Nobel Prizes, Oscars, Pulitzers, and other honors bring fame, and big sales and box office bring fortune. Did you have an idea for improving this content? But what makes an idea or solution creative? And finally, creativity training programs cannot be assumed to increase creativity across all domains simply because they successfully promote creativity in one domain. In one study, people were asked to pick their best responses to a similar divergent-thinking task, and then examined whether they were more likely to choose responses that outside raters considered creative. The first criterion is originality. Our vision was for a dialog between those who study creativity in animals and those who study the same topic in humans. In contrast with macro-level innovation research, which focused essentially on contextual factors but disregarded the individual (e.g., Aiken & Hage, 1971), psychology research placed less emphasis on the context and more importance on identifying the characteristics of the creative individual. 1) Experimental Cognitive Psychology – This involves doing experiments under laboratory conditions, trying to get a handle on a specific brain process that has been theorised. Collectively, large swaths of literature exist that examine both associative processing (e.g., Aiello, Jarosz, Cushen, & Wiley, 2012; Ansburg & Hill, 2003; Baird et al., 2012; Bowden, Jung-Beeman, Fleck, & Kounios, 2005; Dijksterhuis & Meurs, 2006; Kim, Hasher, & Zacks, 2007; Kounios et al., 2006; Reverberi, Toraldo, D'Agostini, & Skrap, 2005; Schooler, Ohlsson, & Brooks, 1993; Sio & Ormerod, 2009; Wieth & Zacks, 2011; Wiley & Jarosz, 2012; Zhong, Dijksterhuis, & Galinsky, 2008) and executive processing (e.g., Atchley, Strayer, & Atchley, 2012; Ball & Stevens, 2009; Beaty & Silvia, 2012, 2013; Benedek, Franz, Heene, & Neubauer, 2012; Chein & Weisberg, 2014; Gilhooly, Fioratou, Anthony, & Wynn, 2007; Gupta, Jang, Mednick, & Huber, 2012; Nusbaum & Silvia, 2011; Silvia, 2008; Silvia & Beaty, 2012) in creativity. Sowden et al. Three main ways of measuring creativity have been proposed: the creativity quotient (CQ), psychometrics, and the social-personality approach. No other scientist came up with the idea. Similarly, domain specificity of creativity means that creativity testing as currently practiced is necessarily inadequate and of limited validity. However, other theoretical approaches may approach creativity more as a trait, which should be apparent in the way creativity is measured. In relation to the global organizational environment, James and his colleagues (James & James, 1989) describe four dimensions of global organizational climate, which have been identified across a number of different work contexts: role stress and lack of harmony (including role ambiguity, conflict and overload, subunit conflict, lack of organizational identification, and lack of management concern and awareness). The development of the social psychological approach to the study of creativity was to a great extent responsible for bringing together these two research streams, integrating the importance of both individual features and contextual characteristics (Amabile, 1983). John Baer, in Domain Specificity of Creativity, 2016, If large-scale, domain-general creativity theory is impossible, why is it so attractive? In Animal Creativity and Innovation, 2015. He explains that creators decide to buy low and sell high in ideas, meaning that they generate and pursue ideas and concepts that seem too unusual or out-of-the mainstr… Most creativity training programs already use a wide variety of tasks, spread across various content domains, in the exercises they use to improve divergent thinking and other creative thinking skills. Outstanding discoveries, insights and developments do not happen in a vacuum” (Steitz, 2010, para. General, domain-transcending theories – if true – would have far greater power than domain specific theories that account only for creativity in a limited content domain. For instance, Beaty et al. Although psychologists have offered several definitions of creativity (Plucker, Beghetto, & Dow, 2004; Runco & Jaeger, 2012), probably the best definition is the one recently adapted from the three criteria that the U.S. Patent Office uses to decide whether an invention can receive patent protection (Simonton, 2012). To this end, the book contains 22 chapters covering a wide range of issues and topics in this field, all written by distinguished leaders. Research found that people were able to discern their more creative responses – and that people who were more open to experience were more likely to choose accurately. Creativity can be observed across multiple domains of human behavior including problem solving, artistic and athletic engagement, scientific reasoning, decision making, business and marketing, leadership styles, and social interactions. Finally, Amabile singles out your motivation toward the task at hand. Klein, 1997). Geir Kaufmann, in The International Handbook on Innovation, 2003. Creativity is not something that you just pick like apples from a tree. You guessed right! Another neural network identified as important for creativity is the salience network, which includes the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and the anterior insula (Abraham, Rutter, Bantin, & Hermann, 2018; Beaty et al., 2015; Heinonen et al., 2016). Related is the serial-order effect: the finding that ideas generated in divergent-thinking sessions tend to get more creative over time (Christensen, Guilford, & Wilson, 1957). For instance, the “person approach”, which represented one of the dominant schools of