learning creativity reflection
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Week5-Intro_Person_full.pptxIntro to creativity studies Week 5: Creative Person
Nathaniel Barr, PhD
“Many highly talented, brilliant, creative people think they're not - because the thing they were good at at school wasn't valued, or was actually stigmatized.” Ken Robinson
https://www.ted.com/talks/sir_ken_robinson_do_schools_kill_creativity
Cultivation of knowledge/skill VS natural dispositions
Both nature and nurture are consequential for creativity
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aF4sP-uC-yI
Teresa Amabile 1950-
American Professor of Business Administration
Componential Theory of Creativity
Domain Relevant Skills: self-evident
Creativity-Relevant Processes: does the person have a creative personality?
Task Motivation: Is the task intrinsically rewarding? Is the person motivated to complete the task?
Social Environment: Does the environment enhance or inhibit creativity?
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Domain-relevant skills
Social Environment
Creativity-Relevant Processes
Task Motivation
Domain-Relevant Skills
Knowledge, expertise, technical skills, intelligence and talent in the particular domain where the problem-solver is working.
Domain-relevant skills
Social Environment
Creativity-Relevant Processes
Task Motivation
Creativity-Relevant Processes
The personality traits and cognitive style conducive to creativity.
Independence, risk-taking, taking new perspectives, self-discipline, skill in generating ideas, synthesizing information, breaking from the status quo, and tolerance for ambiguity.
Domain-Relevant skills
Social Environment
Creativity-Relevant Processes
Task Motivation
Task Motivation
Intrinsic task motivation is passion: the motivation to undertake a task or solve a problem because it is interesting, involving, personally challenging, and/or satisfying.
People are motivated by intrinsic not extrinsic factors (i.e. paying people more does not boost creativity).
Domain-relevant skills
Social Environment
Creativity-Relevant Processes
Task Motivation
Personality and creativity
Personality: defined
An individual’s unique constellation of consistent behavioural traits
Personality traits: durable disposition to behave in a particular way in a variety of situations, e.g. friendly, anxious, impulsive
Trait vs. State
Trait:
Enduring, long lasting dispositions
Relatively constant across situations
State:
Momentary, non-permanent “states of mind”
Can vary depending on situation
Let’s think of some scenarios where these might diverge
Personality: purpose
Concept of personality used to explain:
1) stability of a person’s behaviour over time and across situations
consistency
2) the behavioural differences among people reacting to the same situation
distinctiveness
MacKinnon’s Creative Personality (1978)
Invited peer-nominated creatives to a weekend retreat in a former fraternity house
Everyone lived together and participated in informal discussions
Researchers submitted creatives to a series of tests
Identified traits associated with the creative personality
2. “great men of the twentieth century” “planning the city of the future”
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Above Average Intelligence
Professions scored differently on different submeasures of intelligence.
Writers scored highly on verbal intelligence.
Architects scored highly on spatial intelligence.
Very talented in their domains.
Discernment, Observance, and Alertness
Highly creative people are experts at identifying important problems in their domains.
They can quickly scan ideas and select those that are relevant to solving their problem.
They have a wide range of information at their command.
Very knowledgeable in their domains.
Openness to Experience
They defer judgment when learning about new ideas.
Willingness to try new and different things.
Risk Taking
Relative absence of repression and suppression mechanisms that control impulse and imagery.
Preference for Complexity
They enjoyed discovering unifying principles that can bring order to complex, unfinished phenomena.
Curious people who enjoyed abstract and metaphorical thought.
A tolerance of ambiguity and contradictions.
