Motivated information processing, social tuning, and group creativity.

The extent to which groups are creative has wide implications for their overall performance, including the quality of their problem solutions, judgments, and decisions. To further understanding of group creativity, we integrate the motivated information processing in groups model (De Dreu, Nijstad, & Van Knippenberg, 2008) with work on epistemic social tuning (Lunn, Sinclair, Whitchurch, & Glenn, 2007). Three propositions were advanced: (a) Groups produce more ideas when members have high rather than low epistemic motivation, especially when members also have a prosocial rather than pro-self motivation; (b) these ideas are more original, appropriate, or feasible when a group norm favors originality, appropriateness, or feasibility; and (c) originality is valued more in individualistic cultures (e.g., the Netherlands), whereas appropriateness is valued more in collectivist cultures (e.g., Korea). Four studies involving 3-person groups generating ideas supported these propositions: Epistemic motivation (mild vs. intense time pressure; presence vs. absence of process accountability) stimulated production and originality, especially when prosocial rather than pro-self motives were present and participants were Dutch or originality norms were experimentally primed. When appropriateness norms were primed or participants were Korean, epistemic motivation stimulated production and appropriateness, especially when prosocial rather than pro-self motives were present. We discuss implications for research on group processes and for work on culture and creativity. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Peacocks, Picasso, and parental investment: The effects of romantic motives on creativity.

Four experiments explored the effects of mating motivation on creativity. Even without other incentives to be creative, romantic motives enhanced creativity on subjective and objective measures. For men, any cue designed to activate a short-term or a long-term mating goal increased creative displays; however, women displayed more creativity only when primed to attract a high-quality long-term mate. These creative boosts were unrelated to increased effort on creative tasks or to changes in mood or arousal. Furthermore, results were unaffected by the application of monetary incentives for creativity. These findings align with the view that creative displays in both sexes may be linked to sexual selection, qualified by unique exigencies of human parental investment. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Motivation and creativity: Effects of motivational orientation on creative writers.

72 members of the college community who identified themselves as actively involved in creative writing participated in individual laboratory sessions, in which they were asked to write 2 brief poems, to investigate the hypothesis that intrinsic motivation is conducive to creativity and extrinsic motivation is detrimental. In the present study, intrinsic motivation was defined as resulting from an S's interest in and enjoyment of writing for its own sake, while extrinsic motivation was defined as resulting from the external things obtained by writing (e.g., rewards, approval). Ss were divided into approximately equal groups that were designated as intrinsic-orientation, extrinsic-orientation, and control conditions. Before writing the 2nd poem, Ss in the intrinsic-orientation condition completed a questionnaire on intrinsic reasons for being involved in writing, and Ss in the extrinsic-orientation condition completed a questionnaire on extrinsic reasons. Ss in the control condition were not given a questionnaire on reasons for writing. Results indicate that, although there were no initial differences between conditions on prior involvement in writing or on creativity of the 1st poems written, there were significant differences in the creativity of the poems written after the experimental manipulations. Poems written under an extrinsic orientation were significantly less creative than those written in the other 2 conditions. Implications for social-psychological and individual-difference conceptions of creativity are discussed. (26 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Incremental effects of reward on creativity.

The authors examined 2 ways reward might increase creativity. First, reward contingent on creativity might increase extrinsic motivation. Studies 1 and 2 found that repeatedly giving preadolescent students reward for creative performance in 1 task increased their creativity in subsequent tasks. Study 3 reported that reward promised for creativity increased college students' creative task performance. Second, expected reward for high performance might increase creativity by enhancing perceived self-determination and, therefore, intrinsic task interest. Study 4 found that employees' intrinsic job interest mediated a positive relationship between expected reward for high performance and creative suggestions offered at work. Study 5 found that employees' perceived self-determination mediated a positive relationship between expected reward for high performance and the creativity of anonymous suggestions for helping the organization. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Cognitive regularities in creative activity.

