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Cultural Perspectives on Creativity
Abstract
This textbook is a systematic and straightforward introduction to the interdisciplinary study of creativity. Each chapter is written by one or more of the world's experts and features the latest research developments, alongside foundational knowledge. Each chapter also includes an introduction, key terms, and critical thought questions to promote active learning. Topics and authors have been selected to represent a comprehensive and balanced overview. Any reader will come away with a deeper understanding of how creativity is studied – and how they can improve their own creativity.
... These features promote algorithmic fairness (Friedler et al., 2019), provide an opportunity to measure and mitigate bias (Tay et al., 2022), and facilitate cross-cultural comparisons and the study of non-WEIRD (Western European Industrialized Rich Democratic) individuals (Blasi et al., 2022;Durrheim, 2023;Roberts et al., 2020;Roberts, 2024). The current work reframes the conceptualization of creativity, consistent with socio-cultural theories (Glăveanu, 2020;Lubart et al., 2019), and integrates topic modeling and LLMs to explain, characterize, and predict human creativity. ...
... Creativity is woven into a specific cultural and temporal context (Glăveanu, 2020;Lubart et al., 2019). Thematic profile analysis provides a computational method to situate creative ideas in a context-dependent and culturally specific semantic space. ...
The world faces formidable challenges that demand creative solutions tailored to specific socio-cultural contexts. We introduce thematic profile analysis, a computational method that combines topic modeling with large language models to situate creative ideas within context-dependent and culturally specific semantic spaces. A thematic profile quantifies the semantic distance between an individual’s creative ideas and themes from a corpus. Analyzing 18,414 ideas from 3,213 participants across 74 nationalities, we found that an individual’s thematic profile strongly predicted human creativity ratings (R = .58-.79). Thematic content was critical to creativity, with certain themes being more important to avoid or explore in one culture (e.g., Mexican) than another (e.g., U.S.A.). Thematic profile analysis enabled novel quantitative comparisons of themes across cultures - revealing substantial differences and similarities – providing a robust tool for capturing the context-dependency and cultural specificity of creativity.
... It suggests that a brand can operate much like a culture, in the anthropological sense of the word. According to brand culture theory, a brand is a pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms, whose messages are communicated to people through advertising, perpetuate and develop their knowledge and attitudes towards life (Storme, et al. 2019). This theory also states that consumers today are very concerned with supporting brands that agree with their personal values. ...
This study aims to identify and investigate the factors that influence brand equity in the fast-food business in Kitwe district of Zambia. Unlike other studies, a holistic approach that examined all the Consumer Based Brand Equity (CBBE) drivers of Brand equity (BE) was used. This study used cross-sectional data with a survey approach to collect appropriate data from a randomly selected sample of 400 respondents through online forms. The results showed that among the five determinants of BE, brand awareness, brand loyalty, and perceived quality were found to have a significant effect on BE in fast food businesses. Fast food businesses, especially those in the Kitwe district, should consider creating a loyal customer base by ensuring that their clientele base is kept informed, responding to their complaints, which in the long run enhances their relationships. The results are effective for fast food business firms in developing the necessary business functions that attract more consumers and ensure maximum utility.
... culture dans laquelle baigne l'enfant a une incidence sur le développement de son potentiel créatif. En effet, les recherches ont mis en évidence une distinction entre la conception « occidentale », qui s'attache plus particulièrement à la production en elle-même, et la conception « orientale », plus tournée vers le processus de création en lui-même [17]. De plus, les valeurs transmises par l'environnement culturel viennent stimuler ou freiner l'activité créative de l'enfant ou de l'adolescent, puisque certaines sociétés, qui valorisent le statut de l'individu par rapport au groupe social (société occidentale), tendent à promouvoir les productions créatives qui remettent en question les normes alors que la posture collectiviste (société orientale) les respecte davantage. ...
... An Eastern view of creativity is fatalistic in a sense that the output is in the hands of outside forces. Its process is also nonlinear and seeks to reinvigorate what already exists into new combinations and interpretations ( Lubart, et al., 2019 ). Tan (2016) described it as a type of creativity that is evolutionary. ...
Creativity scholars Runco and Charles (1993) asserted that creativity not only requires originality but it also requires some fit or appropriateness. That is why culture is so influential; it defines appropriateness. In a similar vein, Westwood and Low (2003) emphasized that, “creativity takes place within, is constituted and influenced by, and has consequences for, a social context” (p. 236). With the acceleration of globalization, an examination of creativity would benefit from a more culturally sensitive approach. Towards that end, this article has a focus on examining the basic nature of creativity through the lens of cultural and geographical differences.
... Cultures, in fact, difer in their conceptions of the nature of creativity itself Lubart et al., 2019 ;Niu & Zhou, 2017 ). Te product-oriented, originality-based phenomenon emphasized in this book is a Western orientation, whereas some Eastern or traditional cultures conceptualize creativity as a process of individual growth, spiritual journey, or evolution (rather than revolution) in shared community culture (see Chapter 3 ). ...
... In some cultures, creativity is more an individual act, whereas in others it is inherently more collective. Some cultures express a strong need for certainty or respect of tradition, which may place less value on risky, culturally novel endeavors (see Lubart, Glaveanu, De Vries, Camargo & Storme, 2019). According to the sociocultural approach, creativity is embedded as a phenomenon in a cultural time and space. ...
