Creativity refers to the phenomenon whereby a person creates something new (a product, a solution, a work of art etc.) that has some kind of value. What counts as "new" may be in reference to the individual creator, or to the society or domain within which the novelty occurs. What counts as "valuable" is similarly defined in a variety of ways.
Scholarly interest in creativity ranges widely: Topics to which it is relevant include the relationship between creativity and general intelligence; the mental and neurological processes associated with creative activity; the relationship between personality type and creative ability; the relationship between creativity and mental health; the potential for fostering creativity through education and traning, especially as augmented by technology; and the application of an individual's existing creative resources to improve the effectiveness of learning processes and of the teaching processes tailored to them.
Creativity and creative acts are therefore studied across several disciplines - psychology, cognitive science, education, philosophy (particularly philosophy of science), technology, theology, sociology, linguistics, business studies, and economics. As a result, there are a multitude of definitions and approaches.
Etymology
The lexeme in the English word creativity comes from the Latin term creō "to create, make" and its derivational suffixes also come from Latin. The word "create" appears in English as early as the 14th century, notably in Chaucer[1] (in The Parson's Tale[2]). However, its modern meaning as an act of human creation did not emerge until after the Enlightenment.[1]
Definition
In a summary of scientific research into creativity Michael Mumford suggested: "“Over the course of the last decade, however, we seem to have reached a general agreement that creativity involves the production of novel, useful products” (Mumford, 2003, p. 110).[3] Beyond this general commonality, authors have diverged dramatically in their precise definitions, with Peter Meusburger claiming that over a hundred different versions can be found in the literature.[4]
Aspects of creativity
Theories of creativity (in particular investigating why some people are more creative than others) have focused on a variety of aspects. The most dominant are usually identified as the four "Ps" - process, product, person and place.[5] A focus on process is shown in cognitive approaches that try to describe thought mechanisms and techniques for creative thinking. Theories invoking divergent rather than convergent thinking (such as Guilford), or those describing the staging of the creative process (such as Wallas) are primarily theories of creative process. A focus on creative product usually appears in attempts to measure creativity in people (psychometrics, see below), or in creative ideas framed as successful memes.[6] A focus on the nature of the creative person considers more general intellectual habits, such as openness, levels of ideation, autonomy, expertise, exploratory behaviour and so on. A focus on place considers the best circumstances in which creativity flourishes, including degrees of autonomy, access to resources and the nature of gatekeepers.
Historical and personal creativity
The product of "creativity" has typically been defined in one of two ways: either as something historically new (and relatively rare), such as scientific discoveries or great works of art; or as producing something new in a personal sense - an apparent innovation for the creator, regardless of whether others have made similar innovations, or whether others value the particular act of creation. In the former sense there are writers such as Mihály Csíkszentmihályi[7] have defined creativity in terms of rare individuals who have been judged by others to have made significant creative, often domain-changing contributions (and as such, the level of creativity of an individual can vary over historical time as perceptions change), and Simonton, who has analysed the career trajectories of the creatively eminent in order to map patterns and predictors of creative productivity.[8] In the latter sense, writers such as Ken Robinson,[9] and Anna Craft[10] have focussed on creativity in a general population, particularly with respect to education.
There are a variety of labels for the two sides of this dichotomy. Margaret Boden distinguishes between h-creativity (historical) and p-creativity (personal).[11] Craft makes a similar distinction between "high" and "little c" creativity.[10] while Craft cites Robinson referring to "high" and "democratic" creativity. Common also is the pairing of terms "Big C" and "Little C".
Kozbelt, Beghetto and Runco, use a little-c/Big-C model to review major theories of creativity [5] This approach was first introduced by James C. Kaufman and Beghetto into a four C model: mini-c (transformative learning), which are "personally meaningful interpretations of experiences, actions and insights"; little-c (everyday problem solving and creative expression); Pro-C, exhibited by people who are professionally or vocationally creative but not eminent, and Big-C, reserved for those who are considered truly great in their field. This was to help distinguish more clearly between the amateur unapprenticed in the particular creative domain (e.g. the visual arts, astrophysics etc.), the professional who was domain-competent, and creative genius. The four-c model was also intended to help accommodate models and theories of creativity that stressed domain-competence as an essential component, and domain transformation as the highest mark of creativity; it also, they argued, made a useful framework for analysing creative processes in individuals.[12]
History of the term and the concept
Main article: History of the concept of creativity
The Muses Clio, Euterpe, and Thalia, by Eustache Le Sueur. Up to the Renaissance, creativity in Western culture was seen as a form of divine inspiration.