Theories of creativity have not traditionally considered whether novel ideas or inventive behaviors can result from regularities in the cognitive processes responsible for such activities. Most of these traditional theories are based on the evaluation of products as meeting (or not) some abstract metric of creative output. However, cognitive theories of creativity can be proposed in which creative activity is a function of more traditional cognitive processes that are not unique to inventive behaviors. The purpose of this article is to review the cognitive regularities of creative activity and organize the research on this topic into a framework that might be useful in understanding and extending investigations directed at studying creativity. To these ends, cognitive processes underlying generation, synthesis, and selection of information in creative activities are delineated. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Mediating between the muse and the masses: Inspiration and the actualization of creative ideas.

Within the creativity domain, inspiration is a motivational state posited to energize the actualization of creative ideas. The authors examined the construct validity, predictive utility, and function of inspiration in the writing process. Study 1, a cross-lagged panel study, showed that getting creative ideas and being inspired are distinct and that the former precedes the latter. In Study 2, inspiration, at the between-person level, predicted the creativity of scientific writing, whereas effort predicted technical merit. Within persons, peaks in inspiration predicted peaks in creativity and troughs in technical merit. In Study 3, inspiration predicted the creativity of poetry. Consistent with its posited transmission function, inspiration mediated between creativity of the idea and creativity of the product, whereas effort, positive affect, and awe did not. Study 4 extended the Study 3 findings to fiction writing. Openness to aesthetics and positive affect predicted creativity of the idea, whereas approach temperament moderated the relation between creativity of the idea and inspiration. Inspiration predicted efficiency, productivity, and use of shorter words, indicating that inspiration not only transmits creativity but does so economically. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Discernment and creativity: How well can people identify their most creative ideas?

How well can people judge the creativity of their ideas? The distinction between generating ideas and evaluating ideas appears in many theories of creativity, but the massive literature on generation has overshadowed the question of evaluation. After critically reviewing the notion of accuracy in creativity judgments, this article explores whether (1) people in general are discerning and (2) whether some people are more discerning than others. University students (n = 226) completed four divergent thinking tasks and then decided which responses were their most creative. Judges then rated the creativity of all of the responses. Multilevel latent-variable models found that people's choices strongly agreed with judges' ratings of the responses; overall, people were discerning in their decisions. But some people were more discerning than others: people high in openness to experience, in particular, had stronger agreement between their decisions and the judges' ratings. Creative people are thus doubly skilled: they are better at generating good ideas and at picking their best ideas. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Why seeking help from teammates is a blessing and a curse: A theory of help seeking and individual creativity in team contexts.

Research has not explored the extent to which seeking help from teammates positively relates to a person's own creativity. This question is important to explore as help seeking is commonly enacted in organizations and may come with reciprocation costs that may also diminish creativity. Results based on 291 employees in a single division of a large multinational organization revealed that seeking help predicted creativity and mediated the relationship between intrinsic motivation and creativity. However, help seekers also incurred reciprocation costs in that they tended to give more help to teammates, and giving help to teammates was negatively related to creativity. In general, giving higher levels of help attenuated the positive relationship between help seeking and creativity. We also tested an integrated model to show that help giving moderated the mediated relationship between intrinsic motivation and creativity via help seeking, such that higher levels of help giving attenuated this mediated effect. We discuss theoretical and practical implications recommending additional research regarding the interpersonal creative process in team contexts. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Hedonic tone and activation level in the mood-creativity link: Toward a dual pathway to creativity model.

To understand when and why mood states influence creativity, the authors developed and tested a dual pathway to creativity model; creative fluency (number of ideas or insights) and originality (novelty) are functions of cognitive flexibility, persistence, or some combination thereof. Invoking work on arousal, psychophysiological processes, and working memory capacity, the authors argue that activating moods (e.g., angry, fearful, happy, elated) lead to more creative fluency and originality than do deactivating moods (e.g., sad, depressed, relaxed, serene). Furthermore, activating moods influence creative fluency and originality because of enhanced cognitive flexibility when tone is positive and because of enhanced persistence when tone is negative. Four studies with different mood manipulations and operationalizations of creativity (e.g., brainstorming, category inclusion tasks, gestalt completion tests) support the model. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The social psychology of creativity: A componential conceptualization.

