which was stimulated by the field. The variation must then be selected by the field for inclusion in the domain.
Cultures which facilitate creativity
Cultures which promote creativity are probably those in which information is physically stored accurately rather than transmitted orally, and accessible to all members of the culture rather than kept secret from all but a few. The more differentiated the separate domains within the culture, such as religion, science and art, and the more loosely coupled these domains are, the more likely new ideas are to be accepted since the innovations will entail changes within only a circumscribed part of the culture. The more exposed the culture is to information from other cultures, the more likely the occurrence of creative innovation.
Domains which facilitate creativity
Domains in which clear and accurate symbol systems are used to record information probably promote greater innovation because of the ease with which they can incorporate new ideas into the existing knowledge base. Domains in which the information is very tightly organised and integrated probably are poor at accepting innovation and so are not conducive to creativity, nor are loosely organised domains where innovations may go unrecognised. Moderately well-organised domains probably foster creativity. Creativity within a domain, such as religion, politics or science, is probably made more difficult when the domain is central to the culture, closely linked to all aspects of the culture and accessibly to only an elite few, for example religion in the Middle Ages or physical science in the second half of the twentieth century. Where a domain is not central to a culture, only loosely linked to other aspects of the culture and open to many people, then innovation and creativity probably flourish, for example popular music in the second half of the twentieth century.
Societies which facilitate creativity
Societies in which there is surplus physical and mental energy are more likely to promote creativity than those in which all energy is devoted to survival. Societies that value change and innovation with mercantile economies are more likely to foster creativity than those committed to convention and maintaining the status quo. Societies in which there are external threats or internal strife foster creativity.
Fields which facilitate creativity
Fields are likely to promote creativity if their practitioners can obtain economic resources or status from society. Where a field is overly dependent for judgements about the value of new ideas on religious, political or economic considerations, it is less likely to promote creativity. Creativity also will not flourish where the field is very independent from other domains of society and has few links with them. Overly bureaucratic fields that are rigidly organised constrain originality. Domains that have lax criteria for admitting new ideas debase the domain and those that have too stringent criteria stifle creativity.
Family life which facilitates creativity
Individuals who have grown up in families which have surplus energy and resources to devote to curiosity and creativity are more likely to be creative than those that grow up in families where interest in anything but survival is discouraged. Creativity is fostered when there is respect within the family for learning. Creativity is more likely to occur where the family can introduce a child to a domain and field, through school placement, mentors or organised artistic or athletic pastimes. Creativity is more likely where individuals grow up in marginalised families and want to break out of this situation.
Evidence from case studies shows that diversifying experiences, which serve to weaken the constraints entailed by conventional socialisation, and challenging experiences, which strengthen the person’s capacity to persevere when obstacles or adversity are encountered, foster creativity (Simonton, 2000).
Personal characteristics which facilitate creativity
Personal attributes conducive to creativity include: special talents or aptitudes; intrinsic motivation to work hard in the field in which one is talented; well-developed divergent thinking skills; an openness to experience; flexibility; and an unconventional disposition.
To make a creative contribution the individual must have internalised the rules of the domain and the opinions in the field, be dissatisfied with some aspect of these and then come up with a variety of new ideas. At this point, the kernel of creativity is recognising the good new ideas and being able to hold onto these and discard the less useful ideas.
Csikszentmihalyi’s (1996) own case study research and the research findings presented below offer support for many of the hypotheses entailed in this elaborate systems view of creativity.
Sternberg and Lubart’s investment theory
According to Sternberg and Lubart’s (1999) investment theory of creativity, individuals make creative contributions to a field when they ‘buy low and sell high’ in a field of ideas. That is, they ‘buy’ or adopt poorly developed ideas which are unpopular or unfamiliar but which have growth potential, invest creatively in these and develop them into ‘creative products’ before moving on to ‘new’ unpopular ideas with growth potential.
A unique characteristic of the creative individual is persistence in developing a set of ideas despite resistance from the field to these new developments and a lack of acceptance.
Creativity, according to investment theory, requires a confluence of six factors. First, it involves the intellectual abilities required to see problems in novel unconventional ways and recognise which problems are worth pursuing, and the ability to sell one’s ideas to others. Second, it requires sufficient knowledge about a field to move forward in it, but not so much that one is paralysed by conventional practices. Third, creativity requires the capacity to think in novel ways about effective problem solving and to think globally (about the big picture) as well as locally (about details). Fourth, creativity requires a personality characterised by sensible risk taking (particularly in the area of buying low and selling high), persistence in overcoming obstacles (in tolerating the field’s resistance to one’s new ideas), self-efficacy and a tolerance for uncertainty and ambiguity. Fifth, creativity requires intrinsic motivation to work in the field. Sixth, creativity requires a supportive environment which rewards creative contributions to the field.
