Creativity In Context

Update To The Social Psychology Of Creativity

Teresa M Amabile

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429980862
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psicología
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría en psicología

This book preserves the original content and provides some insight into recent developments in the social psychology of creativity. It begins to study the ways in which social factors can serve to maintain creativity and cognitive mechanisms by which motivation might have an impact on creativity.

Part One
Understanding and Assessing Creativity

1

The Case for a Social Psychology of Creativity

It is nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate little plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom; without this it goes to wreck and ruin without fail. It is a very grave mistake to think that the enjoyment of seeing and searching can be promoted by means of coercion and a sense of duty.

Einstein, 1949, p. 19

In this surprisingly lyrical passage from his autobiography, Einstein sounds a theme that will be repeated throughout this book: largely because they affect motivation, social factors can have a powerful impact on creativity.

To understand creativity, two basic questions must be answered. How is creative performance different from ordinary performance? What conditions are most favorable to creative performance—what personal abilities and characteristics, what social environments? With this book, I hope to lay the foundation for a social psychology of creativity. In this endeavor, I will concentrate on the second question by considering the social conditions that are most conducive to creativity. In examining the impact of social factors on creative performance, however, it is also necessary to consider the ways in which creative performance is different from ordinary performance. Thus, throughout the book, both questions will be addressed.

A Gap in Creativity Research

There are two reasons for developing a social psychology of creativity. The first, obvious reason is simply that there has previously been no such discipline. There is little relevant theory, there is only a small research literature on the effects of specific social and environmental influences on creativity and, more importantly, there are virtually no experimental studies of the effects of such influences. Clearly, this is not because there are few creativity studies overall. In 1950, Psychological Abstracts had 11 listings under “Creativity,” less than .2% of the total number of articles abstracted. In 1960, this category represented .4% of the total; in 1966, it accounted for .8%, and by 1970 creativity articles made up fully 1% of all publications listed. Few of these studies were experimental, though, and even fewer concerned social-psychological factors. Between 1976 and 1978, no articles on creativity were published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, Psychological Review or the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. One article that could be considered related to creativity appeared in Cognitive Psychology, one in Psychological Bulletin, and four in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. During that same period, however, over 600 creativity articles were published in less experimentally oriented journals.

If creativity researchers have not been doing experimental studies of social-psychological effects on creative performance (and clearly they have not), what have they been doing? The major emphasis in creativity research over the past three decades has been on personality studies of creative individuals. This emphasis was directly predicted—or, perhaps, initiated—by Guilford in 1950: “the psychologist’s problem is that of creative personality” (p. 444).

This research has taken several different forms. One long-standing approach involves the study of biographies and autobiographies of well-known creative individuals, attempting to define their peculiar qualities of intellect and personality (Galton, 1870; Cox, 1926). A second approach to the examination of individual differences in creative ability is the intensive laboratory study of one or a few creative individuals. Research carried out by MacKinnon and Barron (MacKinnon, 1962) at the Institute of Personality Assessment and Research at Berkeley is typical of this approach. These researchers carried out “living-in” assessments of artists and scientists who had been reliably nominated as creative by their peers. Over a weekend, each subject would be formally interviewed by different individuals, and would complete a large battery of personality and intelligence tests. Finally, the most common variety of individual-difference research on creativity examines ordinary individuals. Typically, an average population is chosen and the members are given personality, intelligence, and creativity tests. Those who achieve high creativity scores are compared along the other assessment dimensions with those who score low (e.g., Wallach & Kogan, 1965).

Some creativity research has focused on issues other than individual differences. For example, Newell, Shaw, and Simon (1962) have considered the cognitive skills necessary for creativity. They describe an information-processing approach to the problem, one in which creative activity is seen as the application of particular set-breaking heuristics. Their relatively sophisticated description of the creative process is linked to computer-based notions of human intellectual abilities. In contrast to the approach of Newell et al. (1962), most other work on the cognitive skills involved in creativity is less theoretical, relying on commonsense notions of the creative process and, occasionally, empirical findings from industry and education. The most familiar work in this category, Osborn’s (1963) “brain-storming” program, is prototypical: sets of rules or heuristics are taught as guidelines for the generation of creative solutions to problems. Subsequently, ideas generated by people who have been trained in the program are compared with those of people who have not.

