In Study 10, I tested whether presenting pictures depicting objects would result in larger differences between Brazilian and British respondents (like Study 8), or would result in larger similarities (like Study 9). Further, I was interested whether this method would still reveal the art bias in lay conceptions of creativity. The objects were related to art, engineering, or mathematics (e.g., impressionist painting, a steam engine, and mathematical formulae or proofs). Based on the findings of Study 8 and 9, I again expected to find that objects related to art would be perceived as more creative, followed by engineering and mathematical objects. I further expected this effect to be stronger in Brazil than in the UK.
Method
Power analysis. I again assumed an effect size of Cohen’s d = 0.50, resulting in a target sample of 86 participants per country with a power of .90.
Participants. Participants were 81 from Brazil with a mean age of 24.50 (SD = 7.60, 57% female, 11% missing values) and 90 from the UK with a mean age of 18.83 (SD = 1.02, 91% female, 1% missing). Brazilian participants were not compensated for their participation, and British participants received course credit.
Procedure. Brazilian participants were recruited via Facebook. I targeted psychology students by posting a short advertisement for the study in psychological groups in and around João Pessoa, where data for Studies 8 and 9 were collected.
British participants were undergraduate psychology students from Cardiff University. All participants completed the survey online.
Material. I selected 26 pictures displaying various objects. Twenty-two were chosen to be related to art, engineering, or mathematics. The remaining 4 pictures were included as ‘filler’-pictures, because they were thought to depict low-creativity objects. The 22 pictures were categorized by a graduate student of art history. She categorized 10 pictures as art related and 12 as related to problem solving or engineering, on the grounds that the objects they depict fulfil a specific purpose and consequently solve a specific problem. In a next step, I moved three pictures from the engineering category to a separate mathematics category, namely Einstein’s formula E = mc2written on a chalkboard, a mathematical proof, and the chemical formula for vitamin B12. The remaining pictures depicting objects related to engineering were a clamp, a gramophone, the structural features of a house, a large and complex traffic junction, a light bulb, a plane, many water slides in a swimming pool, a very early steam engine, and a Roman aqueduct. Although engineering is often not perceived as science, it is clearly based on physics, mathematics, and chemistry. The art related objects were 6 paintings
(Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian man, a Chinese painting, an impressionist painting, a modern painting, a large scale painting on the street, and a graffiti by Banksy), 3 sculptures (Michelangelo’s David, a steel horse, and an African sculpture), and a large hedge maze. The low creativity objects were a buttered slice of toast, a wooden pile, a simple wooden bridge made of a few planks, and a campfire. All pictures can be found in Appendix A.
The instructions were “You are going to see different objects that were all
created by humans. You will be asked to rate the amount of creativity that was needed to come up with the idea for the object and the creation of the object.” The item below
each picture used the same wording: “Amount of creativity needed to come up with the idea for and the creation of this object”. Responses were given on a slider ranging from 0 to 100. Reliabilities for all three scales (art, engineering/science, and mathematics) were ≥ .75 in both countries (Table 4.2).
Results
To test whether the participants understood and followed the instructions, I first compared the low creativity pictures with the art related, engineering, and mathematical pictures. Both in Brazil and the UK, the four low creativity items were judged to be lower in creativity (ds = 0.97 – 1.84, ps < .001, PCRs = 63 – 36, AEs = .23 – .34, see Table 4.2).
Next, a mixed-model ANOVA was conducted with type of picture (art,
engineering, and mathematics) as the within-participants factor and country (Brazil vs UK) as the between-participants factor. The main effect for country was significant,
F(1, 162) = 34.07, p < .001, = .12, as was the effect for domain, F(2, 324) = 13.99, p < .001, = .03. The interaction did not reach significance, F(2, 324) = 0.86, p = .43,
= .002.
The results of independent sample Welch’s t-tests can be found in Table 4.2. As expected, Brazilian participants rated objects related to engineering as more creative than British participants, but surprisingly also did so for the other two categories of picture.
Because the interaction was not significant, the four categories were compared using within-participants t-tests across both countries. All categories differed
significantly from each other at p < .001, except art and mathematics (p = .93). Again, no corrections for multiple comparisons were used for the reasons stated above (doing so would not have changed the pattern of results).
Table 4.4
Comparison of objects across countries
Brazil UK M SD α M SD α df t d 95% CI of d PCR AE Art (10) 72.91 14.57 .84 61.39 12.49 .81 152.68 5.46*** 0.86 0.53, 1.18 67 .12 Engineering (9) 81.53 12.77 .84 66.40 15.00 .85 163.96 7.02*** 1.08 0.75, 1.41 59 .15 Mathematics (3) 73.17 23.37 .75 61.25 22.97 .83 156.37 3.28** 0.51 0.20, 0.83 80 .12 Low creativity (4) 49.67 25.02 .69 32.53 21.30 .68 146.26 4.61*** 0.74 0.42, 1.07 71 .17
Note. Number of items/pictures are in brackets. * p < .05, ** p < .01, *** p < .001
Discussion
In Study 10, I found that objects related to engineering were perceived as more creative compared to the other three categories. Furthermore, art and mathematical objects were perceived as equally creative. From a similarity perspective, all between- and within-country comparisons revealed clearly higher levels of similarity, replicating the Study 9 findings that Brazilians and British participants gave relatively similar responses.