An overview of Creativity based on the 7 C's conception
The fact that language is continually changing and that there is a constant flow of linguistic innovations is blatantly obvious. In recent years, there has been a growing interest in the notion of E(nlarging/extending)-creativity in the context of Construction Grammar (Bergs 2019; Hoffmann 2020, 2022; Ivorra Ordines & López Meirama 2024; Mellado Blanco 2023; among others), in the sense of creating new communicative possibilities that are not already in the language. Against this background, I investigate the extravagant nature of a family of consecutive constructional idioms using data from the esTenTen18 corpus (Sketch Engine), with instances such as una sed que me bebería el entero lago ‘a thirst that could drink the entire lake’. After a constructionist description of the patterns under discussion, the aim of this paper is twofold. First, to elucidate the intersection of creativity and extravagance. Second, to explore the extravagant nature of such patterns through different indicators: orthotypographic markers and cognitive devices. Arguably, semi-schematic patterns with a pragmatic point constitute illustrative examples in the interface of syntax and pragmatics, and as such they can be insightful for our understanding of the trade-off between psychological-cognitive factors of creativity and socio-cognitive ones (such as the wish to be extravagant).
Creativity is contextual; opportunities for and ways of being creative vary by culture. While studies have documented the differences between creative behavior in Eastern and Western cultures, comparisons between the United States and Western European nations have been much rarer. This paper presents research comparing the creative storytelling of children in the United States and Spain. Moreover, instead of focusing only on differences in mean scores, we ask a different question—what predicts ratings of children’s creative storytelling from different cultures? Results show that in the U.S., only novelty predicted ratings of creativity, but in Spain, novelty and the use of emotions independently predicted ratings of story creativity. Several explanations for these observed differences are discussed, including differences in overall culture, as well as possible differences in socialization at school. We discuss how cultural values and national identity contribute to how children approach creative tasks.
The constructional idiom [IRSE/ANDAR(SE)[imperative] a CLAUSE[infinitive]] (e.g., Vete a freír espárragos, lit. 'go to fry asparagus'; Iros a tomar viento, lit. 'go to get wind') is commonly used in Spanish to convey the speaker's strong rejection, and is a hallmark of colloquial language. This makes it an excellent candidate for exploring the phenomenon of extravagance, both because of these characteristics and its structure, which includes an empty slot filled with a clause headed by an infinitive. This structural aspect contributes to variability, as its high token frequency also results in high type frequency. The corpus analysis (Sketch Engine) presented in this paper allows us to illustrate the relationship between creativity and intensification, as well as between innovation and convention. Besides, it underscores the gradual nature of creativity, culminating in extravagance, which speakers employ to gain salience and, in turn, amplify the expressiveness and emotional impact of their statements.
Westerners are better at divergent thinking than Easterners, and previous studies have found this difference relates to collectivism-individualism, however, the underlying mechanism remains unclear. This study aimed to investigate the relationship between individualism-collectivism and divergent thinking from the perspective of semantic networks. A total of 158 participants were measured with the scale of collectivism-individualism tendencies and divergent thinking. Results showed that collectivism and individualism were not significantly associated with the performance of divergent thinking in figural task. And collectivism, rather than individualism, exhibited a negative correlation with originality but a positive correlation with appropriateness in verbal task. Furthermore, collectivism moderated the serial order of originality and appropriateness in verbal task. This study provides preliminary insights into the impact of culture on creativity from semantic network perspectives.
The Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking-Figural (TTCT-F) is a well-known measure of creativity, yet its reliability evidence is hardly reported. In this meta-analysis, we provide such evidence by performing parameter-based meta-analytic structural equation modeling on empirical studies that reported the correlations among the TTCT-F indices. Examining the factor structure of the TTCT-F showed that a two-factor structure (Innovative and Adaptive) fitted the primary study data better than a previously assumed single-factor structure. We conducted a reliability generalization study with a sample of 44 correlation matrices from 38 studies (N = 13,108). We obtained McDonald’s Omega coefficients for the two factors and the composite reliability. Our analyses indicated that the composite reliability was acceptable (ω = .81). Furthermore, we found higher reliability coefficients for the Innovative (INNOV) factor (ω = .85) as compared to the Adaptive (ADAPT) factor (ω = .62). Moderator analyses showed that reliability estimates for the INNOV factor were higher with Form A and when there is evidence of discriminant evidence violation. Between the two forms, Form A had higher reliability estimates than Form B. Our findings suggest that composite scores and INNOV scores are more precise than the ADAPT factor scores, supporting their use in research and practical settings.
The importance of creativity in addressing a diverse range of issues and the urgency of fostering it through education from a life-long learning perspective have been recognised in strategic and educational policy documents at both European Union and national levels. While recognising the key role of creativity in driving positive change, Lithuania has considerable room for further growth in fostering creativity amongst its citizens. The growing interest of researchers in studying creativity education can make it difficult to remain at the cutting-edge of knowledge. Since creativity is a culturally grounded construct, it is significant to examine the available evidence in a context-specific setting in order to inform future research directions and facilitate comparisons across contexts. The systematic review aims to explore the state of empirical research on creativity education in the Lithuanian context, focusing on young children of early childhood education and care (ECEC) and primary school age. The study involves a systematic search, appraisal, and synthesis of empirical research evidence published in peer-reviewed scientific journals between 2000 and 2022. The review identifies key trends and gaps in the empirical research evidence on the matter and draws recommendations for future research. The studies reviewed (n = 36) tended to focus on young children's creativity education in the arts, the role of the educator in creating a learning environment conducive to creativity development, and the characteristics of such an environment. Limited interest was expressed in creativity education in domains other than the arts, through non-formal educational activities or through the use of state-of-the-art digital tools.
There are many ways in which we, as speakers, are creative in how we form and interpret new words. Working across the interfaces of psychology, linguistics, psycholinguistics, and sociolinguistics, this book presents cutting-edge interdisciplinary research, showing how we manipulate the range of linguistic tools at our disposal to create an infinite range of words and meanings. It provides both a theoretical account of creativity in word-formation and word-interpretation, and an experimental framework with the corresponding results obtained from more than seven hundred participants. Data drawn from this vast range of speakers shows how creativity varies across gender and age, and demonstrates the complexity of relationships between the examined variables. Pioneering in its scope, this volume will pave the way for a brand new area of research in the formation and interpretation of complex words.