thought in the psychological study of creativity, conceptualized creativity as the constellation of personality and intellectual traits shown by individuals who, when given sufficient autonomy, spent significant amounts of time engaged in the creative process (Findlay & Lumsden, 1988). That is why we cannot use the singular; there is no such thing as the “creative process.” Nonetheless, the various processes do share one feature: All enable the person to “think outside the box” imposed by routine thinking—to venture into territory that would otherwise be ignored (Simonton, 2011). As the componentional model previously suggested, the interactionist model also stresses the role played by the context, but it further adds the notion that the effects between person and situation are not simply additive but are instead of an interactive nature. People who are high in synthetic ability but low in analytical ability may need someone else to evaluate and judge their work for them. The first, selective encoding, involves distinguishing relevant from irrelevant information. The study of the mental representations and processes underlying creative thought belongs to the domains of psychology and cognitive science. Such analytical ability can be used to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the idea and determine the best steps to improve upon the idea. Creativity theory has only recently begun to accommodate research evidence suggesting that creativity is task specific, although the hierarchical approach discussed above is promising. It should be noted that the research evidence pointing toward domain specificity of creativity is fairly new, and, like the research that preceded it, this research may not tell the whole story. The Blind-Variation-and-Selective-Retention model of Campbell (1960), Simonton's (1999) Darwinian theory of creativity, Finke, Ward, and Smith's (1992) Genoplore model, and Howard-Jones’ (2002) dual-state model of creative thought all articulate the distinction between generating ideas and evaluating them, and the importance of this back and forth in creativity. Unfortunately, many different cognitive processes have been linked to creativity (Simonton & Damian, 2013). West, Claudia A. Sacramento, in Handbook of Organizational Creativity, 2012. Multivariate structural equation models showed unique contributions of both the associative and executive measures to creativity, demonstrating that both types of processes are important in predicting the ability to generate novel ideas. Creativity assessment has been studied for nearly as long as creativity itself. For example, using a brick as a paperweight represents a different conceptual category that using its volume to conserve water in a toilet tank. The idea should be surprising, or at least nonobvious (to use the term used by the Patent Office). In the past quarter century the idea that creativity is domain general has been seriously challenged. The RAT consists of items that require the respondent to identify a word that can be associated to three rather distinct stimulus words. Michael A. In their multilevel, interactionist model of creativity, the authors suggest that creativity is a phenomenon that is influenced by both situational and dispositional factors. Approaches to cognition. Indeed, it often should be unique. Very creative people often have intense knowledge about something, work on it for years, look at novel solutions, seek out the advice and help of other experts, and take risks. Over the past 35 years, examination of social and environmental influences on creativity has become increasingly vigorous, with broad implications for the psychology of human performance, and with applications to education, business, and beyond. Prevailing approaches to individual and group creativity have focused on personal factors that contribute to creative behavior (e.g., personality, intelligence, motivation), and the processes of behaving creatively and appreciating creativity are understood to be largely unrelated. If creativity is domain specific, it means that a single theory of creativity – such as the theory that divergent thinking is a basic component of all creative thinking – cannot account for the diversity of creativity across domains. There are a lot of definitions for creativity. Creativity has long stood as an integral facet of what it means to be human and has served as an object of deep discussion, but, for most of our time pondering it as a species, it has remained mysterious, ephemeral, and even mystical. Amabile’s Componential Model (1983) describes creativity as the product of the combination of three factors: domain relevant skills, which refer to factual knowledge and expertise in a certain domain; creativity-relevant skills, which refer to the strategies and cognitive styles that influence idea production; and intrinsic motivation, conceptualized as the individual’s genuine interest in the task. Promising areas for further psychological study of creativity include computational modeling, and work on the neurobiological basis of creativity, as … A successful creator will generate ideas that may be initially unpopular or underappreciated (as in buying stocks with low price-earnings ratios), yet will persist and convince others of the ideas’ merits. Creativity-relevant skills are personal factors that are associated with creativity. Climate is a contextual feature and therefore an understanding of the role of climate in creativity theory implies an understanding of the broader role attributed to the context in general. Creativity can be found in every area of life, from the way you decorate your