Modern personality research
Since the time of that study, the science of personality, and how it relates to creativity has advanced considerably
Five Factor Model (The Big 5)
Openness to experience
Conscientiousness
Extraversion
Agreeableness
Neuroticism
Factor analysis logic
Correlations among many variables are analyzed to identify closely related clusters of variables, which are called ‘factors’
If many traits are related, can assume there is one single factor causing them all:
E.g., Openness to experience
Risk taking
Imagination
Preference for variety
Independent attitude
Five Factor Model (The Big 5)
Neuroticism
Negative emotionality (e.g., worried vs. calm, insecure vs. secure)
Five Factor Model (The Big 5)
Extraversion
Positive emotionality (e.g., sociable vs. not, affectionate vs. reserved)
Five Factor Model (The Big 5)
Agreeableness
(e.g., soft-hearted vs. ruthless, trusting vs. suspicious)
Five Factor Model (The Big 5)
Conscientiousness
constraint (e.g., organized vs. disorganized, careful vs. careless)
Five Factor Model (The Big 5)
Openness
(e.g., imaginative vs. down to earth, variety vs. routine)
Five Factor Model (The Big 5)
Openness
Conscientiousness
Extraversion
Agreeableness
Neuroticism
Openness dimension split in two
“Intellect reflects cognitive engagement with abstract and semantic information, primarily through reasoning, whereas Openness reflects cognitive engagement with perception, fantasy, aesthetics, and emotions (DeYoung, Grazioplene, & Peterson, 2012)”
-SB Kaufman
How do Openness and Intellect relate to creative achievement?
Openness related to creative achievement in the arts
Intellect related to creative achievement in the sciences
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi 1934-
American Psychology Professor (started by studying sociology)
Flow
Sociocultural Model of Creativity
*Creative Person*
*Creative Press*
*Creative Product*
More nuanced view (not one or the other)
I have devoted 30 years of research to how creative people live and work, to make more understandable the mysterious process by which they come up with new ideas and new things. Creative individuals are remarkable for their ability to adapt to almost any situation and to make do with whatever is at hand to reach their goals. If I had to express in one word what makes their personalities different from others, it's complexity. They show tendencies of thought and action that in most people are segregated. They contain contradictory extremes; instead of being an "individual," each of them is a "multitude.“
From Creativity: The Work and Lives of 91 Eminent People, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, published by HarperCollins, 1996.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/199607/the-creative-personality
1. Energetic/relaxed
Creative people have a great deal of physical energy, but they're also often quiet and at rest. They work long hours, with great concentration, while projecting an aura of freshness and enthusiasm. This suggests a superior physical endowment, a genetic advantage. Yet it is surprising how often individuals who in their seventies and eighties exude energy and health remember childhoods plagued by illness. It seems that their energy is internally generated, due more to their focused minds than to the superiority of their genes.
2. Smart/naive
Creative people tend to be smart yet naive at the same time.
Furthermore, people who bring about an acceptable novelty in a domain seem able to use well two opposite ways of thinking: the convergent and the divergent. Convergent thinking is measured by IQ tests, and it involves solving well-defined, rational problems that have one correct answer. Divergent thinking leads to no agreed-upon solution. It involves fluency, or the ability to generate a great quantity of ideas; flexibility, or the ability to switch from one perspective to another; and originality in picking unusual associations of ideas. These are the dimensions of thinking that most creativity tests measure and that most workshops try to enhance.
Yet there remains the nagging suspicion that at the highest levels of creative achievement the generation of novelty is not the main issue. People often claimed to have had only two or three good ideas in their entire career, but each idea was so generative that it kept them busy for a lifetime of testing, filling out, elaborating, and applying.
3. Responsibility/irresponsibility
Creative people combine playfulness and discipline, or responsibility and irresponsibility. There is no question that a playfully light attitude is typical of creative individuals. But this playfulness doesn't go very far without its antithesis, a quality of doggedness, endurance, perseverance.
4.Fantasy/reality
Creative people alternate between imagination and fantasy, and a rooted sense of reality. Great art and great science involve a leap of imagination into a world that is different from the present. The rest of society often views these new ideas as fantasies without relevance to current reality. And they are right. But the whole point of art and science is to go beyond what we now consider real and create a new reality. At the same time, this "escape" is not into a never-never land. What makes a novel idea creative is that once we see it, sooner or later we recognize that, strange as it is, it is true.