Humans are an incredibly creative species – our minds have evolved to a degree that has enabled us to think original thoughts and come up with novel solutions to a great number of problems. One domain of human cognition that has recently received considerable attention is linguistic creativity. The present contribution will take a closer look at how Construction Grammar can account for various types of verbal creativity. In addition to this, it will also explore the implications of creative utterances for Construction Grammar as a mental theory of language.
Creativity sometimes has been viewed as fixed or absolutist over time and space and other times has been viewed as flexible or relativistic over time and space. The psychometric view has tended toward the absolutist model, the sociocultural view toward the relativistic model. It is proposed that these two views roughly represent a thesis and an antithesis, and that a synthesis with both absolutist and relativistic elements may best capture the nature of creative enterprise. Four models of the composition of creativity and its manifestations are proposed that vary what is fixed and what is variable across time and space.
Cambridge Core - Cognition - The Nature of Human Creativity - edited by Robert J. Sternberg
The aim of this study was to explore whether Multi-User Virtual Environments (MUVE) improve the creativity of users regardless of their creative potential profile. The study involved brainstorming sessions in two settings: a real meeting room (RE) and a similar meeting room in a virtual environment (VE). Twenty groups of three users of public transport were randomly assigned to one of the two conditions and performed a brainstorming task on how to improve mobility in Paris. The results indicated that, at the team level, fluency, and originality were significantly improved by working in VE compared to RE. However, at the individual level, the results suggested that VE did not favor everyone. Participants in VE with high risk-taking propensity were significantly more creative (fluency and originality) than the other participants (e.g., those with a similar profile in RE as well as participants with low scores in risk taking in VE). A similar trend was observed for divergent thinking and mental flexibility but to a lesser extent. The results suggest that VE offered an atmosphere of freedom that disinhibited the participants with a high risk-taking propensity, divergent thinking, and mental flexibility abilities.
In the present study we experimentally manipulated language switching among bilinguals who indicated to be more or less habitual language switchers in daily life. Our aim was to investigate the impact of forced language switching on originality of produced ideas during divergent thinking, conditional on the level of habitual language switching. A sample of bilinguals was randomly assigned to perform alternate uses tasks (AUT’s), which explicitly required them to either switch languages, or to use only one language while performing the tasks. We found that those who were instructed to switch languages during the AUT’s were able to generate ideas that were on average more original, than those who were instructed to use only one language during the AUT’s, but only at higher levels of habitual language switching. At low levels of habitual language switching, the effect reversed, and participants who were instructed to use only one language found ideas that were on average more original, than participants who were required to switch languages during the AUT’s. Implications and limitations are discussed.
Creativity plays an important role in the advancement of all societies around the world, yet the role of cultural influences on creativity is still unclear. Following systems theory, activity theory, and ecocultural theory, semistructured interviews with 30 renowned artists (writers, composers, and visual artists) from Cuba, Germany, and Russia were conducted to explore the complexity of the creative process and potential cultural differences. All interviews were transcribed verbatim and analyzed using consensual qualitative research methodology. The following eight main domains resulted from the interviews: How I became an artist, What being an artist means to me, Creating as a cognitive process, Creating as an emotional process, Creating as a motivational process, Fostering factors of creativity, Hindering factors, and The role of culture in creating. Artists in the three countries similarly talked about creativity being a fluid process where ideas change, and elaborated on the role of intuition and the unconscious when creating art. Meaningful cross-cultural differences were seen among the artists of three cultural backgrounds in terms of attitudes about financial instability, in how they perceive themselves, in their art’s societal function, in the cognitive and in the emotional process of creating, and in terms of social connectedness. Results highlight (a) the complexity of the creative process going beyond cognitive factors and including motivational, emotional, and sociocultural factors, and (b) the cultural differences in the creative process. Results are beneficial for further developing a comprehensive theory of the creative process taking cultural differences into consideration.
Because of the range of design possibilities they provide, virtual environments have a promising potential to support creative work. This paper presents an experiment which explores the effects of contextual cues, provided in a virtual environment, on performance in a creative task. One hundred and thirty-five participants completed a classical creativity task in one of three environments: a virtual creativity conducive environment, comprising standardized elements identified from a survey as being characteristic of environments that support creativity, a real meeting-room (real control environment), and its virtual replication (virtual control environment). Results show that participants produced more original ideas and explored idea categories in greater depth in the creativity conducive environment than in the control conditions. These results were discussed in terms of research on creativity, priming, virtual environments, and of the design of workplaces.
This study clarifies the antecedents of innovative work behavior—a question of interest to
industrial psychologists and managers alike. The article examines the relationship between individual-
level values, psychological contracts, psychological contract breach, and innovative
work behavior (IWB). The sample comprised employees from the Israeli and Indian branches
of a multinational high-tech organization. Questionnaires were distributed via the Internet
and the employees were asked to complete the survey online. Of the 1,000 who were asked to
participate, 188 usable questionnaires were returned, a 19% response rate. The findings show
that individual values, particularly conformity and achievement, were related to IWB above
and beyond the effect of demographic variables. They also show a stronger effect of individual
values than psychological contracts and psychological contract breach.
This study explores the hypothesis that language of testing and mood states can influence creativity in bilinguals. Arabic–English bilingual speakers were induced into positive or negative mood states using film clips and recall-of-events procedures. Then, participants’ creativity was assessed with the Abbreviated Torrance Test for Adults. Participants were tested in either English or Arabic. A Picture Naming Test revealed English as participants’ stronger language and Arabic as their weaker language. Testing in English was found to enhance verbal fluency and originality, as compared to testing in Arabic. Most importantly, an interactive effect of induction (positive, negative) and language of testing (English, Arabic) on creativity emerged. The results revealed two conditions beneficial for participants’ nonverbal originality: a positive mood state when tested in English and a negative mood state when tested in Arabic. These results are discussed in light of the interactive effect of mood induction and linguistic context (stronger vs. weaker) on an individual's creativity.