Finally, there have been a modest number of studies examining the effects of particular social or physical environments on creativity. Some studies have compared two populations from different environments on creativity test performance. For example, open classrooms have been compared to traditional classrooms (e.g., Klein, 1975), and large-city classrooms have been compared to those from smaller cities (Torrance et al., 1960). Other studies have used biographical data to investigate the effects of home and religious influences on the creativity of eminent people (e.g., Roe, 1952), or historical data to uncover the social, political, and cultural environments that foster or inhibit creativity (e.g., Simonton, 1975a).

The most active area of creativity research, then, has been the description of the peculiar characteristics of famous or widely recognized creative people, living and dead, or the description of differences in personality and intellect between people who do well on creativity tests and people who do not. Implicit in much of this work is the assumption that the important characteristics of creative people are largely innate (or at least largely immalleable), and that these characteristics clearly and reliably separate creative people from noncreative people.

As a result of the focus on individual differences, some potentially important areas of inquiry into creativity have been virtually ignored. There has been a concentration on the creative person, to the exclusion of “creative situations”—i.e., circumstances conducive to creativity. There has been a narrow focus on internal determinants of creativity to the exclusion of external determinants. And, within studies of internal determinants, there has been an implicit concern with “genetic” factors to the exclusion of contributions from learning and the social environment.

Previous research on creativity has had fundamentally different aims, in most respects, from those of a social psychology of creativity. Studies on the personality characteristics of outstandingly creative individuals have been concerned with identifying particular clusters of traits that can accurately describe such individuals. To an extent, these studies have been successful in fulfilling that goal. Studies on the characteristics that distinguish people who do well on creativity tests from those who do not do well are also concerned with individual-level description and, perhaps, with prediction. Again, this research has met with some success. Cognitive psychologists studying the creative process have identified some operating procedures of the human cognitive system that seem to lead with a high probability to novel and useful solutions. In contrast to these research endeavors, a social psychology of creativity aims to identify particular social and environmental conditions that can positively or negatively influence the creativity of most individuals.

Some Social Psychological Stories

The second reason for developing a social psychology of creativity is more important than the simple dearth of studies in this area: Social and environmental factors seem to play a crucial role in creative performance. There is considerable informal evidence that social-psychological factors have a significant impact on the productivity and creativity of outstanding individuals. Most of this evidence comes from autobiographies, letters, journals, and other first-person accounts by scientists, artists, writers, and others generally acknowledged for their creative achievements. Certainly, caution must be exercised in the use of such sources as evidence of actual psychological phenomena. One poet herself expressed doubt in the ability of creative persons to provide insight into their creativity:

In answering the question, How are poems made? my instinctive answer is a flat, “I don’t know.” It makes not the slightest difference that the question as asked me refers solely to my own poems, for I know as little about how they are made as I do of anyone else’s. What I do know about them is only a millionth part of what there must be to know. I meet them where they touch consciousness, and that is already a considerable distance along the road of evolution. (Lowell, 1930, p. 24)

There are three reasons, however, for considering first-person reports as legitimate sources of background material for developing a social psychology of creativity. First, the main focus of interest is not on introspections about thinking processes (which, as Lowell noted, are bound to be inaccurate or at least incomplete). Rather, the main focus is on creative persons’ reports of social factors that impinged on them and the apparent stimulation or inhibition of their work that followed. Second, these reports are used only as sources of hypotheses about social factors, and not as tests of those hypotheses. Finally, although particular creative persons might certainly have experienced idiosyncratic reactions to social and environmental influences, if certain factors are repeatedly cited as important by creative people, it is likely that a real phenomenon is being identified.

Several creative people have provided excellent accounts of their daily working lives, often affording insight into influential social forces. (Not surprisingly, the majority of such accounts—particularly the more richly descriptive ones—come from writers.) In many of these reports, social forces are cited as harmful to creativity. This creates a peculiar paradox: May we accept the notion that such forces are indeed detrimental to creativity, if we draw the evidence from persons who distinguished themselves for their highly creative work? It seems more appropriate to find such evidence in the working lives of individuals who were never able to achieve wide acclaim for their work. But these individuals, of course, are not to be found among the names catalogued in collections of autobiographies, journals, and personal letters. We are forced, then, to use as a preliminary data source the writings of creative individuals who experienced normal peaks and depressions in their creative productivity, and then to examine experimentally the social forces that appear to have covaried with those fluctuations.

