I was at the monthly gathering of the Top Secret Liberal Journalist Cabal the other day – sipping coffee flavored with the tears of #Gamergate supporters as I listened to George Monbiot outline the strategy for this year’s War on Christmas – when my phone buzzed with a message. Huge news! According to a new study by researchers at Cornell University, political correctness works. In creativity exercises involving mixed-gender groups, Jack Goncalo and his colleagues found that people instructed to be politically correct generated a greater quantity of novel ideas than those instructed merely to be polite, or given no instructions at all.

Naturally, I yelled the glad tidings from my seat at the back of the auditorium, and jubilation broke out. All these years, we’d been insisting that people stop saying “manhole” and start saying “personal access unit” instead – and so forth – out of nothing but sheer authoritarianism and quinoa-fueled spite. Now we had science on our side! As you can imagine, the remainder of that day’s events passed in a drunken haze, though of course we drank no Guinness, to avoid offending vegans.

Admittedly, many of the facts in the preceding two paragraphs aren’t real (something that raises serious questions about ethics in journalism) – but the Cornell study is. The received wisdom is that “political correctness” refers to something stifling and oppressive, while “true creativity requires a kind of anarchy in which people are permitted to speak their minds, whatever the consequence,” Goncalo was quoted as saying. Yet when groups included men and women, the reverse proved true: in a creativity exercise, which involved coming up with new ideas for a business to occupy an empty building, the PC group did better.

The reason, Cornell’s researchers argue, is that political correctness is a norm that provides clear guidance for how members of the opposite gender ought to relate to each other, which is otherwise ambiguous. “If it is difficult to anticipate exactly what kinds of statements might trigger offense,” the researchers write, “the safest approach may be to withhold all novel ideas.” So by following the PC norm, team members were spared feelings of uncertainty about how to behave, freeing them to comfortably exchange ideas instead. (The effect was the opposite in same-gender teams: with less uncertainty to begin with, the PC group produced fewer novel ideas.) As Goncalo notes, you’d expect something similar to happen when race (or some other potential tension point) was at issue.

None of which, by the way, detracts from the truth that political correctness – like the Top Secret Liberal Journalist Cabal – basically doesn’t exist. The War on Christmas is a Fox News fiction. (Although perhaps we ought to have one?) Most other instances of “political correctness gone mad” turn out, on inspection, to be false – or alternatively, just the resentful mutterings of people who wish they could still spout racist abuse without other people expressing disapproval. I can find no firm evidence that anyone ever tried to make anyone else call a manhole a “personal access unit”. One representative recent tale, about KFC banning handwipes to avoid offending Muslims, was, at the very worst, an isolated misunderstanding. A trope popular on the British right holds that “you can’t talk about immigration” these days thanks to PC taboos, which would be troubling except that British right-wing newspapers talk about it incessantly. And on it goes.

The latest twist on the PC menace – the notion that we live in a “culture of offense”, in which people are paralyzed into silence for fear of upsetting the sensitive – may be slightly less imaginary. But only slightly. Much of the time, it seems like this new version of political correctness gets used to argue that while, say, Ayaan Hirsi Ali is free to argue that Islam is a “cult of death”, people who find that objectionable should shut their mouths. Mainly, it’s not that there are things you can’t say. It’s that there are things you can’t say without the risk that people who previously lacked a voice might use their own freedom of speech to object.

In short, then, PC is still not really a thing, in the sense that it’s not a real force causing real bad things to happen in the real world. What the Cornell study demonstrates, though, is that the phrase “political correctness” means something to people – even if that’s partly thanks to the tirades of Sean Hannity and friends – and that, when people attempt to embody what they think it means, the effect isn’t necessarily corrosive. All they’re doing is following a social norm – and norms, by definition, involve feeling pressure not to act in certain ways.

Whether a given norm is too restrictive is up for debate, but there’s little sense in the idea that modern culture is uniquely objectionable simply because there are some things people feel they shouldn’t say, because that’s how norms work. The only alternative to living by norms, to adapt Goncalo’s point, would be total social anarchy – which I’m assuming isn’t a prospect your average conservative PC-fighter would relish.

And it’s increasingly widely recognized that an anarchical approach isn’t much use when it comes to creativity, which thrives on constraints. “Blue-sky thinking”, with its total lack of limits, provides nothing to push against and nowhere to get a grip; worse, it leaves people more vulnerable to all sorts of psychological phenomena – like groupthink or bigotry or taking certain ideas more seriously because they’re repeated more frequently – that get in the way of actual good ideas.

So it’s unsurprising that the participants in the Cornell study’s mixed-gender groups did better when prompted to follow some guidelines on how to interact, instead of floundering with none at all. And, truly, my fellow Guardianistas and I couldn’t have asked for a better Winterval present.