Old wine in a new bottle: Impact of membership change on group creativity

The purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of membership change on group creativity. Based on the literature suggesting stimulating effects of membership change in groups, we hypothesized that membership change would enhance the creativity of groups. Membership change involved randomly rotating a subset of group members among groups during a series of creative tasks. Using an idea generation paradigm, we compared the creativity of open groups (i.e., groups that experienced a change in their membership across tasks) with that of closed groups (i.e., groups whose membership was invariant across tasks) in two experiments. In both experiments, we found that open groups generated more ideas and more different kinds of ideas than did closed groups. Moreover, Experiment 2 revealed that it was the productivity of “newcomers” (measured in terms of their creative idea generation in a previous task) that exerted a positive impact on groups. We also found that the entry of more productive newcomers increased the creativity of “oldtimers” (i.e., people who remained in one group across tasks). Implications for the role of membership change in groups are discussed.     

Creativity in Men and Women: Threat,Other-Interest,and Self-Assessment

Previous research into gender and creativity has provided little evidence for consistent differences between men and women in creative performance. This research revisits this topic by proposing a person × situation approach, arguing that gender differences in creative performance only occur in certain contexts, but not others. Based on the assumption that men and women tend to differ in self versus other orientation, experimental instructions varied whether our participants’ (n = 169) creative efforts benefit the self or others, and whether creativity occurred under conditions of threat or not. In the absence of threat, women outperformed men in the originality of their creative efforts when the task was beneficial to others. This effect was eliminated in the presence of competitive threat. In contrast to some previous work, threat also increased creative performance under some circumstances. Results also revealed gender differences in self-assessment of creativity such that women seemed to be somewhat more attuned to the objective level of the originality of their creative performance than men. The discussion focuses on implications for research on gender differences in creativity, arguing that researchers must appreciate that gender differences in creativity, so far as they exist, are likely embedded in specific situational contexts.     

The Random-Map Technique: Enhancing Mind-Mapping with a Conceptual Combination Technique to Foster Creative Potential

Although creativity techniques are highly recommended in working environments, their effects have been scarcely investigated. Two cognitive processes are often considered to foster creative potential and are, therefore, taken as a basis for creativity techniques: knowledge activation and conceptual combination. In this study, both processes were enhanced individually and jointly with an appropriate technique. Knowledge activation was fostered by the mind-map technique and conceptual combination by the random-input technique. The random-map technique evolved from merging these two techniques together. The two different techniques were tested in a 2 × 2 factorial experimental design with 80 participants. It was assumed that (a) both individual techniques would enhance creative potential when compared to the control group, and (b) the combined technique would lead to more creative potential than implementing the techniques individually. Results showed an increased creativity level of each of the individual techniques when compared to the control group. The combined creativity technique resulted in even higher creativity level when compared to both individual techniques. Thus, fostering different creativity processes jointly had an additive effect on creative potential.     

AN ANALYSIS OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN INFORMATION SOURCES AND CREATIVITY IN SCIENTISTS AND ENGINEERS

The literature is replete with analyses of creativity as related to personality traits and organizational constraints. Based on Mednick's (1962) associationist position, it was felt that information use patterns play a key role in an individual's process of creativity. In order to test this idea, 29 academic and 36 industrial physical scientists and engineers were categorized as either creative and productive; productive, but not creative; or noncreative and nonproductive on the basis of peer evaluation. Their information seeking and receiving behavior and attitudes were then measured and related to the criterion group membership. Two significant results emerged; First, consistent with the associationist position, variety of exposure to information content, in terms of scientific disciplines from which the information was received, was significantly different for the three groups, with the creative group having the greatest variety. Second, group membership can, with a fairly high probability, be predicted based on information seeking behavior and attitudes.     

Teachers’ Perceptions of Creativity in the Classroom

Teachers’ implicit understandings of creativity may not align with current research-based understanding of creativity and characteristics associated with creative students. Even teachers who say they value creativity may actually find creative characteristics undesirable. Participating teachers (n = 371) rated student characteristics on a scale of very undesirable to very desirable. Participants also completed a brief self-assessment of personal creativity and rank-ordered a set of educational objectives based on what they perceived as most important. Results indicated that teachers found student characteristics associated with creativity less desirable than those characteristics contraindicative to creativity (d = 2.70). No effects were found based on the grade level (d = 0.07) and small effects were found for subjects taught (η² = 0.023). Similarly, no effects were found for the teachers’ level of experience (η² = 0.004) or age (η² = 0.002). Teachers’ level of personal creativity was related (r = .248) to how desirable they rated student characteristics associated with creativity, but the importance with which teachers ranked creative thinking had small effects (η² = 0.04) on how desirable they found characteristics associated with creativity. These results generally confirm previous studies and suggest that teachers’ grade level, subject, experience, and age have no effect on their perception of creative characteristics. However, some evidence suggests that teachers who are more creative find student characteristics associated with creativity more desirable in class.     

Revisiting Mednick's Model on Creativity‐Related Differences in Associative Hierarchies. Evidence for a Common Path to Uncommon Thought

Fifty years ago, Mednick [Psychological Review, 69 (1962) 220] proposed an elaborate model that aimed to explain how creative ideas are generated and why creative people are more likely to have creative ideas. The model assumes that creative people have flatter associative hierarchies and as a consequence can more fluently retrieve remote associative elements, which can be combined to form creative ideas. This study aimed at revisiting Mednick's model and providing an extensive test of its hypotheses. A continuous free association task was employed and association performance was compared between groups high and low in creativity, as defined by divergent thinking ability and self‐report measures. We found that associative hierarchies do not differ between low and high creative people, but creative people showed higher associative fluency and more uncommon responses. This suggests that creativity may not be related to a special organization of associative memory, but rather to a more effective way of accessing its contents. The findings add to the evidence associating creativity with highly adaptive executive functioning.     

创造性人格与员工创造力:一个被调节的中介模型研究

本文基于动机行动和成就动机理论,构建一个被调节的中介模型以检验创造性人格对员工创造力产生的作用机理。以251套来自主管-下属配对的问卷数据为样本,实证分析结果表明:创造性人格可预测员工创造力产生,学习目标导向与绩效证明目标导向在两者之间起部分中介作用;内在动机能够强化个体目标导向对创造力的作用,并显著正向调节创造性人格对员工创造力的间接效应。最后,论文讨论了研究发现对员工创造力产生的理论和实践意义。     

Relating Personality and Creativity: Considering What and How We Measure

Creativity is a complex construct that is conceptualized and measured in multiple ways. This study examined the relationship between creativity and personality taking this into account. It was hypothesized that applying different conceptions and measures would cause variation in the creativity–personality relationship. The participants (N = 224) were undergraduate students and completed six creativity measures, a personality inventory, and a demographic questionnaire. Personality predicted more creative production (R² = .277) than creative potential (R² = .176) and more self‐reported creativity (R² = .348) than that which was externally rated (R² = .149). Openness was most consistently and strongly related to creativity, but other personality factors varied in their influence and some demonstrated suppression effects. Overall, the results suggest that despite relatively small effects of personality on creativity, there appear to be meaningful differences in the relationships depending on conception and measurement. Implications for educational settings and future research are discussed.     

Intelligence Level and the Allocation of Resources for Creative Tasks: A Pupillometry Study

This pupillometry study examined the relationship between intelligence and creative cognition from the resource allocation perspective. It was hypothesized that, during a creative metaphor task, individuals with higher intelligence scores would have different resource allocation patterns than individuals with lower intelligence scores. The study also examined the influence of intelligence in language and visuo-spatial domains on the resource allocation mechanism of verbal and visual creativity. The results suggested that individuals with higher intelligence scores allocated more cognitive resources for creative tasks than those with lower intelligence scores but not for non-creative tasks. The findings of this study support the view that creativity requires allocation of several cognitive faculties and may share underlying cognitive and neural mechanisms with intelligence. Domain-specific intelligence did not seem to play a significant role in the same domain, as individuals with higher scores in both domains showed similar resource allocation patterns. However, individuals with higher intelligence scores in the visuo-spatial domain generated more creative metaphorical interpretations in both verbal and visual creative metaphor tasks suggesting its importance in creative cognition.     

Creativity in the Age of Technology: Measuring the Digital Creativity of Millennials

Digital technology and its many uses form an emerging domain of creative expression for adolescents and young adults. To date, measures of self-reported creative behavior cover more traditional forms of creativity, including visual art, music, or writing, but do not include creativity in the digital domain. This article introduces a new measure, the Creative Behavior Questionnaire: Digital (CBQD), which assesses self-reported creative behavior in the digital domain. High school students (N = 230) completed the CBQD, as well as several other measures of creativity and personality. Factor analysis revealed 3 factors: digital creativity achievement, school-based everyday creativity, and self-expressive digital creativity. Factor-based scales showed expected correlations with other creativity measures, as well as Big-Five personality traits and Unconventionality, supporting construct validity. Results indicate that the CBQD can be used as an independent or a supplemental measure of creative behavior.     

Supporting Creativity Or Conformity? Influence of Home Environment and Parental Factors on the Value of Children's Creativity Characteristics

Although creativity is a desirable skill, parenting for creativity may be quite a challenge and may be less favored than parenting for conformity. The present study aims to investigate parent-related factors that may support creativity versus conformity at home. To this end, this study examined how parents’ attitudes and values toward creativity, creative home environment, and mindful parenting style are related to parents’ perceptions of creative versus socially acceptable characteristics. Analyses of the data collected from 1324 parents (predominantly mothers) indicated that parents were more supportive of creativity traits than socially acceptable characteristics. Most importantly, parents’ attitudes and values toward creativity and creative home environment were significantly and positively related to support for creativity characteristics, whereas mindful parenting was significantly and negatively related to support for socially acceptable characteristics in children. Those findings show that parents who value creativity and set up a creative environment are more likely to support children's creativity. Mindful parenting style seems to indirectly support creativity because it is associated with lower respect for socially acceptable characteristics, some of which are at odds with creativity. Findings are discussed in terms of the implications for training programs that enhance awareness of creativity.     

Loose and Tight: Creative Formation but Rigid Use of Nominal Compounds in Conspiracist Texts

Conspiracy theories (CTs) are spectacular narratives, widely spread, that pose societal threats. We test whether CTs might be linguistically creative products, which would facilitate their transmission and thereby account for their widespread popularity. We analyzed nominal compounds (e.g., mind control, carbon dioxide; N = 1,713,568) from a large corpus of conspiracist and mainstream texts matched by topic. In conspiracist texts, compounds showed greater originality, divergence, and sophistication, but they were used with lower frequency and were more often repeated in different contexts. This pattern suggests a creative aspect in the generation of compounds, coupled with rigidity in their use. We interpret these findings as an effect of loosely defined conceptual boundaries among conspiracist writers, in conjunction with social functions like status or group signaling. Our findings not only contribute to the discourse on creativity in CTs but also provide insights into the communicative advantage of CTs.     

Creative Imagination is Stable Across Technological Media: The Spore Creature Creator Versus Pencil and Paper

T. B. Ward (1994) investigated creativity by asking participants to draw alien creatures that they imagined to be from a planet very different from Earth. He found that participant drawings reliably contained features typical of common Earth animals. As a consequence, Ward concluded that creativity is structured. The present investigation predicts that this limitation on creativity is not restricted to drawings: the use of different technology will not change creative output. To investigate this question, participants performed Ward's task twice: once using pencil and paper and once using software made to design creatures (the Spore Creature Creator). Only minor significant differences were found. This preliminarily suggests that changing tools does not affect the overall rigidity of the creative process. This lends further support to Ward's thesis on the structural rigidity of creativity. We conclude by suggesting an elaboration to Ward's thesis that will be explored in future work. We suggest that aesthetics might be one of the factors that contribute to creative constraint, in that creatures that are too unusual would be less interesting.     

Takin’ It to the Streets: Approach/Avoidance Motivation in the Lives of At-Risk Youth

An attempt is made in this article to relate creativity to personality in a much more definitive way than has been done previously and to use the known correlates of personality to suggest a theory of creativity that would explain many of the phenomena associated with this concept. A causal chain is suggested reaching from DNA to creative achievement, based largely on experimental findings not usually considered in relation to creativity (e.g., latent inhibition). Inevitably, the model is highly speculative, but it is testable and hence may prove useful in not only accounting for many observations and experimental results but also in suggesting new experiments and observations.     

A Meta-Analysis of the Relation between Creative Self-Efficacy and Different Creativity Measurements

This meta-analysis investigated the relations between creative self-efficacy (CSE) and creativity measures and hypothesized that self-assessed questionnaires would have a different relation to self-efficacy beliefs compared to other creativity tests. The meta-analysis synthesized 60 effect sizes from 41 papers (overall N = 17226). Taken as a whole, the relation between CSE and creativity measures was of medium size (r = .39). Subgroup analyses revealed that self-rated creativity correlated higher with self-efficacy (r = .53). The relation with divergent thinking (DT) tests was weak (r = .23). Creativity scales had a medium size relation (r = .43), and was stronger than the relation to verbal performance tasks (r = .27) and figural performance tasks (r = .19). In a comparison between measures focusing on the creative person (r = .47), the creative product (r = .32), and the creative process (r = .27), the person aspect was most strongly linked to CSE. Thus, the relation between self-efficacy and creativity measures is dependent on the type of measurement used, emphasizing the need for researchers to distinguish between different instruments—not the least between self-report scales and more objective test procedures. Conceptual implications are discussed and critique concerning the creativity concept is brought up.     

