Effects of ambient noise on creative cognition
Abstract
Our study examines how ambient noise, an important environmental variable, can
influence human creativity. This research is a replication of a former study: “Is Noise
Always Bad? Exploring the Effects of Ambient Noise on Creative Cognition” of Mehta,
Zhu, and Cheema (2012) which occurs in Canada. Therefore, we want to conduct a likely
similar investigation to examine whether background noise have the same impacts on
Vietnamese creative awareness as on Canadian.
Results from our first experiments demonstrate that a moderate (about 70 dB)
versus both low (about 50 dB) and high (about 85 dB and over) levels of ambient noise
enhances performance on creative tasks.
In our experiment 2, we find that both two factors of Ambient noise and
Individual creativity have positive influences on participants’ Buying Likelihood on
innovative products. Moreover, an increasing of noise level from low (52 to 64 dB) to
moderate (65 to 76 dB) enhance customers’ Buying Likeliness on innovative products in
case of highly creative people (assessed buy 9 items of User-innovative scale of Price and
Ridgway (1983) and Girardi, Soutar, Ward (2005) ); but there is no difference inspected
in case of less creative people.
Through these findings, we want to examine impacts of ambient noise on human
creative cognition. This can help managers or supervisors in making an environment with
as available noise level to encourage the employees’ creativeness. Besides, marketers can
apply effects of background noise on adopting innovative product in marketing; selecting
right potential customers and available noise level of environment can help marketers
make an effective marketing plan.