Most important, the pattern of results is different from the one observed in Study 9, where art related professions were judged to be more creative. This difference
between studies indicates that the type of stimuli used (names of professions vs. pictures) may determine the perceptions of creativity, which raises doubts about the generalizability of art bias. If I had compared only the low creativity objects with the art objects, I would have found clear evidence for the art bias in both countries. It is
possible that other factors have influenced participants’ ratings, such as the ‘wow-factor’ or novelty. For example, a large-scale painting on the street, displaying a three
dimensional crevasse (see Appendix A), was rated as most creative of all objects, both in Brazil and the UK. However, if the streets in Brazil and the UK were full of such
large-scale paintings, participants would likely have rated the painting in my study as less creative.
This issue calls for more research using a within-study comparison of different types of stimuli. It is not a trivial issue whether inferences about a value like creativity depend on whether people imagine an abstract profession or concrete outputs of the profession. In cognition more generally, it is not assumed that processing of exemplars will map cleanly from one level or form of representation to another (e.g., from
linguistic to pictorial). From a practical perspective, this difference may matter if people draw on their inferences about professions when choosing a career as opposed to
drawing on their inferences about visual depictions of the outputs of these professions.
General Discussion
Across three studies I explored whether (1) there is a bias against science, and (2) there is a bias towards art in lay conception of creativity, and (3) the findings can be replicated in a non-Western country. Study 8 revealed a spontaneous association of art with creativity, but only in the British sample and not the Brazilian one. Science or scientists were barely spontaneously associated with creativity by participants in either country. In Study 9, both Brazilian and British participants considered professions in the art domain as needing more creativity compared to professions in the everyday life and science domains. However, this effect was stronger in the UK than in Brazil. In contrast, in Study 10, I found that in both countries objects related to engineering were rated as needing more creativity than were objects related to art. Further, one of the primary outcomes of mathematics, formulae and proofs, were rated as needing the same amount of creativity as art objects.
The results are interesting from a similarity perspective as well. In Study 8, I found that art was spontaneously associated more often with creativity in a British than
in a Brazilian sample, revealing an absolute difference. However, in none of the
subsequent 16 between-group comparisons was I able to replicate this finding. Because this absolute difference found in Study 8 was based on a relatively small sample (N = 67) a replication would be desirable before drawing strong conclusions.
Taken together, these findings support the claim of Henrich et al. (2010) that findings need to be replicated outside of Western countries, in that results in all three studies differed significantly between Brazil and the UK within the classical difference framework (i.e., mean comparison). This, together with the finding that Brazilians judged all objects as requiring more creativity than British participants did, supports the claim made by Glăveanu (2010a, 2010b) that perceptions of creativity differ between countries. This finding that Brazilians rated in Study 9 and 10 everything on average as more creative can potentially be explained if the material used was more new to
Brazilians than Britons. In particular, the objects used in Study 10 are mainly centred around Europe (e.g., Michelangelo, steam engine). Further, there is evidence that Brazilians assign higher arousal ratings to emotional photographs compared to US- Americans (Ribeiro, Pompéia, & Bueno, 2005), which raises the possibility that Brazilians may be more easily aroused and impressed than Britons and rated therefore the professions and objects as more creative.
Consequently, findings concerning lay conceptions of creativity should not be generalized from one country to another. This point is also supported in a recent study which found some differences between Chinese and US-American participants
regarding which cues are indicators of creativity: breakthrough, surprise, and potential were indicators in both countries, but easy-to-use, feasible, and for-a-mass-market were only seen as cues in China (Loewenstein & Mueller, 2016).
The current findings also imply that the art bias is not universal and that it depends on the method (cf. Glăveanu, 2014). The art bias was stronger in the UK, stronger when the creativity of professions from different domains was rated, and was absent when pictures displaying objects from various domains were used.
This leads to an important implication. If policy makers, companies, and teachers want to improve the image of science (Ahlgren & Walberg, 1973; Kind et al., 2007; Mead & Métraux, 1957), they should display the outcomes of sciences in a concrete way. One possible way to do this would be to utilize the finding that creativity is usually perceived as positive (Cropley et al., 2010) and to emphasize that creativity is also an important element within science by displaying the outcome of science. This may be especially relevant for students with a lower socioeconomic status, given that they are likely to have, almost by definition, a more vague impression of science. This also points to an important limitation of my studies: The participants were mainly university students. Further studies are needed to test whether the findings can be replicated in a school student sample and whether they can be used to change attitudes towards sciences.
From a theoretical point of view, the present research raises the question of the definition of creativity, because creativity is differently conceived across countries, unlike scientific definitions of creativity. This is in line with previous research which has found differences between Chinese and US-American lay conceptions of creativity and therefore suggested a need to differentiate between ‘folk creativity’ and the
scientific study of creativity (cf. Loewenstein & Mueller, 2016). Differentiating
between a scientific and lay person understanding of creativity is also important because the lay conception of creativity was found to influence how much specific products are desired (Paletz & Peng, 2008).
In summary, results indicate that there are both differences and similarities in what is thought of as creative in two countries. In two studies, I found a bias against science – scientists were less strongly associated with creativity compared to art, and I also demonstrated in Study 10 how this effect can be reversed.