Creativity

Definition

Creativity can be defined three major ways. First, creativity can be viewed as a concrete product that satisfies two specifications: (1) originality or novelty, and (2) utility usefulness or adaptiveness. The first requirement excludes routine work that may be adaptive but habitual. The second separates creativity from the ideas of a psychotic; such ideas can be highly original but clearly maladaptive. The product may take many forms, such as a discovery, invention, painting, poem, song, design, or recipe. Second, creativity can be defined with respect to the cognitive process that generates creative products. This process may include intuition, imagination, incubation, free association, insight, heuristic search, and the like. Third, the concept can be defined relative to the creative person who has the capacity and the willingness to apply the process that yields the products. This personal disposition toward creativity may entail a set of cognitive abilities, motives, interests, values, and personality traits.

Social Psychology of Creativity

Whether creativity is viewed as product, process, or person, it is evident that there is nothing inherently social about creativity. It is most often viewed as an utterly individual phenomenon. As a consequence, for a considerable time social psychologists did not consider creativity to be a mainstream research area. Instead, most of the publications on the subject were conceived by investigators in cognitive, personality, educational, and applied psychology. This peripheral status notwithstanding, many aspects of creativity do feature a conspicuous social dimension. The social nature of creativity was first recognized by sociologists and cultural anthropologists, some of whom went so far as to argue that creativity was entirely a social event, thereby rendering individual psychology irrelevant. For example, the phenomenon of multiple discovery—where two or more scientists independently and sometimes simultaneously arrive at the same idea—was often cited as positive proof of this extreme position. Such episodes were said to reflect the causal impact of the sociocultural milieu, or zeitgeist. In any case, it is ironic that most of the early research on creativity was conducted either by non–social psychologists or by non–psychological social scientists. The middle, and potentially integrating perspective, was missing.

This entry illustrates the sociopsychological aspects of creativity by looking briefly at the following phenomena: the sociocultural milieu, group dynamics, social influence, interpersonal relationships, and personality.

Sociocultural Milieu

As noted earlier, many sociologists and cultural anthropologists have tended to view creativity as a sociocultural rather than individual phenomenon. This sociological reductionism is clearly invalid. After all, creativity almost invariably emerges out of individual minds. Nevertheless, it remains true that creativity often depends on the zeitgeist. That zeitgeist has two kinds of effects. First, it influences the amount of creativity that appears in a particular time and place. For example, certain sociocultural conditions favor tremendous spurts of creative activity, as those seen in the Golden Age of Greece or in Renaissance Italy. Second, the zeitgeist can affect the qualitative nature of that creativity—the type of creativity that is most favored. For instance, creativity takes a different form depending on whether the culture is individualistic or collectivistic in basic orientation. In an individualistic zeitgeist, originality or novelty tends to have greater weight than does utility or adaptiveness, whereas the reverse is true in a collectivistic zeitgeist. The effects [Page 201]of individualistic versus collectivistic conditions tend to be long lasting. Such cultural values do not come and go very quickly. Yet other sociocultural effects are much more volatile or transient. That is, creativity can be influenced by momentary fluctuations in political, economic, social, or cultural events. For instance, scientific creativity is adversely affected by assassinations, coups d'état, military mutinies, and other forms of political anarchy. Of even greater interest are events that enhance the cultural heterogeneity or diversity of a society. These events include nationalistic revolts as well as the influx of alien ideas through immigration or foreign travel. Although these findings were based on analyses of archival data, the positive relation between cultural diversity and creativity has also been found in laboratory experiments on group creativity.

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