This study provides new evidence concerning task specificity in creativity – examining through a cross-cultural perspective the extent to which performance in graphic vs. verbal creativity tasks (domain specificity) and in divergent vs. convergent creativity tasks (process specificity) are correlated. The relations between different creativity tasks in monocultural and multicultural samples of Chinese and French children were compared. Electronic versions of the Wallach and Kogan Creativity Test (WKCT, Wallach & Kogan, 1965; Lau & Cheung, 2010) and the Evaluation of Potential Creativity (EPoC, Lubart, Besançon & Barbot, 2011; Barbot, Besançon & Lubart, 2011) were used. Both measures showed satisfactory psychometric properties and cross-cultural structural validity. The results showed that culture has an impact on the structure of creative ability: It appeared that correlation patterns were different across Chinese and French groups and across monocultural and multicultural groups. Such results show that it is crucial to take task specificity into account when investigating the effect of culture on creativity. Indeed, our study implies that cultural differences that are found using one specific creativity task might not be automatically generalizable to all sorts of creativity tasks. Limitations are discussed and perspectives for future research on culture and task specificity in creativity are proposed.
Digital Creativity examines the impact of technology on creative practitioners-how it influences, and sometimes determines, the way they work and what they produce. It questions the claims to creativity of the technology industry and at the same time argues for seeing computing as a craft practice. Artists and craftspeople have always been drawn to new technologies for inspiration, and this book seeks to contextualise the frenzy of claims about the impact of digital technology against the reality of what it is to be creative. The different motivations for creativity are tested, making much-needed distinctions between the practices of the Arts and the models of innovation in engineering and elsewhere in the technology industries. Finally, the book warns of the problems ahead if technology comes to dominate creative practice, either by defining it or by imitating it. Ultimately, artists must engage with the structures of technology if creative practice is to retain a human form and scale. Gregory Sporton is Professor of Digital Creativity at the University of Greenwich, London, UK. He founded and heads the Department of Creative Professions and Digital Arts, which approaches art and design solely based on digital outputs including graphics, film, media, animation, performance and visual arts. With Jonathan Green, he invented MotivePro, a human–computer interface device based on haptics, and regularly publishes work on the issues that surround artists and technology. Available from all good booksellers or online at www.palgrave.com
This paper advances a new theoretical model to understand the effect of culture on creativity in a global context. We theorize that creativity engagement and success depend on the cultural tightness—the extent to which a country is characterized by strong social norms and low tolerance for deviant behaviors—of both an innovator’s country and the audience’s country, as well as the cultural distance between these two countries. Using field data from a global online crowdsourcing platform that organizes creative contests for consumer-product brands, supplemented by interviews with marketing experts, we found that individuals from tight cultures are less likely than counterparts from loose cultures to engage in and succeed at foreign creative tasks; this effect is intensified as the cultural distance between the innovator’s and the audience’s country increases. Additionally, tight cultures are less receptive to foreign creative ideas. But we also found that in certain circumstances—when members of a tight culture do creative work in their own or culturally close countries—cultural tightness can actually promote creativity success. This finding implies that some degree of convergent thinking as engendered by tight cultures could be beneficial for creativity, challenging the dominant view in creativity research that divergent thinking is a prerequisite for creative performance.
The link between multicultural experience and creativity is consistently supported by many empirical studies. However, most of these results are limited to adult participants with foreign living experience. The present study extended previous studies and investigated the positive relationship between multicultural experience and creativity in Taiwan young adolescents living in binational families. With more than 700 young adolescents, the results showed that young adolescents from binational families had parents with lower socioeconomic status than monocultural families. However, young adolescents from binational families performed better on creativity tests (fluency, flexibility, and originality) than those from monocultural families. In addition, when variables of family background and young adolescents' personalities were controlled for, the effect of binational families on creativity remained. The implications for research on multicultural families and young adolescents' creative performance are discussed.
This research explores whether the foreign professional experiences of influential executives predict firm-level creative output. We introduce a new theoretical model, the foreign experience model of creative innovations, to explain how three dimensions of executives' foreign work experiences—breadth, depth, and cultural distance—predict an organization's “creative innovations,” which we define as the extent to which final, implemented products or services are novel and useful from the standpoint of external audiences. We examined 11 years (21 seasons) of fashion collections of the world's top fashion houses and found that the foreign professional experiences of creative directors predicted the creativity ratings of their collections. The results revealed individual curvilinear effects for all three dimensions: moderate levels of breadth and cultural distance were associated with the highest levels of creative innovations, whereas depth showed a decreasing positive effect that never turned negative. A significant three-way interaction shows that depth is the most critical dimension for achieving creative innovations, with breadth and cultural distance important at low but not high levels of depth. Our results show how and why leaders' foreign professional experiences can be a critical catalyst for creativity and innovation in their organizations.
This study further explores the theme of bilingual creativity with the present focus on code-switching. Specifically, it investigates whether code-switching practice has an impact on creativity. In line with the previous research, selective attention was proposed as a potential cognitive mechanism, which on the one hand would benefit from extensive code-switching, and on the other, facilitate creative performance. One hundred and fifty-seven multilingual college students completed a code-switching attitudes and behaviors questionnaire, which served to select habitual and non-habitual code-switchers. These respective groups were compared on creativity and selective attention tests. Habitual code-switchers demonstrated greater innovative capacity than their non-habitual counterparts. However, these groups revealed no difference in selective attention. Moreover, the relationship between selective attention and innovative capacity was found only among non-habitual code-switchers. Further, code-switching induced by a particular emotional state and by a lack of specific vocabulary in a target language appeared to relate to increase in innovative capacity. The discussion of these results lays foundation for further empirical research investigating the role of bilinguals' code-switching in their creative capacity.
