I don’t know about you but I hate clichés.

I hate songs that have lyrics that reach for them as predictable solutions for rhyming couplets… ‘Tomorrow is another day’, ‘Down on my knees begging please’, pretty much any mention of a road (‘road going nowhere’), things that ‘cut like a knife’… you will, I suspect, have your own pet hates.

Now, my objection to clichés is not that they are factually wrong (well, usually not, roads always go SOMEWHERE). My issue is that the hackneyed phrase concerned has appeared like a linguistic tick to fill the space where the person uttering it couldn’t conjure something original to say. Or perhaps it’s that, once the well-known phrase starts, the entirely predictable nature of its ending, means that I know the next two seconds will be a waste of my life!

Often clichés end up being a mix of two psychological phenomena: a meme and a belief (or a piece of received wisdom that can be succinctly passed down from generation to generation). For example, ‘a stitch in time saves nine’ has a rhyme that sticks in the mind even if you’ve never repaired a garment in your life: but if you had you would also appreciate that, once a whole appears, it’s likely to get bigger if you do nothing about it.

But what about the more esoteric phrases that have become clichés, such as ‘thinking outside the box’ as a way of referencing creativity, or ‘on one hand…, on the other…’, or ‘putting two and two together…’? Do these linguistic ticks serve any purpose?

Well, believe it or not, they appear to reflect something psychologically significant.

In an experiment that sounds too good to be true, researchers explored what difference it made to people’s performance in a creativity exercise when they were either sitting inside a box (a five foot square cardboard one, that wasn’t in any sense claustrophobic) and when they were outside of it. All other environmental conditions remained the same.

The result? People inside the box were less creative! As strange as this sounds, other research has shown that, for instance, ceiling height can influence the type of mental processing people use when evaluating products.

Similar links were found between the other clichés tested: People who put two pieces together to form a single coaster performed better in tasks that required them to bring ideas together to be creative (convergent thinking). Walking around did free the mind and acting out balancing items in each hand had a positive impact too.

So whilst I still think they are unforgivably lazy in song lyrics, it may be worth considering the underlying truth in clichés when they apply to situations in which you find yourself, or when you want to encourage creativity.

My Granny always used to say, ‘Drink water, it makes lions strong’. I can’t dispute the health benefits of drinking water (which were espoused publically long after she advocated the benefits of hydration), I have always wondered if it might be the fresh zebra meat that accounts for the king of jungle’s muscle development.

Source: Association for Psychological Science. “To ‘think outside the box,’ think outside the box.” ScienceDaily, 23 Jan. 2012. Web. 30 Jan. 2012.

Image courtesy: U.S. Army