cognitive psychology for an in-depth discussion about how our minds work.

We discuss the Nine Laws of Cognition, why action shapes thought, how the language we use changes what we think, tactics to communicate better on Zoom, why she dove into the work of Leonardo da Vinci, when to use charts and when to avoid them, the importance of perspective taking, learned knowledge vs. earned knowledge, and so much more.

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