
The first group came up only with the most predictable associations, e.g. “sky” for a blue slide, but the second group was far more creative. The “error” introduced into the group forced them to consider more possibilities than just the obvious ones.
In a study, psychologist Charlan Nemeth showed two groups of people slides with various colors on them, and asked the subjects to free-associate words after seeing each slide. Here’s the twist: into the second group, Nemeth inserted actors who occasionally claimed to see different colors than the actual one shown, e.g. “green” when the slide was in fact blue.