Many discussions of the difference between Vygotsky and Piaget focus on the proximal locus of development. For Piaget it is said to be in individual children, who construct knowledge through their actions on the world; for Vygotsky it is said to be in social processes. A more appropriate way to distinguish between them has to do with the role attributed to cultural mediation. Mediation of human action by cultural artifacts played a central role in Vygotsky's account of human development, but was much less important for Piaget. Claims regarding the social origins of individual mental processes in Vygotsky's account need to be understood in light of his claims regarding how artifacts mediate social and individual functioning.
This article presents the concept of creative potential and its link to talent. Psychological measures to assess creative potential in children and adolescents (EPoC) and adults (Creative Profiler) are then described. Implications for developing creativity are proposed.
This study continues the effort to investigate the possible influence of bilingualism on an individual's creative potential. The performances of Farsi-English bilinguals living in the UAE and Farsi monolinguals living in Iran were compared on the Culture Fair Intelligence Test battery and two creativity tests: divergent thinking test (the Abbreviated Torrance Test for Adults) and structured imagination test (Invented Alien Creatures task). The findings of the divergent thinking test revealed that bilingualism facilitates the innovative capacity, the ability to extract novel and unique ideas, but not the generative capacity, the ability to generate and process a large number of unrelated ideas. The findings of the test of structured imagination demonstrated that bilingualism strengthens an ability to violate a standard set of category properties. In addition, the study hints at the construct validity of these two tests of creative functioning. However, the study acknowledges its rather exploratory character as the bilingual and monolingual groups might differ in a number of uncontrolled sociocultural factors that could potentially mediate the effect of bilingualism.
This article reviews contemporary studies on the concept of creativity across two cultures—Eastern (Asian) cultures and Western (American and European) cultures — by examining two bodies of literature. One is on people's implicit theories of creativity across different cultures and the other is on cross-cultural studies of creativity. Studies on implicit theories of creativity in the East suggest that many Asians have similar but not identical conceptions of creativity to many people in the West. Cross-cultural studies of creativity reveal that Easterners and Westerners differ, on average, in their divergent-thinking performance and creative expressions. A view of creativity as relatively culture-specific is presented and the appropriateness of using divergent-thinking tests to measure creativity is discussed.
This article explores creativity in craftwork using the case of Easter egg decoration, a folk art chosen for its traditional roots and diversity of artistic outcomes. This research contributes to the literature at (a) a theoretical level, by conceptualizing a pragmatist-inspired framework of creative activity; (b) a methodological level, by using, beside observation and interview, subjective cameras to record activity; and (c) an empirical level, considering the fact that creativity in folk art has often been a neglected topic. A total of 20 egg decorators of various ages from the village of Ciocăneşti in northern Romania participated in 2 studies. Study 1 concerned the general stages of traditional egg decoration and their characteristics, and Study 2 took a closer look at variations associated with the activity path, the generalities and specificities of work, and how they could be accounted for, particularly in terms of expert–novice differences. These studies revealed the many ways in which creativity is intrinsic to Easter egg decoration, and the final discussion of the article summarizes them with reference to processes of combination and change, copying and translation, personal style, and creative identity. In the end, an understanding of “micro” moments of creativity in craft is achieved, which can help us rethink the relation between tradition and creativity and between folk and fine art. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved)
Researchers examine implicit beliefs about creativity to understand what laypeople think. Past work has looked at cultural differences, characteristics associated with creativity, and the positive or negative valence that people feel toward creativity. In this study, we focused on the Four C Model of Creativity (Beghetto & Kaufman, 2007; Kaufman & Beghetto, 2009) to discover if laypeople perceive nuances in different levels of accomplishment. We found that although Pro-c and little-c merged into one factor, Big-C, mini-c, and Not-c (not creative) were distinguishable. Personality (particularly agreeableness and openness) predicted how participants rated different levels of creativity. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved)
With few exceptions, scholarship on creativity has focused on its positive aspects while largely ignoring its dark side. This includes not only creativity deliberately aimed at hurting others, such as crime or terrorism, or at gaining unfair advantages, but also the accidental negative side effects of well-intentioned acts. This book brings together essays written by experts from various fields (psychology, criminal justice, sociology, engineering, education, history, and design) and with different interests (personality development, mental health, deviant behavior, law enforcement, and counter-terrorism) to illustrate the nature of negative creativity, examine its variants, call attention to its dangers, and draw conclusions about how to prevent it or protect society from its effects.
One potential problem for creativity theory is whether both novelty and appropriateness are equally valid dimensions across cultures. Taking an implicit theory approach, the authors surveyed more than 400 students from Japan, China, and the United States. Using repeated measures scenarios of cooking and textbook products, novelty was found to be important across the three countries for evaluations of creativity. However, the Chinese were more swayed than were the Americans by the novelty manipulation in terms of how much they desired the products. Appropriateness was more important for Americans and Japanese for evaluations of creativity and desire for products. Both novelty and appropriateness had large effects. Rather than relying on assumed country variations, the authors argue that cross-cultural research be used to understand the nature of creativity.