residence to a new way of understanding how a cell works. The everyday expression of creativity often takes the form of trying out a new approach to a familiar dilemma. The authors propose that creativity is the product of a complex person–situation interaction influenced by events of the past as well as salient aspects of the current situation. These skills include tolerance for ambiguity, self-discipline, and risk-taking. It is quite possible that both domain specificity and generality are true, each in part and in its own way. This staged framework, while focused on how an idea arises unintentionally from consciousness, emphasized focused and controlled thought in the evaluation of the utility of the insight. His work spawned a considerable and concerted effort to isolate aspects of creative potential unrelated to intelligence. (It might also make creativity less interesting, but because such a theory is impossible, we will never know. Tests of creativity in specific content domains – which might use the consensual assessment technique to evaluate the creativity of products, or might instead find simpler (perhaps paper-and-pencil) techniques for assessing domain specific skills – would still be possible in principle, but they could be of only limited range and applicability. We will refer in more detail to TCI and KEYS later in this chapter (for a comprehensive review see Mathisen & Einarsen, 2004). Disciplinary perspectives often emerge in opposition to each other, and this can be seen in the individualist and holist approaches to creativity. Even the author of the paper arguing for domain generality acknowledged that the tide had turned in favor of a domain-specific view: Recent observers of the theoretical (Csikszentmihalyi, 1988) and empirical (Gardner, 1993; Runco, 1989; Sternberg & Lubart, 1995) creativity literature could reasonably assume that the debate is settled in favor of content specificity. CC BY-NC-SA: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike, https://openstax.org/books/psychology-2e/pages/7-4-what-are-intelligence-and-creativity, http://nobaproject.com/modules/creativity, Define creativity, divergent, and convergent thinking. The variety of current creativity theories has plusses and minuses. Creativity is a phenomenon whereby something somehow new and somehow valuable is formed. Individual perceptions of the work environment are usually termed psychological climate, and, when shared to a level sufficient for aggregation to the group or organizational level, are labelled group or organizational climate. Indeed, many so-called “creativity tests” are actually measures of the thought processes believed to underlie the creative act (Simonton, 2003b). Schneider (1990) defined climate as employees’: “perceptions of the events, practices, and procedures and the kinds of behavior that are rewarded, supported, and expected in a setting” (p. 384). The second criterion is usefulness. An original recipe that produces a dish that tastes too terrible to eat cannot be creative. Other theories emphasize a confluence of different elements and include intellectual and cognitive abilities in the equation. Looking at resting-state connectivity, Beaty et al. For instance, a solution that is a straightforward derivation from acquired expertise cannot be considered surprising even if it were original. Finally, organizational creativity is also a function of the interaction between the creative outputs of its component groups and contextual influences (such as organizational climate and culture, reward systems, resources, or the external environment). Guilford (1950), for instance, defined divergent thinking as the generation of many alternatives and ideationally branching out from a single starting point, and convergent thinking as homing in on a singular solution and evaluation of fit. With reference to the evidence indicating a significant relationship between hypomania and creativity cited above, Weisberg conducted an interesting case study of Schumann's mood bipolarity. In the article, The shifting sands of creative thinking: Connections to dual-process theory, Sowden, Pringle, and Gabora (2015) systematically review the multiple theories in creativity that can be conceptualized as dual-process in nature. Many employers value creative thinkers, so consider highlighting your creative thinking skills … In fact, Baer (1994a, 1994b, 1994c)1994a1994b1994c provided convincing evidence that creativity is not only content specific but is also task specific within content areas. This implies that in order to fully understand creativity, one has to consider the interplay between the person and the environment. Organizational climate has occupied a pivotal role in the organizational sciences dating from Lewin’s classic work on motivation in the 1950s (Lewin, 1951), and was formalized through the human relations movement of the 1960s (Argyris, 1958). For instance, the “person approach”, which represented one of the dominant schools of thought in the psychological study of creativity, conceptualized creativity as the constellation of personality and intellectual traits shown by individuals who, when given sufficient autonomy, spent significant amounts of time engaged in the creative process (Findlay & Lumsden, 1988). 