Sternberg and Lubart’s (1999) investment theory of creativity offers an elaboration of the way in which individuals select areas for innovation, and so fills in some of the detail absent from Csikszentmihalyi’s (1999) broader framework. The six conditions necessary for creativity to occur are similar in both theories. A detail absent from both theories is the temporal sequence involved in creative production.
Research findings on creativity
Reviews of the literature on creativity allow a number of broad conclusions to be drawn about the stages of creativity; individual differences and creativity; intelligence,
personality, motivation and brain processes involved in creativity (Simonton, 2000;
Sternberg, 1999).
Stages of creativity
Since the gestalt psychologists’ early formulations, numerous theorists have proposed that the process of creativity follows a series of stages (Simonton, 2000). Case studies of the lives of very creative people have thrown light on the stages involved in the creative process (Poicastro and Gardner, 1999). Such studies have focused on the lives of Darwin the naturalist and Piaget the polymath (Gruber and Wallace, 1999), Einstein the physicist, Freud the psychoanalyst, Gandhi the political activist, Picasso the painter, Stravinski the musical composer, T.S.Eliot the poet, Martha Graham the dancer (Gardner, 1993), John Stuart Mill, the philosopher, Norbert Weiner, the founder of cybernetics, George Bernard Shaw, the writer, and Michael Faraday, the scientist (Howe, 1999). Creative adults have a history of many years of training to gain expert knowledge in their field. After this apprenticeship or period of immersion, which usually lasts about ten years, they make their creative contributions which are often not a single product, but a network of interrelated enterprises. Creative output is curvilinear and follows an inverted-backwards J-shaped function. The best work is usually produced at the point of greatest productivity (Simonton, 2000).
Case studies have borne out Csikszentmihalyi’s (1999) hypothesis that to make a creative contribution the individual must have internalised the rules of the domain and the opinions in the field, be dissatisfied with some aspect of these and then come up with a variety of new ideas.
Acts of creativity, which may appear as sudden insights into how particular problems may be solved, typically follow long and hard work on details related to the problem and its solution, and a period of incubation during which problem solving occurs in the cognitive unconscious.
Most creative people have a sense of their finished product before they start. Much of their work is publicly articulating and differentiating the detail entailed by this preliminary intuitive sense of the finished product.
Individual differences in creativity
Guilford (1967), who viewed creative abilities as a subset of skills within his Structure of the Intellect Model, developed divergent thinking skills tests to evaluate these. Torrance (1974) and others have continued this research tradition, by developing creative thinking tests modelled, in style, on intelligence tests which show that there are individual differences in creativity which are normally distributed within the population. Torrance’s (1974) Test of Creative Thinking is still the most widely used psychometric research instrument in the field. This and other similar tests have been shown to have good reliability but only moderate predictive criterion validity. That is, the correlation between test scores in childhood or adolescence and the production of creative work in adulthood is small. Creativity as measured by creativity and divergent thinking tests is fairly stable over time, but in children there is a slump in late elementary school: the fourth-grade slump.
Creativity self-rating scales or parent and teacher rating scales; psychometric rating scales for judging the originality of creative products; and rating scales for quantifying aspects of environments, such as supervisor encouragement or freedom to choose assignments that promote creativity, have been developed and many show good reliability and validity (Plucker and Renzulli, 1999).
Intelligence and creativity
Creativity as measured by divergent thinking tests correlates moderately with measures of IQ measured by conventional intelligence tests. A certain basic level of analytical intelligence is essential for creativity, but beyond that critical base level, creativity and IQ are relatively independent sets of abilities.
Guilford’s (1967) Structure of the Intellect Model and newer models, such as Sternberg’s (1997) Triarchic Model, subsume creativity into a much broader definition of intelligence. Guilford (1967) included both convergent (analytical) thinking skills and divergent (creative thinking skills) within his overall model of the intellect. In Sternberg’s (1997) triarchic theory of intelligence (described below in the section on wisdom) he argues that effective adaptation to the environment, and hence successful use of intelligence, involves combining analytic intelligence with practical intelligence and creative intelligence.
Personality and creativity
Feist (1999), in a thorough literature review of empirical studies, concluded that, compared with normal controls, creative artists and scientists have different personalities.