Most of us assume that artists—musicians, writers, poets, painters—are strong on the fantasy side, whereas scientists, politicians, and businesspeople are realists. This may be true in terms of day-to-day routine activities. But when a person begins to work creatively, all bets are off
5. Extroversion/introversion
We're usually one or the other, either preferring to be in the thick of crowds or sitting on the sidelines and observing the passing show. In fact, in psychological research, extroversion and introversion are considered the most stable personality traits that differentiate people from each other and that can be reliably measured. Creative individuals, on the other hand, seem to exhibit both traits simultaneously.
6. Humble/proud
It is remarkable to meet a famous person who you expect to be arrogant or supercilious, only to encounter self-deprecation and shyness instead. Yet there are good reasons why this should be so. These individuals are well aware that they stand, in Newton's words, "on the shoulders of giants." Their respect for the area in which they work makes them aware of the long line of previous contributions to it, putting their own in perspective. They're also aware of the role that luck played in their own achievements. And they're usually so focused on future projects and current challenges that past accomplishments, no matter how outstanding, are no longer very interesting to them. At the same time, they know that in comparison with others, they have accomplished a great deal.
7. Masculine/feminine
Creative people, to an extent, escape rigid gender role stereotyping. When tests of masculinity/femininity are given to young people, over and over one finds that creative and talented girls are more dominant and tough than other girls, and creative boys are more sensitive and less aggressive than their male peers.This tendency toward androgyny is sometimes understood in purely sexual terms, and therefore it gets confused with homosexuality. But psychological androgyny is a much wider concept referring to a person's ability to be at the same time aggressive and nurturant, sensitive and rigid, dominant and submissive, regardless of gender. A psychologically androgynous person in effect doubles his or her repertoire of responses. Creative individuals are more likely to have not only the strengths of their own gender but those of the other one, too.
8. Rebel/conservative
Creative people are both rebellious and conservative. It is impossible to be creative without having first internalized an area of culture. So it's difficult to see how a person can be creative without being both traditional and conservative and at the same time rebellious and iconoclastic. Being only traditional leaves an area unchanged; constantly taking chances without regard to what has been valued in the past rarely leads to novelty that is accepted as an improvement.
9. Involved/detached
Most creative people are very passionate about their work, yet they can be extremely objective about it as well. Without the passion, we soon lose interest in a difficult task. Yet without being objective about it, our work is not very good and lacks credibility. Here is how the historian Natalie Davis puts it:"I think it is very important to find a way to be detached from what you write, so that you can't be so identified with your work that you can't accept criticism and response, and that is the danger of having as much affect as I do. But I am aware of that and of when I think it is particularly important to detach oneself from the work, and that is something where age really does help."
10. Joy/pain
Creative people's openness and sensitivity often exposes them to suffering and pain, yet also to a great deal of enjoyment. Most would agree with Rabinow's words: "Inventors have a low threshold of pain. Things bother them." A badly designed machine causes pain to an inventive engineer, just as the creative writer is hurt when reading bad prose.Being alone at the forefront of a discipline also leaves you exposed and vulnerable. Eminence invites criticism and often vicious attacks. When an artist has invested years in making a sculpture, or a scientist in developing a theory, it is devastating if nobody cares.
Yet when a person is working in the area of his of her expertise, worries and cares fall away, replaced by a sense of bliss. Perhaps the most important quality, the one that is most consistently present in all creative individuals, is the ability to enjoy the process of creation for its own sake. Without this trait, poets would give up striving for perfection and would write commercial jingles, economists would work for banks where they would earn at least twice as much as they do at universities, and physicists would stop doing basic research and join industrial laboratories where the conditions are better and the expectations more predictable.
“…what is really singular about humans: they gain control of their lives in a way unique among lifeforms on Earth—by rational self-determination.”
Keith E. Stanovich, 2004,
The Robot’s Rebellion: Finding Meaning in the Age of Darwin
“There will be no one like us when we are gone, but then there is no one like anyone else, ever. When people die, they cannot be replaced. They leave holes that cannot be filled, for it is the fate — the genetic and neural fate — of every human being to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death.”
Your story
“When you are in the middle of a story it isn't a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood; like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard powerless to stop it. It's only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all. When you are telling it, to yourself or to someone else.”
Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace
