Creativity intro

Week 1: Intro to Psych of Creativity (Gabora)

Creativity was not studied because it could not be scientifically investigated – similar to a feeling of love. Early thinkers took a mystical perspective.

·      Creative person was seen as an empty vessel that a divine being fills with inspiration.

 

-       Divergent thought is conventionally characterized as the thinking needed for open-ended tasks, and measured by the ability to generate multiple solutions, while convergent thought is commonly characterized as the thinking required for tasks in which there is only one correct solution…creativity is associated with a loosening of cognitive control and decreased arousal.

-       What is creativity –

  •    Guilford defined creativity in terms of two criteria – originality (new, novelty) and appropriateness (useful, relevance to the task at hand).

  • Relative weighting of these two factors depends on the constraints and affordances of the task – in the arts, originality might be more important vs. in sciences/ tech, appropriateness might be more important.

  • Surprise – third criteria.

-       Distinctions

  • Explorers of creativity (can get the idea but lack effort) V. Developers of creativity (lacks idea but good effort)

  • Internal (work by self) v. External (independently)

  • Person- oriented (value making people happy) V. task-oriented (not pleasing others but accomplishing the task)

-       Exploratory creativity

  • Considering/ exploring different ways

  •    Transformational creativity

  • Thinking about a solution in a different, outside-the-box (LITERALLY) way.

-       Process v. Product.

  •    The primary value of the creative process is that it enables the creator to express, transform, solidify, or unify the creator’s understanding of and/ or relationship to the world, while the external product provides a means of tracking or monitoring this external transformation – view more prominent in eastern than western culture.

  • Emphasizing people and process over products indicates that those focusing on the product have certain degrees of arbitrariness, subjectivity, and lack of knowledge – focusing on a product establishes a status that dismisses the underlying intentions of the feelings, especially when the process is all the same in a good or bad product.

-       Personal v. Historical creativity.

  • Historical (H) creativity (Big C)– creative process results in a product that is new to humanity and impacts the course of civilization. Also referred to as eminent creativity.

  •    Personal (P) creativity (Little C) – a creative process that results in a product that is new to the creator, but has been produced before by others, or is not creative enough to exert an impact on human civilization. Can be a source of pleasure and amusement.

    •   Everyday creativity (closely related to P-creativity) – manifests in everyday life, starting with taking an innovative, unconventional approach to life that involves undertaking common tasks in uncommon ways, capitalizing on hidden opportunities, and finding unique solutions.

-       Degrees of Creativity –

  •   Big C – akin to historical creativity

  • Little C – new and significant to indiv

  • Mini C – new to indiv but not so significant individual – akin to everyday creativity.

-       Creativity involves induction –

  • Deduction – drawing conclusions from facts in a straightforward manner

  • Induction – sensibility extrapolating beyond facts

    •   Induction aims at a unity that the facts present but does not strictly imply

    • There is an element of subjectivity to induction because there is always an infinite set of possible inductions from which to choose.

People can move across the spectrum of P and H creativity.

-       Four P’s of Creativity

  •   Person

  •    Process

  • Product

  •   Place

    •   Creative ppl are just the reflection of the environment that they grew up in.


-       Distinguishing creativity from Discovery and Invention

  •   Discovery is finding something already present and sharing it with others.

  •    Invention is unearthing something relatively impersonal that did not exist before.

  • Creativity is unearthing and sharing something profoundly personal that was not present before.

    • The degree of impersonality varies from things being very personal v not so personal. Writing a personal memoir vs writing an article on the president.

-       Creativity v. Intelligence.

  •  Creativity and intelligence correlate up to an IQ of 140, but after that, they diverge. Some pp can be more smart and less creative, and some the opposite. It all depends on how both are being measured.

-       Creativity v. Individual learning.

  • Individual learning deals with obtaining pre-existing information from the environment through non-social means – the information already existed before the indiv knew about it.

  •    Creativity also involves abstract learning – reprocessing of internally sourced mental contents. When this reprocessing results in the generation of useful or pleasing ideas, behaviors, or artifacts that did not previously exist, it can be said to be creative.

-       Historical Framework.

  •    Freud (1958) – creativity resulted from the tension between reality and unconscious wishes for sex, love, power…His notion of preconscious – a state between conscious and unconscious reality where thoughts are loose and vague yet interpretable is viewed as a source of creativity.

o   Wallas (1926) four stages of creativity theory –

  •   Preparation – obtaining any relevant background knowledge about the creative task, and any instruction or past attempts or preconceptions regarding how to address it – involved conscious, focused work on the task.

  • Incubation – unconscious processing of the task that continues while one is engaged in other tasks. Prep and Incubation stage may be interleaved, or incubation may not occur at all.

  • Illumination – the creator has a new insight that may have to be worked and reworked to make sense. The idea at this point may be less concrete and requires more reflection.

  • Verification – fine-tuning/ corrections but presenting it in an easily accessible way for others – book, act, idea, theory, action.

    • Problems with Wallas' stages of creativity – inconclusive evidence, it’s merely descriptive but no explanation of why or how the creative process happens this way.

Cognitive psychologists study how people engage in cognitive processes considered creative, such as concept combination, problem-solving, and analogy, and write computer programs that simulate these processes. Those who take a psychometric approach develop tests of creativity.

Developmental psychologists examine creativity in children and throughout the lifespan. Social psychologists study how group dynamics, family dynamics, and cultural influences affect creativity.

Clinical psychologists use art, dance, and music to improve well-being, self-understanding, and self-esteem. Neuroscientists investigate the biological basis of creativity.

 Organizational psychologists study creativity as it pertains to successful business strategies and entrepreneurship.

Cultural, comparative, and evolutionary psychologists address the question of how humans came to possess their superlative creative abilities, how these abilities compare to those of other species, how creativity differs across cultures, and in what sense creative ideas evolve over time.

-       Stages and Processes in Creative Thinking

  • Heuristic search – relevant variables of the problem or task are defined upfront – breaking a problem into subproblems, and working backward. Creativity involves heuristics that guide the search for, not just a new possibility in a predefined state space, but a new state space itself.

  • Restructuring – switching from one representation of the task to another, limited to the creative domain (problem domain). Restructuring is not limited to the problem domain in the sense that during creative thought none of the contents of the mind is safeguarded from restructuring, and this is why immersion in a creative task is potentially transformative.

    •   Restructuring involves generating new concept combinations and viewing old concepts in new concepts. Creative outcomes often require that restructuring be iterative and recursive, such that the output of one restructure becomes the input of the next.

    • When this reconstruction reflects one’s perspective and worldview, it becomes honing – involves self-organized criticality, where small perturbations can have large effects – a chain reaction of insights as the implications of each new understanding are assimilated.

- Modified Wallas’ classic 4-stage model of creativity –

  •   Problem finding – noticing that something is amiss. Finding the problem to solve – leads to greater success – looking for ways to improve a product.

  •   Problem posing – expressing the problem

  • Problem construction – developing a detailed representation of the problem

  • Problem definition/ redefinition

    • Problem finding may involve sensing a gap or disturbing missing element.

    •   Proactive identification of problem to be solved or approach to explore – paying attention to what your mind keeps returning to. Acknowledging the presence of this gap allows you to address it and grow from it.

  •      Frustration phase – comes prior to incubation – straightforward attempts to solve the problem are unsuccessful.

-       Domain specific v. Domain general.  

  •    Domain general theories – emphasize the generalizability of creative thinking across different domains and the capacity for creators to connect different domains through associative thinking and metaphor. Research focusing on the inspiration phase of the creative process suggests that creativity is more domain-general than is widely believed.

-       The degree of fantasy and imagination at ages six to seven was related to the divergent thinking ability in high school

  •   Creativity is correlated with self-confidence, aesthetic orientation, independence of judgment, risk-taking, openness to experience, tolerance of ambiguity, impulsivity, lack of conscientiousness, high energy, attraction to and ability to handle complexity, problem sensitivity, flexibility, the ability to analyze, synthesize, evaluate, and reorganize information, engage in divergent thinking.

-       Measuring Creativity –

  • Torrance test of Creative Thinking – consists of multiple components/ sub tests.

  •   Unusual User Test – pps are asked to think of as many uses of a common object

  • Product Improvement Test – pps are asked to list all they ways they can change a product to make it more useful or desirable.

    • The tests are criticized for not adequately testing the ability to engage in the kind of iterative honing process required for Big- C creativity.

  •   Brainstorming – group settings – open ideas and no criticism.

-       Environmental Impact on Creativity

  •   Maslow (1974) – creativity is fostered by environments that are supportive and free of evaluation.

    • According to the systems approach, creativity occurs through an interaction between the individual, a field which is a set of relevant individuals in society, the domain, or the set of relevant ideas.

-        Neural basis for creativity and brain regions involved.

  •    Creative thought is facilitated by lower levels of noradrenaline and dopamine – catecholamines directly linked to cognitive control, prefrontal functioning, and cortical arousal.

  •    EEG experiments show that divergent thinking tasks produce decreased beta-range synchrony and increased alpha-range synchrony over the frontal cortex, suggesting that there is a loosening of executive control and lower prefrontal cortical arousal during creative thought.

  •    Physiological research into creativity has revealed evidence of an association between creativity and high variability in physiological measures of arousal such as heart rate, skin response, cortical activity… entering a stage that is quite different from one’s normal resting state – physiological aspect (low arousal level) and a cognitive aspect (divergent or associative mode of thought).