Black Box Thinking: Growth Mindset and the Secrets of High Performance

by Matthew Syed

The problem is that when many of us free associate, we come up with rather boring associations. If someone says ‘blue’, most people reply ‘sky’. If someone says ‘green’, we say ‘grass’. This is hardly the stuff of inspiration. In her free association experiment, Nemeth showed slides to volunteers. As expected, they came up with conventional, banal associations. But then she had a lab assistant call out the wrong colour as part of the experiment. When a blue slide was shown, the assistant called out ‘green’. And this is when something odd happened. When Nemeth then asked these volunteers to free associate on the colours that had been wrongly identified, they suddenly became far more creative. They came up with associations that reached way beyond tired convention. Blue became ‘jeans’ or ‘lonely’ or ‘Miles Davis’.