They tend to be more open to new experiences; more self-confident, dominant, driven, ambitious and impulsive; more hostile; and less conscientious and conventional. While creative artists and scientists differ from normal controls in these respects, their personality profiles differ from each other insofar as scientists are more conscientious while artists are more emotionally unstable and unconventional. The creative personality profile is relatively enduring over time and the profiles that characterise creative adults is similar to that shown by creative children and adolescents. However, as has already been noted, giftedness in childhood (expert performance in conformity with rules of the domain) rarely leads to adult creativity (innovation which violates the rules of the domain).
Motivation and creativity
Intrinsic motivation, discussed in Chapter 2, is essential for creativity (Collins and Amabile, 1999). Intrinsic motivation refers to a willingness to engage in an activity for its own sake because it is challenging, interesting and enjoyable rather than to achieve some other end. In contrast, extrinsic motivation arises from a wish to achieve some external goal by engaging in an activity, such as receiving social or financial rewards, avoiding sanctions or obtaining feedback. Extrinsic motivators, such as providing feedback, rewards or sanctions that distract attention from the task or reduce perceived autonomy, hinder creativity. However, other types of extrinsic motivators, such as providing
task-related feedback which enhance perceived competence and taskinvolvement, facilitate creativity. Task-related feedback may be a useful extrinsic motivator when ‘getting up to speed’ before making a major creative breakthrough or working out the fine details of a creative product after a major creative breakthrough. Extrinsic motivators such as receiving recognition for creativity may also be an important motivator for going through the steps necessary for bringing creative work to the attention of people within one’s field. Thus, there may be a motivation-work cycle match where intrinsic motivation is critical during the period just prior to and during creative insight, but facilitative extrinsic motivators such as task-relevant feedback or the prospect of recognition may be important before and after this particular time period.
Brain processes and creativity
Psychophysiological studies of creativity indicate that creative people show low levels of cortical activation during the inspiration stage of creativity and higher levels of cortical activation when resting than non-creative people (Martindale, 1999). In these studies low levels of cortical activation are indexed by the percentage of time in EEG alpha state, with high percentages of alpha associated with low cortical arousal.
Psychophysiological studies show that attention is defocused, thought is associative and a large number of mental representations are activated during periods of low cortical activation associated with creative inspiration (Runco and Sakamoto 1999).
Within western cultures, giftedness is typically associated with childhood, creativity with adulthood, and wisdom, the focus of the next section, with middle and later life.
WISDOM
Distinctions are made between implicit and explicit theories of wisdom (Sternberg, 2000a). Implicit theoretical approaches to wisdom aim to articulate folk conceptions of the nature of wisdom. That is, psychologists conduct studies to find out what the man in the street thinks wisdom is. In contrast, theories or wisdom developed by psychologists may be classified as explicit theoretical approaches to wisdom. In studies of implicit theories of wisdom, participants are asked to rate the sorts of words that characterise wise people and these words are then collapsed into dimensions using multidimensional scaling techniques (e.g. Clayton and Birren, 1980). The results of these studies show that people have a clear understanding that wisdom is related to excellence and differentiated from other concepts such as social intelligence, maturity and creativity. Wisdom involves an exceptional level of personal and interpersonal competence including the abilities to listen, evaluate and give advice and is used for the wellbeing of self and others (Baltes and Staudinger, 2000). Explicit theories of wisdom include those that define wisdom as a stage of personality development (Erikson et al., 1986); a stage of cognitive development (Basseches, 1984; Riegel, 1973); or a high level of skill development that entails both personality and cognitive processes (Baltes and Staudinger, 2000; Sternberg, 2000a).
Wisdom as the final stage of personality development
Erik Erikson, a Jewish psychoanalyst who fled Nazi Germany prior to the Second World War, has addressed the issue of wisdom within the context of his lifecycle model of personality development (Erikson et al., 1986; McAdams and de St Aubin, 1998). Within this model, the lifecycle is divided into a series of stages each of which involves facing a challenge or crisis that requires resolution. If resolution occurs, a particular personal strength or virtue evolves and if not, a personal difficulty or vulnerability is engendered.
The ease with which successive dilemmas are managed is determined partly by the success with which preceding dilemmas were resolved. Erikson’s model is presented in Table 5.1. What follows is a summary of the main hypotheses entailed in this theory.
Trust v mistrust
The main psychosocial dilemma to be resolved during the first 18 months of life is trust versus mistrust. If parents respond to infants’ needs in a predictable and sensitive way, the infant develops a sense of trust. In the long term, this underpins a capacity to have hope in the face of adversity and to trust, as adults, that difficult challenges can be resolved. If the child does not experience the parent as a secure base from which to explore the world, the child learns to mistrust others and this underpins a view of the world as threatening. This may lead the child to adopt a detached position during