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? 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.

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.

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.

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.