For decades, the dominant view among psychologists was that constraints served as a barrier to creativity . Anybody who spends a short time working under a confining bureaucracy, dealing with a micromanaging boss, or sitting in a classroom that teaches to the test can grasp the appeal of this argument. But it isn’t the whole story.

Patricia Stokes is a Columbia University psychologist and an expert in the science of creativity. In one experiment she conducted back in 1993, rodents were forced to press a bar with only their right paws. Eventually, they not only learned to adapt to that constraint, but they figured out how to press the bar in more ways than a group that had free use of their limbs. This has come to be called “little ‘c’ creativity”—a form of creativity not focused on producing creative works but rather on solving practical problems through new uses and applications of resources. And it’s this form of creativity that tends to get short shrift.

Resource abundance can actually be counterproductive.

We tend to think of creativity as something artistic—the quality that produces masterpieces. But it’s actually an important part of just getting everyday stuff done. It’s what allows a programmer to complete her first line of original code, a product manager to identify a new market for an existing product, and an elementary-school teacher to find an entertaining way to teach subtraction. And when it comes to situations as different as these, constraints seem to improve our performance.

In a 2015 study, Ravi Mehta at the University of Illinois and Meng Zhu at Johns Hopkins University examined how thinking about scarcity or abundance influences how creatively people use their resources. The researchers thought that by highlighting resource scarcity, they could reduce people’s natural tendency to use what was available to them in conventional ways.

To test their predictions, the researchers ran five experiments. In one, they started by randomly dividing 60 undergraduate participants into two groups. Mehta and Zhu then instructed the first set of subjects to write a brief essay about growing up having scarce resources, while the second set wrote about growing up having abundant resources. Then the researchers presented both groups of subjects with an actual problem their university faced.

With a recent move of its computer lab, the school had 250 bubble-wrap sheets and wanted to find a use for them. The experimenters provided a sample of the material, then asked them to come up with a plan for how to use the bubble wrap. Afterward, participants completed a survey to measure the different ways they approached the challenge.

The professors then hired 20 judges to assess the novelty of the suggested ideas. The judges, blind to whether participants belonged to the scarcity or abundance group, scored the proposals. And lo and behold, the scarcity group came out on top for their creative uses for bubble wrap.