39). In addition, the three attributes should have a zero point, that is, it should be possible to speak of an idea lacking any originality, usefulness, or surprise whatsoever. Major test developers may not be willing to support extensive test development efforts for tests of such limited potential use. They stress that: “individual creativity is a function of antecedent conditions (e.g., past reinforcement history, biographical variables), cognitive style and ability (e.g., divergent thinking, ideational fluency), personality factors (e.g., self-esteem, locus of control), relevant knowledge, motivation, social influences (e.g., social facilitation, social rewards), and contextual influences (e.g., physical environment, task and time constraints)” (p. 294). Creativity theories must either become domain specific themselves or find some general approach to dealing with these domain-based differences. Wiley and Jarosz (2012) agree that creative problem-solving requires a mixture of “non-goal-directed processes and more controlled, attention-demanding processes” (p. 260) and call for “a dual-process model of problem solving that incorporates both analytic and nonanalytic processes” (p. 261). Examples of his components of creativity include Guilford's divergent thinking components (fluency, flexibility, and originality), and being open to new experiences, curious, willing to take risks, and sensitive to aesthetic characteristics. The first step is to fully devote yourself to developing your creative … Moving from the implications of domain specificity for creativity theory to its implications for creativity testing, a domain specific understanding of creativity provides a very direct challenge to existing notions of how to test creativity. The idea should be valuable or work. The second element, practical ability, is needed to communicate creative ideas to other people (i.e., ‘selling’ an idea). Observations of the importance of cognitive control in creative thinking are also apparent in research on creative analogical reasoning. James C. Kaufman, in Creativity and the Performing Artist, 2017. Sense creation in the structure of processes of meaning dynamics. As valuable as such approaches have been in isolating processes involved in creative thinking, given the considerable bodies of empirical evidence supporting roles for both associative and executive processing, researchers are increasingly seeking a deeper understanding of the interaction between these modes of thought and, accordingly, are adopting more global approaches. Figure 2. As the evidence surrounding the importance of interaction between associative and executive processing in creative thought continues to emerge, at both the behavioral and neural levels, many have articulated a need for dual-process theoretical frameworks that can more fully account for this interplay. Some reasons for this have already been discussed, such as the lure of GUTs in other fields like physics8 and biology and the simple fact that life (and creativity research) would be so much easier if a single, grand unifying theory of creativity were possible. In this model, a creative person is like a talented Wall Street investor. Longitudinal hit ratios of classical composers: Reconciling “Darwinian” and expertise acquisition perspectives on lifespan creativity. If creativity is domain specific, what exactly is one to test? The circles representing creativity and intelligence overlap. (2015) conclude by noting that a means by which to proceed is to integrate creativity research more fulsomely within the broader cognitive psychological literature on thinking: the time is ripe to develop an integrated dual-process model of creativity that clearly specifies the nature of this interaction [between modes of thought] across different points in the creative process, and the mechanisms that underlie shifting between generative and evaluative thinking. (2015) also deeply considered the connections between creativity theories that are dual-process, and in more general dual-process theories of cognition. However, much of human. We’d love your input. Neuroscientific research has shown an increase in frontopolar cortex activation when individuals identify or generate more creative analogies (with higher creativity quantified by increased semantic distance between the constituent elements of an analogy; see Green, 2016 for a review; also see Kenett, 2018 for a review of quantitative measure of semantic distance in creativity research). Paula Thomson and Victoria S. Jacque have produced a comprehensive, meaningful work that is readable, grounded in the literature, and of great interest to scholars and performers alike. To date, there is no consensus-based definition of creativity; however, according to a standard definition, creativity is often perceived as the ability to produce something new/novel and appropriate/useful. The capacity to produce unusual uses is but one example of the general cognitive ability to engage in divergent thinking (Guilford, 1967). Thus, our following discussions on team and organizational climates will be grounded on these two frameworks. 2. In addition, they argue that this interaction between person and situation is repeated at each level of analysis: group creativity is a function of individual creative inputs plus the interaction between the individuals involved in the composition of the group, group characteristics (e.g., size), group processes (e.g., conflict), and contextual influences (e.g., the larger organization, task characteristics). In her study, positive mood significantly enhanced ideational fluency, compared to negative mood, but no significant differences between positive and negative mood were obtained on scores of originality and usefulness of ideas. This section contains some of my own research into the psychology of creativity, including my MA critical research paper, plus further thoughts and discussions on various related subjects. 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