ABOUT

Marta Wronska hugging a cow

Welcome! 

Bullshit Free Creativity is a knowledge base about creative problem solving for people who want to make the world a better place: advocates, activists, vegans, vegetarians, and vegan allies.

I’m Marta Wronska and I study the psychology of creativity. The most important reason why I’m doing Bullshit Free Creativity is that as a researcher, I want to make a difference. Science can bring us valuable insights and progress, but only if we choose to use it to change the world. My most important goal is to support the animal advocacy movement. You can learn here about how I see the role of creativity in the animal advocacy movement.

Creative thinking is something I have always been quite obsessed about. It all started when I was chilling out at a Greek beach with a magnificent view of Mount Olympus. Not sure if it was Zeus in the form of a sea wave or a light breeze from Athena, but I couldn’t take my eyes off one book: Psychology of creativity. Written by a prominent Polish creativity researcher, Edward Nęcka, it was dense and scientific. But the stories of eminent creators and mechanisms of creative thought thrilled me as if Zeus struck me with a bolt of lightning. This excitement turned into a single thought. I want to figure out the mystery of creative thinking.

And so, from the second year of my psychology degree, I’ve been studying creative thinking. Not just from books and lectures. I started additional research projects and worked as a research assistant. Does creativity increase false remembering? Is it better to be alone or in a group when generating creative ideas? Does creativity make you happy? These were the questions we aimed to answer, together with my colleagues and mentors. Finally, I started a PhD in the Netherlands with two of the best European experts in the topic of creativity.

But when my research career became much more realistic, I realized that something was missing. I’ve always wanted to do good. I’ve been vegetarian since I came of age and for a few years vegan, and I wanted to make the world a better place for animals. So I started figuring out how to contribute to animal advocacy. I discovered Effective Altruism and learned about the movement from books (e.g., “Doing Good Better”, “How to Create a Vegan World”, “Against Empathy”), lectures, and Sentience Institute Podcast. Then, I wanted to make a direct connection between my research topic and animal advocacy. So I taught about the obstacles to creative thinking at the Conference on Animal Rights in Europe and I supported creative problem-solving in the newly formed Vegan Student Association in Groningen.

In the end, I created Bullshit Free Creativity website: a place where the science and animal advocacy world come together, where empirical evidence meets practical needs, and where the dragon of inaccessible knowledge becomes a fluffy innocent kitty of short and practical articles.

At the moment, I am:

You can also watch my presentation from the animal rights conference CARE 2019 “Creative superpowers in the animal advocacy battle – a researcher’s perspective”.

Have fun, feel free to explore, and let’s make a difference together!

Marta