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Solitary Minds and Social Capital: Latent Inhibition, General Intellectual Functions and Social Network Size Predict Creative Achievements

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Szabolcs Kéri
Szabolcs Kéri
Szabolcs Kéri
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Abstract

Successful creative accomplishment is influenced by both individual and social factors. The aim of this study was to investigate the relationship between these factors in 111 Central-Eastern European volunteers recruited from the community. Individual factors evaluated in this study included IQ, latent inhibition (LI), and schizotypal personality traits. In addition to these measures, the size of the primary social network (relatives and friends who know and personally contact each other) and the broader network (persons to whom Christmas cards are sent) were evaluated. Result revealed that the personality trait unusual experiences significantly predicted real-life creative achievements. However, when LI was taken into consideration, this relationship did not retain significance. Further independent predictors of creativity were IQ and, most importantly, primary but not broader social network size. These results suggest that decreased LI, higher intellect and stronger social support independently facilitate real-life creative accomplishment. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
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Solitary Minds and Social Capital: Latent Inhibition, General Intellectual
Functions and Social Network Size Predict Creative Achievements
Szabolcs Ke´ri
University of Szeged, Faculty of Medicine, Department of Physiology, Szeged
and National Psychiatry Center, Budapest, Hungary
Successful creative accomplishment is influenced by both individual and social factors. The aim of this study
was to investigate the relationship between these factors in 111 Central-Eastern European volunteers recruited
from the community. Individual factors evaluated in this study included IQ, latent inhibition (LI), and
schizotypal personality traits. In addition to these measures, the size of the primary social network (relatives
and friends who know and personally contact each other) and the broader network (persons to whom
Christmas cards are sent) were evaluated. Result revealed that the personality trait unusual experiences
significantly predicted real-life creative achievements. However, when LI was taken into consideration, this
relationship did not retain significance. Further independent predictors of creativity were IQ and, most
importantly, primary but not broader social network size. These results suggest that decreased LI, higher
intellect and stronger social support independently facilitate real-life creative accomplishment.
Keywords: creativity, latent inhibition, social network, personality, IQ
What are the predictors of creative accomplishment? Can cre-
ativity be conceptualized as an individual trait of solitary, clever,
and unusual minds or is it closely related to social networks? These
two ideas are often quoted as independent or mutually exclusive
hypotheses from the points of view of cognitive science, social
psychology and even psychopathology, and so far relatively little
empirical work has been done to compare these two hypotheses
against each other (Hennessey & Amabile, 2010; Runco, 2004).
Regarding individual differences in cognitive abilities, latent
inhibition (LI) and general intellectual functions (IQ) are often
considered as cornerstones of creativity (Carson, Higgins, & Pe-
terson, 2003; Eysenck, 1995; Silva, 2008; Sternberg & O’Hara,
1999). LI is a special ability of the nervous system to tune down
information that was previously experienced as irrelevant (Lubow,
1989). LI serves an important function in directing the focus of
attention away from irrelevant details, and thus facilitating con-
vergent thinking and goal-directed behavior. However, reduced LI
can expand the availability of stimuli and mental representations,
which may be essential to generate novel and original associations
and to intuitively gain insight into complex problems (Simonton,
1988). It has been shown that lower LI is associated with person-
ality traits such as openness to experience and extraversion (Pe-
terson & Carson, 2000; Peterson, Smith, & Carson, 2002), which
are marked predictors of divergent thinking and creativity (e.g.,
Feist, 1998; Furnham & Bachtiar, 2008; King, Walker, & Broyles,
1996; McCrae, 1987). Carson et al. (2003) demonstrated an in-
triguing interaction between LI and IQ in relation to creativity: the
highest eminent creative accomplishments were observed in per-
sons with low LI and high IQ. Additionally, persons with de-
creased LI seem to have a higher faith in their intuition to solve
various problems (Kaufman, 2009).
LI may provide a valid link between creativity and psychopa-
thology. Patients with acute schizophrenia and healthy individuals
with schizotypal personality traits display decreased LI
(Braunstein-Bercovitz, Rammsayer, Gibbons, & Lubow, 2002;
Lubow, 2005), and there is evidence that schizotypal traits, such as
unusual experiences, broadened conceptual categories and loos-
ened associations, are associated with creativity (Claridge, 1998;
Eysenck, 1995).
Altogether, these results suggest that at the individual level
creativity is associated with an ability to reach information that is
otherwise screened out. General intellectual functions and unusual
personality traits may facilitate the generation of original experi-
ences, ideas and novel associations. However, creativity is rarely
confined to solitary minds; all creative activities from the gener-
ation of new ideas and artistic objects to the acceptance and
appreciation of these products are basically social and are influ-
enced by group organization, personal relationship and support,
and cultural context (Amabile, 1996; Brass, 1995;
Csı´kszentmiha´lyi, 1990; Glaveanu, 2010; John-Steiner, 2005). In a
seminal report, Simonton (1975) collected information from 127
generations of European history and found that creative eminence
and development were affected by social factors ranging from the
availability of role models within the specific creative domain to
political instability. However, different categories of social rela-
tionships have a distinct effect on successful creative achievements
(Simonton, 1984, 1992). Within the family domain, positive role
models, nourishing environment, and traumatic events were
This article was published Online First January 17, 2011.
Szabolcs Ke´ri, Department of Physiology, University of Szeged, Szeged,
Hungary, and National Psychiatry Center, Budapest, Hungary.
The study was supported by the Hungarian Research Fund (OTKA
NF72488). The author is indebted to Andrea Szaka´cs and Zsolt Halas for
assistance in data collection.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Szabolcs
Ke´ri, National Psychiatry Center, Balassa u. 6, 1083, Budapest, Hungary.
E-mail: szkeri@phys.szote.u-szeged.hu
Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts © 2011 American Psychological Association
2011, Vol. 5, No. 3, 215–221 1931-3896/11/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/a0022000
215
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... Linking this idea with the consideration that leaky attention might attenuate latent inhibition, led to the prediction that creative people might show attenuated latent inhibition (Carson, 2011;2014;Eysenck, 1993Eysenck, , 1995. Several studies have revealed favourable evidence for this prediction, measuring creativity both through divergent thinking tasks (Fink et al., 2012) and self-reports of creative achievement (Carson et al., 2003;Kéri, 2011; however, see Burch et al., 2006;Holt et al., 2020). ...
... To test these hypotheses, we designed a study that assessed latent inhibition, divergent thinking, and the characteristics of testimonies in an eyewitness memory task (see Figure 1). As a starting point of the study, we hypothesized that individuals with higher creative performance, measured through the Alternative Uses Task-an established assessment of divergent thinking abilities (Guilford, 1967)-would exhibit attenuated latent inhibition, replicating previous findings (e.g., Carson et al., 2003;Kéri, 2011). ...
... A key feature of our experiment was the use of a new procedure for measuring latent inhibition, in which pre-exposure to the target stimulus was not accompanied by a masking task. In doing so, we were responding to criticisms raised by previous studies (Byrom et al., 2018), which have suggested that procedures with masked pre-exposure, such as those used in previous research on the relationship between latent inhibition and creativity (Carson et al., 2003;Kéri, 2011), may not have measured genuine latent inhibition effects, but rather other types of effects related to inattention, such as learned irrelevance (Le Pelley & Schmidt-Hansen, 2010). The presence of a masking task in these previous studies opens the possibility that the loss of attention to the target stimulus would not have occurred spontaneously as a direct, and exclusive, result of the non-reinforced pre-exposure. ...
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