Creativity and Smartphone Use: Three Correlational Studies

Various books and popular media outlets claim that mindless smartphone use can impair creativity, yet few studies have tested this idea. We conducted a survey and three correlational studies focused on divergent thinking, the mindful ability to generate creative responses to open-ended problems. Most of the 48,000 participants surveyed thought that smartphone use reduced creativity. This view was consistent with the negative correlations we found between divergent thinking and both screen time and problematic smartphone use (rs=−.27 to −.35) in an exploratory sample of 62 university students. However, in two pre-registered replications with larger and more diverse samples (N = 294 and 16,932), we found at most tiny correlations between measures of divergent thinking or creative achievement and several types of smartphone use (rs=−.09 to .09). Thus, the link between smartphone use and creativity may be weaker or more nuanced than is commonly believed.