Considers the definition and assessment of creativity and presents a componential framework for conceptualizing this faculty. Including domain-relevant skills, creativity-relevant skills, and task motivation as a set of necessary and sufficient components of creativity, the framework describes the way in which cognitive abilities, personality characteristics, and social factors might contribute to stages of the creative process. The discussion emphasizes the previously neglected social factors and highlights the contributions that a social psychology of creativity can make to a comprehensive view of creative performance. (99 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

When prevention promotes creativity: The role of mood, regulatory focus, and regulatory closure.

Promotion-focused states generally boost creativity because they associate with enhanced activation and cognitive flexibility. With regard to prevention-focused states, research evidence is less consistent, with some findings suggesting prevention-focused states promote creativity and other findings pointing to no or even negative effects. We proposed and tested the hypothesis that whether prevention-focused states boost creativity depends on regulatory closure (whether a goal is fulfilled or not). We predicted that prevention-focused states that activate the individual (unfulfilled prevention goals, fear) would lead to similar levels of creativity as promotion-focused states but that prevention-focused states that deactivate (closed prevention goals, relief) would lead to lower levels of creativity. Moreover, we predicted that this effect would be mediated by feelings of activation. Predictions were tested in 3 studies on creative insights and 1 on original ideation. Results supported predictions. Implications for self-regulation, motivation, mood, and creativity are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Rational versus intuitive problem solving: How thinking “off the beaten path” can stimulate creativity.

We compared the effects of rational versus intuitive problem solving on creativity. We argued that the relative effectiveness of these approaches depends upon an individual's typical thinking style such that individuals will be more creative when they adopt a problem-solving approach that differs from their typical style of thinking (e.g., individuals who avoid rational thinking will exhibit higher creativity when they are instructed to rely on rational problem solving). We tested this hypothesis in a sample of undergraduate students generating creative ideas in response to a real-world problem. In support of our hypothesis, we found that problem-solving approach and individual differences in thinking style interact such that creativity is highest when individuals use a nontypical problem-solving approach. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Multicultural experience enhances creativity: The when and how.

Many practices aimed at cultivating multicultural competence in educational and organizational settings (e.g., exchange programs, diversity education in college, diversity management at work) assume that multicultural experience fosters creativity. In line with this assumption, the research reported in this article is the first to empirically demonstrate that exposure to multiple cultures in and of itself can enhance creativity. Overall, the authors found that extensiveness of multicultural experiences was positively related to both creative performance (insight learning, remote association, and idea generation) and creativity-supporting cognitive processes (retrieval of unconventional knowledge, recruitment of ideas from unfamiliar cultures for creative idea expansion). Furthermore, their studies showed that the serendipitous creative benefits resulting from multicultural experiences may depend on the extent to which individuals open themselves to foreign cultures, and that creativity is facilitated in contexts that deemphasize the need for firm answers or existential concerns. The authors discuss the implications of their findings for promoting creativity in increasingly global learning and work environments. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Explaining Creativity: The Science of Human Innovation.

Reviews the book, Explaining Creativity: The Science of Human Innovation by R. Keith Sawyer (2006). Explaining Creativity is a refreshing analysis of creativity within a broad range of creative domains that are often neglected in scientific treatments of creativity. The book is divided into five parts. In the first part, Sawyer reviews previous conceptions of creativity, such as "creativity comes from the unconscious," and "everyone is creative" and claims many such conceptions are myths. The second part of the book reviews individualist approaches to creativity. In the third part of the book, Sawyer reviews evidence from sociology, culture, and history to show how researchers from various perspectives all converge on the importance of context for recognizing creativity. The fourth part reviews the creative process of performance-based, collaborative artistic forms of creativity, such as installation art, screenwriting, sitcom writing, jazz improvisation, and comedy improvisation. The fifth section shows how science and business creativity are also embedded in a social context and can be even more reliant on collaboration than artistic creativity. The book then ends with tips for being more creative. A complete textbook on creativity should be comprehensive, present all the evidence and viewpoints, and be critical of everything. This is not such a book. Nonetheless, this is one of the first books to go beyond the psychological study of creativity and to synthesize various different levels of analysis to understand diverse creative behaviors. To this end, the book is highly recommended to nearly anyone that wants to have a more complete understanding of how creativity operates in today's world. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Detrimental effects of reward: Reality or myth?

