Creative Personality

Creative Personality Traits

Creativity is often defined as behaviors or products that are viewed by leaders in a specific field as providing new insights, novel directions, and unique solutions to problems. Creative individuals can be identified by their contributions, such as inventions, poetry, theories, and artwork. Researchers have utilized a variety of quantitative and qualitative methods to explore the personality of these individuals to identify common personality traits. This research has provided patterns and lists of traits that can be useful in identifying and understanding the personality of individuals who have or may provide unique contributions to society. The research provides a basis for support and nurturance of creative endeavors.

The most frequently used model for describing broad personality traits is called the Big Five. This model of personality posits that all personality traits can be organized into five broad dimensions: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. In 1998, Gregory Feist conducted a meta-analysis of research exploring personality traits in scientific and artistic creativity. Utilizing the Big Five traits as common variables, Feist was able to combine research findings from many studies on creative personalities. The results of Feist's analysis show that creative people are more open to new experiences, less conventional and conscientious. In addition, this study found creative individuals are more self-accepting, self-confident, dominant, hostile, ambitious, and impulsive than their less creative counterparts. This research highlights the different personality traits of creative scientists and artists.

In addition to the meta-analysis focused on creativity and the Big Five personality traits, other researchers have been exploring creative personality traits quantitatively. In 2006, Zorana Ivcevic and John Mayer explored a narrower selection of creative personality traits, including emotions and motivation, cognition, social expression, and self-regulation. This study produced profiles of creative traits and behaviors that discriminated between the conventional person, the everyday creative person, the artist, and the scholar. The results of this study suggest that the personality traits of creative individuals may influence the field they enter. Researchers [Page 186]identified openness to experience, creative role, persistence, trait hypomania (the ability to work with intense energy in a specific area of study for long periods of time), and intellectual curiosity as traits that are more prevalent in creative individuals. They also identified a creative scholar cluster of traits that included risk taking, divergent thinking, and intrinsic motivation. The results of this study are important because they suggest that there are different personality traits among groups of creative people and that these traits may influence the domain in which an individual is able to be creative.

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