预期交流与创造力的关系:解释水平的调节作用

该研究探讨了预期交流对创造力的影响, 以及解释水平在其中的调节作用。实验1采用结构性想象任务探讨预期交流是否影响创造力。结果表明, 相较于没有预期交流, 预期交流条件下的个体表现出更高的创造力。实验2采取了创意产生任务, 并探讨了解释水平在其中的调节作用。结果表明, 当完成抽象的、高解释水平任务时, 相较于无预期交流, 预期交流条件下个体在新奇性和变通性两个维度上表现出了更高的创造力; 当完成具体的、低解释水平任务时, 预期交流的效应不复存在。也就是说, 只有当创造力任务要求高解释水平的抽象思维时, 预期交流才能促进创造力的发挥。总结而言, 本研究在过往对于交流与创造力以及解释水平与创造力的研究基础上进一步发现, 对于抽象创造力任务, 虽然真正的信息交流尚未发生, 但仅仅对于交流的预期就会提高创造力水平。     

The Effects of a Verbal and a Figural Creativity Training on Different Facets of Creative Potential

This study investigated the effects of different types of creativity interventions on different facets of creative potential, also including more school-related creativity demands. In a sample of 77 fourth-graders in the age between 9 and 12 years, we administered a verbal and a figural creativity training, realized in two school lessons over two consecutive days each. As outcome measures, creative potential in both the verbal and the figural domain by means of two well-established divergent thinking tasks was assessed. As additional measures of creative potential, a story completion task and a picture painting task were administered to examine training effects on more school-related types of creative behavior. The verbal training was found to increase both verbal and figural divergent thinking ability, but not creative potential in the story completion and the picture painting task. The figural training yielded significant training effects only regarding the picture painting task. Findings suggest a specific training effect of the figural creativity training, and moreover indicate that the verbal creativity training, rather than stimulating “verbal” creative abilities per se, was more strongly concerned with domain-general creativity processes including ideational fluency, flexibility, and originality that are characteristics of divergent thinking tasks across different domains.     

Different Brain Wave Patterns and Cortical Control Abilities in Relation to Different Creative Potentials

Contemporary understanding of brain functions provides a way to probe into the mystery of creativity. However, the prior evidence regarding the relationship between creativity and brain wave patterns reveals inconsistent conclusions. One possible reason might be that the means of selecting creative individuals in the past has varied in each study. By distinguishing creative potential as open-ended versus closed-ended based on theoretical views, this study examined different brain wave patterns and cortical control abilities in relation to different creative potentials by using electroencephalogram (EEG) biofeedback equipment. The results demonstrated that participants’ performance on the open-ended creative problem was positively related to EEG alpha frequencies, whereas performance on the closed-ended creative problem was related to larger variability in EEG dynamics between alpha and beta waves when performing either open-ended or closed-ended creativity tasks. Further, better control in changing states of brain wave activities according to the EEG biofeedback signals could predict closed-ended creativity performance. Open-ended creativity was related only to the enhancement of alpha signals. These results help clarify previous inconsistent findings, reveal different natures of distinct creativities, and further suggest ways to improve different aspects of creativity with modified biofeedback procedures.     

绩效薪酬对雇员创造力的影响:人-工作匹配和创造力自我效能的作用

采用296对上下级匹配数据考察了绩效薪酬对创造力的影响以及人-工作匹配的调节效应和创造力自我效能的中介效应。研究结果表明:绩效薪酬对创造力有倒U形影响;创造力自我效能部分中介了绩效薪酬对创造力的倒U形影响;人-工作匹配调节绩效薪酬与创造力的关系,人-工作匹配度越高,中等强度绩效薪酬的正面效应越强,高强度绩效薪酬的负面效应越弱;绩效薪酬与人-工作匹配的交互效应通过创造力自我效能的完全中介效应影响创造力。     

The Language of Creativity: Evidence from Humans and Large Language Models

Recent developments in computerized scoring via semantic distance have provided automated assessments of verbal creativity. Here, we extend past work, applying computational linguistic approaches to characterize salient features of creative text. We hypothesize that, in addition to semantic diversity, the degree to which a story includes perceptual details, thus transporting the reader to another time and place, would be predictive of creativity. Additionally, we explore the use of generative language models to supplement human data collection and examine the extent to which machine-generated stories can mimic human creativity. We collect 600 short stories from human participants and GPT-3, subsequently randomized and assessed on their creative quality. Results indicate that the presence of perceptual details, in conjunction with semantic diversity, is highly predictive of creativity. These results were replicated in an independent sample of stories (n = 120) generated by GPT-4. We do not observe a significant difference between human and AI-generated stories in terms of creativity ratings, and we also observe positive correlations between human and AI assessments of creativity. Implications and future directions are discussed.