First-person accounts of creative activity contain ample evidence on the major issue considered in this book: the creativity-enhancing effect of working on something for its own sake, and the creativity-undermining effect of working on something for the sake of meeting an external goal. This contrast between internal (or intrinsic) and external (or extrinsic) motivation appears repeatedly in these accounts and, because of this obvious importance, it appears repeatedly in the social psychology of creativity developed in later chapters.

Albert Einstein: From External to Internal Control

Although Einstein wrote little of his life and work, what he did record contains a recurrent theme: His interest in science and, presumably, his creativity, were undermined by forces that exerted external control over his work. As a youth, he attended a regimented, militaristic school in Germany where the pressures of exam period so overwhelmed him that he temporarily lost his interest in science which was, even at that time, quite substantial. “This coercion had such a detering effect upon me that, after I had passed the final examination, I found the consideration of any scientific problems distasteful to me for an entire year” (1949, p. 18).

Partly in an attempt to escape from such a strictly regimented learning environment, Einstein left Munich for Zurich when he was 15, hoping to enroll in the Polytechnic Institute there. To his dismay, however, he failed the entrance examination and was required to enroll in a Swiss school for remedial coursework. According to one Einstein analyst (Holton, 1972), this episode represented a turning point in Einstein’s schooling and, perhaps, in his scientific thinking as well. In sharp contrast to what he had known, this school was humanistic in orientation, stressing the individual’s unencumbered search for knowledge. This social atmosphere was ideally suited to Einstein’s independent style of thinking and working. There was little emphasis on memorization, much emphasis on individual laboratory work and student-initiated investigation, and a concentration on the development of relaxed, democratic exchanges between students and teachers. To the end of his life, Einstein remembered this school fondly: “It made an unforgettable impression on me, thanks to its liberal spirit and the simple earnestness of the teachers who based themselves on no external authority” (Holton, 1972, p. 106). It was here that Einstein devised the first Gedankenexperiment that would lead him to the theory of relativity.

Other creators have resisted external attempts to control their behavior. For example, Woody Allen reports enjoying his work as a stand-up comedian and a writer far more than his work as a filmmaker precisely because other people have so much more control over various aspects of filmmaking; in his other pursuits, he alone is in complete control of the outcome (Lax, 1975). Like many highly creative individuals, Allen shuns tasks that he feels pressured to do but earnestly attacks work that meets his own interests. He regularly played hooky from school as a child, and flunked out of NYU after his first semester. (The courses he failed in college included film production.) Starting at an early age, with great consistency, he rejected the expectations that others had for his performance. Rather than attending school, he would wander around Manhattan observing people or visiting magic stores or watching movies. Rather than conforming to someone else’s notion of his proper education, he taught himself filmmaking, music, literature, philosophy, history, and magic. On the night he was awarded an Oscar for Annie Hall he was doing what he always did on Monday night, and what he clearly preferred to society’s recognition—playing clarinet with his jazz group in Manhattan.

The rejection of external constraints is evident in the writing of D.H. Lawrence, who wrote to a friend, “I always say, my motto is ‘Art for my sake.’ If I want to write, I write—and if I don’t want to, I won’t” (Allen, 1948, p. 225). Joyce Carol Oates suggests that her underlying reason for writing is the intrinsic pleasure that reading something good brings: “I write to discover what it is I will have written. A love of reading stimulates the wish to write—so that one can read, as a reader, the words one has written” (1982, p. 1). And Picasso said, “When we invented cubism, we had no intention of inventing cubism, but simply of expressing what was in us. Nobody drew up a program of action, and though our friends the poets followed our efforts attentively, they never dictated to us” (Zervos, 1952, p. 51).

Even the minor daily demands of relatives, friends, and colleagues can act as social constrai...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Preface to the Updated Edition
• Preface to the 1983 Edition
• Part One Understanding and Assessing Creativity
• Part Two Social and Environmental Influences
• Part Three Implications
• References to the 1983 Edition
• References to the Updates
• About the Book and Author
• Credits
• Index