Today's diverse society often includes culturally rich environments that contain cues pertaining to more than one culture. These cultural cues can shape cognitive processes, such as creativity. Recent evidence shows that bicultural experience enhances creativity, and that for culture-related domains, this effect is particularly evident among biculturals who blend their two cultural identities. The present study tested whether enhanced creativity among more blended biculturals was due to increased idea generation (i.e., ideational fluency). Moreover, the authors tested whether these effects generalized to noncultural domains, which may indicate that bicultural experience enhances creativity in broader arenas. One hundred seventy-seven Chinese Americans completed a creativity task in either a monocultural or bicultural context (manipulated via Chinese or American sym-bols or both). Greater bicultural identity blendedness predicted domain-general creativity in bicultural but not in monocultural contexts, and this was mediated by ideational fluency. Implications for enhancing creativity in our diverse society are discussed.
This study presents evidence for the impact of sociocultural environment on creative potential. The divergent thinking performance of American, Russian, and Iranian college students was compared on the Abbreviated Torrance Test for Adults. The study revealed that, compared to the Iranians, Americans and Russians have superior abilities to consider a problem from different perspectives and to generate original solutions to a problem. The performance differences on the originality measure of the representatives of the Western and Eastern countries calls for the possible revisions of the traditional definition of creativity as a construct emphasizing originality in thinking. Although originality and innovation are inherent properties of creative behavior in the Western thought, it might have lesser value in the East.
This article explores the relationship between culture and creativity and innovation. It critically reviews the literature in which cross cultural differences in approaches to creativity and innovation are discussed. It first examines how creativity is conceptualized differentially across cultures and how social structural factors account for differences in creativity and innovation. Evidence for the impact of culture on cognitive style and personality as related to creativity and innovation is covered next. Finally, it addresses directly the relationship between cultural values and creativity/innovation. The article draws the following conclusions: (1) culture can and does impact on creative and innovation processes, but the relationship should not be considered universalistically, simplistically or unreflexively; (2) there is insufficient evidence to enable definitive statements to be made about systematic differences across cultures in personality or cognitive style with respect to creativity; (3) creativity and innovation are complex psychosocial processes involving numerous salient factors of which culture is but one; (4) the weight of evidence suggests that the relationship should be viewed contingently and in subtle and nuanced ways. A contingent view suggests that there are different processes, mechanisms, and structures through which creativity and innovation emerge. Cultures are creative and innovative within the context of their own systems and the exigencies and contingencies of those particular systems.
Creativity in Turkey and Turkish-speaking countries in the Balkans and Turkish Republic is very colorful. In the Anatolia peninsula, hundreds of ethnicities and subcultures have mingled with each other, each protecting its own identity, for thousands of years. Turkey is surrounded by Russia (which at present includes Turkish republics such as Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan), Iraq, Iran, and Syria to the east and south, and Bulgaria and Greece to the west.
Most of the Balkan countries include Turkish minorities and Muslims, such as those who live in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo, Albania, Montenegro, and some parts of Greece and Bulgaria. Within this mosaic, the concept of creativity reflects a deep synthesis of Western and Eastern values.
It is useful to examine how fantasy is perceived in Turkish culture. The Turkish synonym for fantasy, hayal, originates from the Arabic word heyl. Interestingly, heyl means horse in Arabic. Thus in Turkish culture, fantasy could be described as a horse that takes its rider far away beyond the boundaries of the universe.
Today, there seem to exist two main approaches to the importance and function of fantasy within the creative process. One approach was developed by Ahmet İnam, a Turkish philosophy professor at Middle East Technical University, in Ankara. İnam (1996, p. 14) claims that fantasy is the main source of thought.
In this chapter we focus on the links between creativity, learning, and technology in education. More specifically, we propose and exemplify a unitary, sociocultural framework of creative learning based on the notions of position and perspective. We start by specifying some general principles of sociocultural theory, in particular the interdependence between person and context and the way in which psychological processes “extend” into the world through the means of action, interaction, and communication. Following this, we outline the perspectival model of creativity and learning, focused on how re-positioning and perspective-taking lead to new, creative insights, and relate it to various uses of technology in education, including technology mediated creative learning practices and immersive technology. In the end, we reflect on the consequences of these uses for how we understand, theorise, and cultivate creative learning in and beyond the classroom.
This paper examines the contrast and distinction between divergent and convergent scientific creativity, and the paradoxical relationship of scientific creativity with cultural factors in elementary students. With a newly developed measure of potential for scientific creativity, EPoC Science (Lubart et al., in press), students produce ideas in response to scientific problems, and both divergent-exploratory as well as convergent-integrative processes involved in scientific creativity are analyzed. An empirical study (n = 118) was conducted in France with elementary school children (ages 7–10). The divergent-exploratory task was scored for fluency and statistical uniqueness. For the convergent-integrative task, the number of concepts that a student integrated and synthesized, and the originality of the synthesis were scored. Results showed that divergent and convergent task performances were weakly related to each other. This suggests that divergence and convergence are two relatively distinct processes for scientific creativity, and that the relation is more complex than commonly assumed. In terms of culture-related variables, immigrant cultural background (number of family members born outside of France) was significantly and negatively correlated with the originality of divergent and convergent scientific creativity. Findings are discussed and educational implications are proposed.
