Are you a lark or an owl? Do you do your best work in the morning or the evening?
If you’re a morning person, who jumps out of bed ready to take on the day but feels sluggish by the time afternoon or evening hits, you might think you should do your most creative work at the beginning of the day, when you’re fresh. Likewise, if you’re a night owl, and feel barely awake until mid-afternoon, it’s logical that you’d save your most creative work until late at night.
But a new research study by Mareike Wieth of Albion College and Rose Sacks of Michigan State University finds otherwise (hat tip to the folks over at PsyBlog). The researchers asked 428 students to tackle six problem-solving tasks at different times of day. Those who identified themselves as morning persons actually did better on “insight”-based problem solving—tasks that required original thinking—in the evening. Night owls’ performance was the opposite, with more of their “aha!” moments coming earlier in the day.
Wieth and Sacks hypothesized this would happen, because a key aspect of solving “insight” problems is being able to overcome an impasse in your head. To come up with an original idea or novel solution, in other words, we must be able to approach it from a different perspective. During our “non-optimal” times of day, we’re more influenced by distracting information, and are less blinded by an initial solution that, when we’re more clear-headed, might seem obvious but turns out to be wrong.
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