BVSR Theory of Human Creativity

Fundamentals

In 1960, Donald T. Campbell proposed his theory that creativity depended on the two-step process of blind variation and selective retention, or BVSR. Significantly, he believed that BVSR applied to all creative thought as well as to “other knowledge processes,” including scientific discovery. Campbell’s theoretical presentation was neither highly formal nor intimately based on empirical research, but rather, he mainly documented the operation of BVSR by extensive quotations from past thinkers, such as the philosophers Alexander Bain and Paul Souriau, the physicist Ernst Mach, and the mathematician Henri Poincaré. Despite the fact that BVSR is often identified as “Darwinian,” Campbell did not predicate the theory on any analogy with Darwin’s theory of biological evolution. Campbell did not elaborate much on BVSR in his subsequent publications, except to subsume it under a much more extensive evolutionary epistemology. Nevertheless, some researchers took BVSR as the basis for their own theoretical and empirical work. In their hands, BVSR has acquired some claim to providing the most comprehensive and precise theory of human creativity. The comprehensiveness is most apparent in BVSR’s capacity to integrate a diversity of phenomena, including the personality traits and developmental experiences of individual creators as well as the organizational and sociocultural contexts in which those individuals create. BVSR’s precision is especially conspicuous in combinatorial models of the creative process that have generated predictions that have been subjected to empirical tests.

According to Campbell, creativity begins with the generation of “thought trials,” which are then either rejected or selected and retained. Because the ideational variants are not generated with foreknowledge of the outcome, he deemed them blind, albeit sometimes in later writings he would use alternative designations, such as unjustified. The important point is that creators or discoverers often cannot know in advance whether an idea will work until they first generate and test the idea. On the contrary, if the individual can confidently predict whether the idea will be selected or rejected prior to testing, then the idea should signify nothing truly new. Instead, it would most likely represent routine, reproductive, or algorithmic thinking. Campbell then made some effort to describe some of the factors that might enhance BVSR’s effectiveness. For example, he pointed out the advantages of what now would be termed multicultural experiences. Persons exposed to two or more cultures would be more likely to transcend cultural constraints on thinking.

Later research has provided both empirical and theoretical support for the BVSR theory. On the empirical side, studies have shown that individual creators possess characteristics that would make them more capable of “thinking outside the box” [Page 103]imposed by expertise, such as the ability or willingness to engage in defocused attention. Likewise, highly creative problem-solving groups tend to consist of members who are unusually heterogeneous with respect to gender, ethnicity, age, and training. This diversity of perspectives increases the odds that the group will avoid imposing unnecessary constraints on the search for the optimal solution. On the theoretical side, BVSR theory has been expanded to encompass a wide range of creative processes and procedures, even including algorithmic methods and combinatorial models. An important aspect of this theoretical expansion has been recent work refining the definition of what constitutes a blind variation, a key term that Campbell had only loosely defined.

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