The subject of creativity has been neglected by psychologists. The immediate problem has two aspects. (1) How can we discover creative promise in our children and our youth, (2) How can we promote the development of creative personalities. Creative talent cannot be accounted for adequately in terms of I.Q. A new way of thinking about creativity and creative productivity is seen in the factorial conceptions of personality. By application of factor analysis a fruitful exploratory approach can be made. Carefully constructed hypotheses concerning primary abilities will lead to the use of novel types of tests. New factors will be discovered that will provide us with means to select individuals with creative personalities. The properties of primary abilities should be studied to improve educational methods and further their utilization. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Explaining Creativity is an accessible introduction to the latest scientific research on creativity. In the last 50 yearss, psychologists, anthropologists, and sociologists have increasingly studied creativity, and we now know more about creativity that at any point in history. Explaining Creativity considers not only arts like painting and writing, but also science, stage performance, and business innovation. Until about a decade ago, creativity researchers tended to focus on highly valued activities like fine art painting and Nobel prize winning science. Sawyer brings this research up to date by including movies, music videos, cartoons, videogames, hypertext fiction, and computer technology. For example, this is the first book on creativity to include studies of performance and improvisation. Sawyer draws on the latest research findings to show the importance of collaboration and context in all of these creative activities. Today's science of creativity is interdisciplinary; in addition to psychological studies of creativity, Explaining Creativity includes research by anthropologists on creativity in non-Western cultures, and research by sociologists about the situations, contexts, and networks of creative activity. Explaining Creativity brings these approaches together within the sociocultural approach to creativity pioneered by Howard Becker, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Howard Gardner. The sociocultural approach moves beyond the individual to consider the social and cultural contexts of creativity, emphasizing the role of collaboration and context in the creative process.
This study explores the interaction of the essential components of creativity and collaboration in a digital environment in the design process. The framework is based on Amabile’s componential theory of creativity, which is composed of three intra-individual components of creativity and the social environment. The digital environment as the social component of creativity provides the technical infrastructure for the analysis of data related to creativity and collaboration. Protocol coding method is used for the analysis of the qualitative and quantitative data stored in The Modular Object Oriented Developmental Learning Environment (MOODLE) forum posts that were formed by the comments or critiques given during the collaboration process by the team members, instructors or jury members. Findings indicate that the social environment component named as the reactivity to proposals is closely related to idea generation as the creative relevant process component and group interaction as the task motivation component. Furthermore, it is found that the number of sketches and design ideas produced through critiques are the main design issues that enhance creativity in collaborative digital environments.
This edited book discusses the exciting field of Digital Creativity. Through exploring the current state of the creative industries, the authors show how technologies are reshaping our creative processes and how they are affecting the innovative creation of new products. Readers will discover how creative production processes are dominated by digital data transmission which makes the connection between people, ideas and creative processes easy to achieve within collaborative and co-creative environments. Since we rely on our senses to understand our world, perhaps of more significance is that technologies through 3D printing are returning from the digital to the physical world. Written by an interdisciplinary group of researchers this thought provoking book will appeal to academics and students from a wide range of backgrounds working or interested in the technologies that are shaping our experiences of the future.
We call any activity of a person that creates anything new, creative activity. This includes the creation of any kind of inner world or construction of the mind that is experienced and observed only in humans. Looking at human behavior, we can distinguish two basic forms of construction. One form of activity can be called reproductive, and is closely connected with memory, its essence consisting in a person's reproducing or retrieving traces of previous impressions. When I remember the house in which I spent my childhood or a remote country I sometimes visit, I reproduce traces of the impressions I obtained in early childhood or at a time of a journey. In general, in all these cases this activity of mine is not creating anything new; basically, it is more or less just a return of what was.
According to Csikszentmihalyi (1988), creativity is a very complex interaction among a person, a field, and a culture. In keeping with this approach, a look at Asian culture in relation to its impact on creativity is in order. While people may vary in their native capacity for creativity, it is in the individual's interaction with the macrocosm where creative expression can be found. Therefore, this paper will explore the four principles of Confucianism, and how they compare to creativity research in order to discover how Asian culture influences creativity; and what we can do to enhance our students' creative capacity.
This article addresses the issue of units of analysis and atomistic models in psychology taking creativity research as a case study. A classic typology in this area, initially proposed by Rhodes (1961), distinguishes between the four P's of creativity: person, process, product, and press (environment). Continuing an effort to rewrite this basic language of the discipline from a cultural psychological perspective in the form of five A's (actor, audience, action, artefact, affordances), the discussion here focuses on bringing relationships to the fore within this framework and problematising strict distinctions between each of the five elements. A closer look at the five A's of creativity, drawing on theoretical considerations and illustrated by interviews with creators working in different domains, reveals the permeable borders surrounding these units and challenges clear divisions between actors and audiences, action and artefacts, actors and artefacts. In the end, it is argued that creative phenomena cannot be properly understood and studied outside of their integrated and dynamic totality defined as a creativity complex. Implications of adopting this “molecular” perspective for theory and methodology are discussed.
Cross-cultural differences in creative thinking were assessed for 51 American and 54 Japanese college students. The American college students showed statistically significantly higher scores on the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT) figural test than the Japanese college students. No gender differences were found in either culture. Performance on the TTCT did not correlate with the performance on broad academic aptitude/achievement measures for either culture.
The present study attempted to appraise creativity in the indigenous Sudanese culture, which is formed by a complex integration and interaction of various social and cultural factors, mainly of African, Arab, and Islamic origin. More specifically, the study investigated the concept of creativity in a conformist culture, the problem of using Western tests and the problem of modernization. Also it attempted to find answers to some crucial questions: What is the scope available for creative expression in a tight sociocultural system? How could creativity coexist with conformity? What form of creativity can exist in the indigenous sociocultural system?
