Persona Beats Methodology

Simple persona prompts often outperform elaborate brainstorming methodologies when generating diverse AI ideas.

“You are Steve Jobs looking to generate new product ideas” achieved 0.368 cosine similarity, better than prompts incorporating the full text of HBR brainstorming best practices (0.387) or Stanford design thinking methodology (0.392).

The finding is counterintuitive. We might expect detailed instructions about creativity techniques to produce more creative outputs. Instead, a recognizable persona label appears to activate more useful latent patterns than procedural guidance.

This suggests that LLMs have internalized “creative person” as a coherent behavioral pattern through training. The persona prompt surfaces that pattern more effectively than analytical descriptions of what creativity looks like.

However, neither approach matches Chain-of-Thought’s performance (0.255), indicating that how the model thinks through the task matters more than who it’s pretending to be.

Related: 05-atom—cot-diversity-effect, 05-molecule—prompt-engineering-for-diversity