Creativity: The Owner's Manual

The Ultimate Guide to Peak Mental Performance at All Ages

Pierce Howard

• Publisher: William Morrow Paperbacks
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9780062357625
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Educational Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Getting to New You

“’Tis wise to learn; ’tis godlike to create!” —John Godfrey Saxe

The Psychobiology of Creativity

The call for creativity strikes fear in some while arousing enthusiasm in others. Why? This chapter addresses that question, based on the current state of research on creativity.

TOPIC 24.1

The Creative Act

Teresa Amabile, a leading researcher in creativity, has defined creativity conceptually as follows (1983, p. 33): “A product or response will be judged as creative to the extent that (a) it is both a novel and appropriate, useful, correct or valuable response to the task at hand, and (b) the task is heuristic rather than algorithmic” (see topic 26.4). She then identifies three criteria for distinguishing more creative contributions from less creative ones: (1) novelty (we haven’t seen or heard this before), (2) relevance (it relates to satisfying the need that originally prompted the contribution), and (3) spontaneity (the contributor didn’t use a formula to “mechanically” come up with the contribution).

Margaret Boden (1990), thinking in parallel with Amabile, distinguishes between psychological creativity and historical creativity. The first is merely something new for the individual doing the creating; the second is something new for humanity. To quote Boden: “A merely novel idea is one which can be described and/or produced by the same set of generative rules as are other, familiar ideas. A genuinely original, or creative, idea is one which cannot” (p. 40). Robert Sternberg (in Review of General Psychology, Vol. 3, No. 2, 1999, pp. 83–100) expands on the nature of relevance by specifying seven different ways that a creative act can relate to the tradition of an ongoing domain:

1. Conceptual replication, in which one attempts to repeat an earlier study to determine whether its results were a fluke or are here to stay.

2. Redefinition, in which one finds a new meaning or application for an established entity.

3. Forward incrementation, in which one takes an established paradigm to a higher level.

4. Advance forward incrementation, in which one takes an established paradigm to a level higher than its advocates are willing to take it.

5. Redirection, in which one builds on previous work, but in a different direction.

6. Reconstruction and redirection, in which one takes a defunct entity, resurrects it, modernizes it, and claims that it still has value.

7. Re-initiation, in which one approaches something in a radically different way and direction from current practice.

Sternberg points out that the first three tend to be nonthreatening and are relatively easy to accept, whereas the last four tend to be resisted because they threaten those currently at work in the field.

How do we know whether or not a contribution possesses novelty, relevance, and spontaneity? Amabile (1983, p. 31) proposes a consensual definition: “A product or response is creative to the extent that appropriate observers independently agree it is creative. Appropriate observers are those familiar with the domain in which the product was created or the response articulated.” Her definition reflects Aristotle’s comment in the Rhetoric that he can’t tell how to make good art; he can only describe the art that observers over the ages have agreed upon as good.

Application

The merely novel is often represented to us as being creative. Novelty by itself, however, is an insufficient basis on which to judge something as being creative. Novelty without relevance falls somewhere between whimsy and the psychotic. Novelty without spontaneity is tiresomely formulaic; it leads viewers to respond, “I could have done that myself”—for example, after seeing a painting with a repeating pattern of colors and squares or hearing a 12-tone-row composition. The classic example of nonspontaneous art is “painting by the numbers.” Stress the necessity for all three elements—novelty, relevance, and spontaniety—either in your own creative processes or in those of your students, co-workers, and children.

TOPIC 24.2

The Psychology of the Creative Personality

Amabile (1983) identifies three components of creativity in individuals: domain-relevant skills, creativity-relevant skills, and task motivation. These three components must all be present for an individual to be fully creative.

To have domain-relevant skills, the individual must possess the knowledge, technical skills, and special talents peculiar to the domain in which he wishes to be creative. Without this, it may be easy to create novel and spontaneous contributions, but relevance will be, at best, random. The presence of these skills depends on innate logical ability and information-processing skills, as well as on formal and informal education. Amabile defines a talent as a skill in which an individual has an apparently natural ability. Thus, someone can play the piano technically well but have no talent for it, leaving listeners less than impressed. Or a person can master the technical side of a welding process but, without a talent for it, can be frustratingly error-prone. This definition of talent fits well with Gardner’s definition of the eight domains of intelligence (summarized in topic 29.4).

Amabile identifies three groups of creativity-relevant skills:

1. Cognitive style. This area includes the ability and willingness to break perceptual sets (as opposed to functional fixedness), be comfortable with complexity, hold options open and not push for closure, suspend judgment rather than reacting to things as good or bad, be comfortable with wider categories, develop an accurate memory, abandon or suspend performance scripts, and see things differently from others.

2. Knowledge of heuristics. Heuristics are insightful tips for coming up with new ideas (for a more detailed treatment of heuristics, see topic 26.4). Probably the most famous heuristic comes out of the neurolinguistic programming literature: “If what you’re doing is not working, try something different.” This is based on the axiom “If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always gotten.” A dated but highly effective introduction to heuristics is Zuce Kogan’s Essentials in Problem Solving (1956). Also full of insightful tips are Adams (1980), Bandler and Grinder (1982), de Bono (1967), M. Fisher (1981), P. Goldberg (1983), and von Oech (1983).

3. Work style. A positive work style consists of the ability to sustain long periods of concentration, the ability to abandon nonproductive approaches, persistence during difficulty, a high energy level, and a willingness to work hard.

Amabile finds that two prerequisites determine our level of performance in these three areas of creativity-relevant skills: experience and personality traits. Experience in generating ideas in and out of the classroom contributes heavily to a person’s creativity. You can’t do it unless you’ve done it! Among the personality traits critical to creativity-relevant skills are

• Self-discipline

• Delay of gratification

• Perseverance

• Independent judgment

• Tolerance for ambiguity

• Autonomy

• Absence of sex-role stereotyping

• Internal locus of control (seeing self as responsible for one’s own fate)

• Willingness to take risks

• Ability to be a self-starter

• Absence of conformity to social pressure

Amabile has found that the creative personality must also have task motivation, or a positive attitude toward the task—that is, she must want to do it. An unwillingness to do a task results in measurably lower creativity, using the standards of novelty, relevance, and spontaneity. Research has also conclusively demonstrated...

Table of contents

• Contents
• A Note to the Reader
• Getting to New You: The Psychobiology of Creativity
• Chipping Off the Old Block: Removing Barriers to Creativity
• 8 General Principles for Developing Creativity
• The Author
• Credits
• Copyright
• About the Publisher