For the past 5 decades the psychology of creativity has been influenced by what is known as the 4 P's of creative expression: person, process, product, and press. This conceptual schema, initially proposed by Rhodes (1961), helped researchers structure their thinking about the phenomenon. However, it also supported an individualistic, static, and oftentimes disjointed vision of creativity. The present article aims to rewrite this fundamental language of the discipline by using terms that explicitly endorse a systemic, contextual, and dynamic approach. The 5 A's framework—actor, action, artifact, audience, affordances—is grounded in current literature from sociocultural and ecological psychology as well as theories of the distributed mind and tries to achieve a more comprehensive and unitary perspective on creativity. Several theoretical, methodological, and practical implications are considered. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved)
Two studies were designed to compare (a) the rated creativity of artworks created by American and Chinese college students, and (b) the criteria used by American and Chinese judges to evaluate these artworks. The study demonstrated that the two groups of students differed in their artistic creativity. American participants produced more creative and aesthetically pleasing artworks than did their Chinese counterparts, and this difference in performance was recognized by both American and Chinese judges. The difference between the use of criteria by American and Chinese judges was small, and consisted mainly of the American judges' use of stricter standards in evaluating overall creativity. Moreover, in general, there was a greater consensus among Chinese judges regarding what constitutes creativity than among American judges. The study also revealed, but preliminarily, that the artistic creativity of Chinese students was more likely to be reduced as a function of restrictive task constraints or of the absence of explicit instructions to be creative. The results of this study seem to support the hypothesis that an independent self-oriented culture is more encouraging of the development of artistic creativity than is an interdependent self-oriented culture. Other possible explanations, such as differences in people's attitudes toward and motivation for engaging in art activities, or socioeconomic factors might also account for differences in people's artistic creativity.
Since its inception, the psychology of creativity has been concerned primarily with the study of individual creators. In contrast, this research is dedicated to an exploration of (a) who has a significant impact on a creative professional's activity and (b) what the contribution is that others make to creative outcomes. The research included interviews with 60 professionals working in science and creative industries in France. The following categories of others emerged: family and friends, peers and students, clients and funders, critics and gatekeepers, and the general public – and they were related to themes depicting the interaction between these different others and the creator. Findings reveal both similarities and differences across the five domains in terms of the specific contribution of others to the creative process. Social interactions play a key formative, regulatory, motivational and informational role in relation to creative work. From ‘internalized’ to ‘distant’, other people are an integral part of the equation of creativity calling for a de‐centring of the creative self and its re‐centring in a social space of actions and interactions.
Acknowledgements List of contributors 1. Introduction Robert J. Sternberg 2. Creativity research in English-speaking countries John Baer and James C. Kaufman 3. Creativity in Latin America: views from psychology, humanities and the arts David D. Preiss and Katherine Strasser 4. History of creativity in Spain Candido Genovard, Maria Dolores Prieto, Maria Rosario Bermejo and Carmen Ferrandiz 5. Past, present, and future perspectives on creativity in France and French-speaking Switzerland Christophe Mouchiroud and Todd I. Lubart 6. Creativity in Italy Alessandro Antonietti and Cesare Cornoldi 7. Creativity research in German-speaking countries Siegfried Preiser 8. Creativity under the Northern Lights: perspectives from Scandinavia Gudmund J. W. Smith and Ingegerd Carlsson 9. Creativity in Soviet-Russian psychology Olga Stepanossova and Elena L. Grigorenko 10. Creativity studies in Poland Edward Necka, Magdalena Grohman and Aleksandra Slabosz 11. Research on creativity in Israel: a chronicle of theoretical and empirical development Roberta M. Milgram and Nava L. Livne 12. Creativity in Turkey and Turkish-speaking countries Gunseli Oral 13. Development of creativity research in Chinese societies: a comparison of mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore Weihua Niu 14. Creativity - a sudden rising star in Korea In-Soo Choe 15. Culture and facets of creativity: the Indian experience Girishwar Misra, Ashok K. Srivastava and Indiwar Misra 16. African perspectives on creativity Elias Mpofu, Kathleen Myambo, Andrew A. Mogaji, Teresa-Anne Mashego and Omar H. Khaleefa 17. Creativity around the world in 80 ways ... but with one destination Dean Keith Simonton Author index Subject index.
Most studies of writers have focused on Western writers, including studies of personal characteristics and success. The Chinese culture has traditionally had a much different view of creativity. Would a study of modern Chinese writers mirror past Western findings, indicating that Chinese and Western conceptions of creativity may be converging, or would there be different results? This study examined 722 twentieth-century Chinese writers and yielded two main findings, which generally correspond to past, Western-based research. First, female writers, particularly poets and fiction writers, were more likely to suffer a personal tragedy than male writers. Second, writers who were politically persecuted were more likely to eventually receive an award than those not politically persecuted. Explanations and implications for future studies are then discussed.
This article describes briefly the Hofstede model of six dimensions of national cultures: Power Distance, Uncertainty Avoidance, Individualism/Collectivism, Masculinity/Femininity, Long/Short Term Orientation, and Indulgence/Restraint. It shows the conceptual and research efforts that preceded it and led up to it, and once it had become a paradigm for comparing cultures, research efforts that followed and built on it. The article stresses that dimensions depend on the level of aggregation; it describes the six entirely different dimensions found in the Hofstede et al. (2010) research into organizational cultures. It warns against confusion with value differences at the individual level. It concludes with a look ahead in what the study of dimensions of national cultures and the position of countries on them may still bring.
Places and times of creativity can be understood through an ethnopsychological approach based on ONO new terms, visitor and insular, with which people, places, and times can be divided depending on their philosophy of life and resulting activity. The two new terms are to be understood first as denoting causes (i.e. different developmental paths) and then as results (i.e., different personality characteristics), visitors being more creative and insulars less. Focusing the cause initially and specifically on the long-term presence or absence of division of power around a person permits a classification and understanding of personality characteristics that will vary from culture to culture. For many centuries, most Chinese, Arabs, and Spaniards were visitors; later, they became insulars under increasing unity of power and with a corresponding decrease of creativity. Many Westerners became visitors under increasing division of power. To understand the roots of the present high level of division of power in the West-a phenomenon practically unique in the history of the world-we must go back to the Middle Ages and to the long fights between popes, emperors, and kings, which benefited most of Western Europe and later North America, but in lesser measure Spain and her colonies. Without these fights between the religious and the secular powers, the Magna Carta would have been inconceivable as would all modem constitutions and much of the West's scientific, artistic, and humanitarian creativity.