Traditional views in the West and East
It is generally thought that "creativity" in Western culture was originally seen as a matter of divine inspiration.[1] In Greek culture, for instance, Muses were seen as mediating inspiration from the Gods.[13] Romans and Greeks invoked the concept of an external creative "daemon" (Greek) or "genius" (Latin), linked to the sacred or the divine. This probably came closest to describing what the modern age views as creative talent.[14] In the Judaeo-Christian tradition, creativity was the sole province of God; humans were not considered to have the ability to create something new except as an expression of God's work.[15]
The traditional Western view of creativity can be contrasted with the traditional Eastern view. For Hindus, Confucianists, Taoists and Buddhists, creation was at most a kind of discovery or mimicry, and the idea of creation "from nothing" had no place in these philosophies and religions.[14]
The Enlightenment and after
In the West, this view of creativity as divinely inspired was dominant until the time of the renaissance and even later.[15] However, by the 18th century and the Age of Enlightenment, mention of creativity (notably in art theory), linked with the concept of imagination, became more frequent.[16] In the writing of Thomas Hobbes, imagination became a key element of human cognition;[1] William Duff was one of the first to identify imagination as a quality of genius, typifying the separation being made between talent (productive, but breaking no new ground) and genius.[13]
As a direct and independent topic of study, creativity effectively received no attention until the 19th century.[13] Runco and Albert argue that creativity as the subject of proper study began seriously to emerge in the late 19th century with the increased interest in individual differences inspired by the arrival of Darwinism. In particular they refer to the work of Francis Galton, who through his eugenicist outlook took a keen interest in the heritability of intelligence,with creativity taken as an aspect of genius.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, leading mathematicians and scientists such as Hermann von Helmholtz (1896) and Henri Poincaré (1908) began to reflect on and publicly discuss their creative processes, and these insights were built on in early accounts of the creative process by pioneering theorists such as Graham Wallas and Max Wertheimer.
In 1927, Alfred North Whitehead gave the Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh, later published as Process and Reality.[18] He is credited with having coined the term "creativity" to serve as the ultimate category of his metaphysical scheme: "Whitehead actually coined the term – our term, still the preferred currency of exchange among literature, science, and the arts. . . a term that quickly became so popular, so omnipresent, that its invention within living memory, and by Alfred North Whitehead of all people, quickly became occluded”.
The formal psychometric measurement of creativity, from the standpoint of orthodox psychological literature, is usually considered to have begun with J. P. Guilford's 1950 address to the American Psychological Association, which helped popularize the topic[20] and focus attention on a scientific approach to conceptualizing creativity. (It should be noted that the London School of Psychology had instigated psychometric studies of creativity as early as 1927 with the work of H. L. Hargreaves into the Faculty of Imagination,[21] but it did not have the same impact.) Statistical analysis led to the recognition of creativity(as measured) as a separate aspect of human cognition to IQ-type intelligence, into which it had previously been subsumed. Guilford's work suggested that above a threshold level of IQ, the relationship between creativity and classically measured intelligence broke down.
Creativity in psychology and cognitive science
The study of the mental representations and processes underlying creative thought belongs to the domains of psychology and cognitive science.
A psychodynamic approach to understanding creativity was proposed by Sigmund Freud, who suggested that creativity arises as a result of frustrated desires for fame, fortune and love, with the energy that was previously tied up in frustration and emotional tension in the neurosis being sublimated into creative activity. Freud later retracted this view.[citation needed]
Graham Wallas
Graham Wallas, in his work Art of Thought, published in 1926, presented one of the first models of the creative process. In the Wallas stage model, creative insights and illuminations may be explained by a process consisting of 5 stages:
(i) preparation (preparatory work on a problem that focuses the individual's mind on the problem and explores the problem's dimensions),
(ii) incubation (where the problem is internalized into the unconscious mind and nothing appears externally to be happening),
(iii) intimation (the creative person gets a "feeling" that a solution is on its way),
(iv) illumination or insight (where the creative idea bursts forth from its preconscious processing into conscious awareness); and
(v) verification (where the idea is consciously verified, elaborated, and then applied).
In numerous publications, Wallas' model is just treated as four stages, with "intimation" seen as a sub-stage. There has been some empirical research looking at whether, as the concept of "incubation" in Wallas' model implies, a period of interruption or rest from a problem may aid creative problem-solving. Ward[] lists various hypotheses that have been advanced to explain why incubation may aid creative problem-solving, and notes how some empirical evidence is consistent with the hypothesis that incubation aids creative problem-solving in that it enables "forgetting" of misleading clues. Absence of incubation may lead the problem solver to become fixated on inappropriate strategies of solving the problem.[] This work disputes the earlier hypothesis that creative solutions to problems arise mysteriously from the unconscious mind while the conscious mind is occupied on other tasks.
Wallas considered creativity to be a legacy of the evolutionary process, which allowed humans to quickly adapt to rapidly changing environments. Simonton[] provides an updated perspective on this view in his book, Origins of genius: Darwinian perspectives on creativity.
J. P. Guilford
Guilford performed important work in the field of creativity, drawing a distinction between convergent and divergent production (commonly renamed convergent and divergent thinking). Convergent thinking involves aiming for a single, correct solution to a problem, whereas divergent thinking involves creative generation of multiple answers to a set problem. Divergent thinking is sometimes used as a synonym for creativity in psychology literature. Other researchers have occasionally used the terms flexible thinking or fluid intelligence, which are roughly similar to (but not synonymous with) creativity.