Based on seemingly overwhelming empirical evidence of the decremental effects of reward on intrinsic task interest and creativity, the use of reward to alter human behavior has been challenged in literature reviews, textbooks, and the popular media. An analysis of a quarter century of research on intrinsic task interest and creativity revealed, however, that (a) detrimental effects of reward occur under highly restricted, easily avoidable conditions; (b) mechanisms of instrumental and classical conditioning are basic for understanding incremental and decremental effects of reward on task motivation; and (c) positive effects of reward on generalized creativity are easily attainable using procedures derived from behavior theory. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Creativity map: Toward the next generation of theories of creativity.

What is creativity and how should it be studied after more than 60 years of research? In this paper I call for more terminological clarity in creativity research, especially regarding the distinction between creative potential and creative behavior. The former concerns cognitive abilities and processes and personality dispositions facilitating creative expression. The latter refers to observable behavior, communicated ideas, or products that result from the interaction between individual potential and situational or cultural influences. Much research has focused on different attributes of creative potential, such as creative personality or divergent thinking abilities. I argue that future work in this area will have to specifically address domain-specific creative potential as well as the interaction between attributes of creative potential and situational or social attributes. The interaction of personal potential and social environment will determine whether creativity is expressed and how it is expressed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

On the enhancement of creativity by alcohol: pharmacology or expectation?

Creative individuals may use psychoactive drugs to enhance their ability to produce creative works, but it is difficult to differentiate the pharmacological effects from other influences. Part of the problem is that creativity defies any simple definition, making it hard to determine when or how much creativity is evident. The other major obstacle is that life circumstances are confounded with the propensity to use drugs (including alcohol), so the causal relation of drugs to creativity is uncertain. We examined this question by an experiment in which subjects were asked to creatively combine pictures of wildflowers that were implicitly organized around a set of three dimensions: color, shape, and number. Pharmacological and expected effects of alcohol were dissociated in the experiment by using the balanced placebo design (BPD). The results showed no pharmacological effect of alcohol on the creative combinations that subjects produced. However, the novelty and structural recombination of the wildflower arrangements were enhanced when subjects thought they had consumed alcohol, whether or not they had actually done so. Implications for measuring creativity and the possible motivation to use drugs for creative effect are discussed.     

The effectiveness of western creative teaching methods in China: An action research project.

A total of 54 students from a design department in a Chinese higher education institution took part in a 7-week action research project, which was intended to test the efficacy of U.K. creative teaching approaches in the Chinese educational context. The study took the form of a quasi-field experiment. A creative pedagogic model developed in the U.K. was used to deliver the Chinese curriculum to a class of second-year Bachelor of Arts Graphic Design students (the experimental class), while another class of students with similar student composition (the control class) received the traditional Chinese model of education. Visual outcomes produced by students from the two classes before and during the teaching intervention were evaluated for overall creativity, originality, design quality, and experimental range. Levels of student effort, motivation, enjoyment, and confidence in experimentation were measured through a student questionnaire examining the impact of different pedagogic models on student creative abilities and other related attributes. Both quantitative and qualitative results suggest that the creative methods developed in the U.K. were highly effective in encouraging learner creativity and related attributes such as intrinsic motivation, enjoyment, and confidence. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Creativity and terror management: Evidence that creative activity increases guilt and social projection following mortality salience.

The present research, based on the ideas of O. Rank (1932/1989) and E. Becker (1973), was designed to test the hypotheses that engaging in creative expression after personal mortality has been made salient will lead to both increased feelings of guilt and a desire to enhance social connectedness. In Study 1, the authors used a 2 (mortality salience vs control)?×?2 (creative pretask vs noncreative pretask) between Ss factorial design and measured self-report guilt. Results indicated that participants who were reminded of their death and completed the creative pretask expressed more guilt than all other participants. In Study 2 this effect was replicated with a modification of the creativity treatment. In Study 3, the same conditions leading to increased guilt also led mortality-salient creative-task participants to express higher levels of social projection, an index of perceived social connectedness. Implications of these results for creativity, the interpersonal nature of guilt, and terror management theory are briefly discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)