Perceptions of creativity towards metaphor and sarcasm

What is it about?

This article is about whether layperson perceptions towards creativity in language are influenced by the presence or absence of metaphor and sarcasm. Participants self-rated their level of creativity in a creative language production task, and compared their answers to pre-existing answers which contained different degrees of metaphor and sarcasm.

Featured Image

Photo by Jr Korpa on Unsplash

Photo by Jr Korpa on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Metaphor and sarcasm are sometimes thought to be types of creative language, but it is less clear whether people perceive these uses to be creative. This is important because metaphor and sarcasm are ubiquitous in everyday speech and therefore laypeople will have likely formed impressions about one's creative ability based on their use of metaphor and/or sarcasm. The results found that metaphor tended to be seen as more creative than sarcasm, but also that participants who used any form of creativity in their answers felt they were very creative. As such, this article provides evidence that self-perceptions of creative ability are tightly linked to creative language.