Creativity

What do the following have in common: the drug penicillin, the Eiffel Tower, the film Lord of the Rings, the General Theory of Relativity, the hymn Amazing Grace, the iPhone, the novel Don Quixote, the painting The Mona Lisa, a recipe for chocolate fudge, the soft drink Coca-Cola, the video game Wii Sports, the West Coast offense in football, and the zipper? You guessed right! All of the named items were products of the creative mind. Not one of them existed until somebody came up with the idea. Creativity is not something that you just pick like apples from a tree. Because creative ideas are so special, creators who come up with the best ideas are often highly rewarded with fame, fortune, or both. Nobel Prizes, Oscars, Pulitzers, and other honors bring fame, and big sales and box office bring fortune. Yet what is creativity in the first place?

The original patent drawings for the “clasp locker” – what we today call a zipper. This ubiquitous device was the product of the creative mind of American inventor Whitcomb Judson, who also invented a machine to make zippers quickly and cheaply.

Creativity: What Is It?

Creativity happens when someone comes up with a creative idea. An example would be a creative solution to a difficult problem. But what makes an idea or solution creative? Although psychologists have offered several definitions (Plucker, Beghetto, & Dow, 2004; Runco & Jaeger, 2012), probably the best definition is the one recently adapted from the three criteria that the U.S. Patent Office uses to decide whether an invention can receive patent protection (Simonton, 2012).

The first criterion is originality. The idea must have a low probability. Indeed, it often should be unique. Albert Einstein’s special theory of relativity certainly satisfied this criterion. No other scientist came up with the idea.

The second criterion is usefulness. The idea should be valuable or work. For example, a solution must, in fact, solve the problem. An original recipe that produces a dish that tastes too terrible to eat cannot be creative. In the case of Einstein’s theory, his relativity principle provided explanations for what otherwise would be inexplicable empirical results.

The third and last criterion is surprise. The idea should be surprising, or at least nonobvious (to use the term used by the Patent Office). For instance, a solution that is a straightforward derivation from acquired expertise cannot be considered surprising even if it were original. Einstein’s relativity theory was not a step-by-step deduction from classical physics but rather the theory was built upon a new foundation that challenged the very basis of traditional physics.

When applying these three criteria, it is critical to recognize that originality, usefulness, and surprise are all quantitative rather than qualitative attributes of an idea. Specifically, we really have to speak of degree to which an idea satisfies each of the three criteria. In addition, the three attributes should have a zero point, that is, it should be possible to speak of an idea lacking any originality, usefulness, or surprise whatsoever. Finally, we have to assume that if an idea scores zero on any one criterion then it must have zero creativity as well. For example, someone who reinvents the wheel is definitely producing a useful idea, but the idea has zero originality and hence no creativity whatsoever. Similarly, someone who invented a parachute made entirely out of steel reinforced concrete would get lots of credit for originality—and surprise!—but none for usefulness.

Yet, certainly, we have to ask: Who makes these judgments? The person who generated the idea or other people who the person expects to appreciate the idea? If the former, we can speak of subjective or personal “little-c creativity,” and if the later, we have objective or consensual “Big-C Creativity” (Simonton, in press). This distinction is important because sometimes personal and consensual assessments do not have to agree. Such disagreements are especially conspicuous in “neglected geniuses,” such as the poet Emily Dickinson, the painter Vincent Van Gogh, and the scientist Gregor Mendel—all producing ideas that received only posthumous recognition for their creativity.

Creativity is a very complex phenomenon (Hennessey & Amabile, 2010; Runco, 2004). As a result, psychologists who study creativity can do so from many different perspectives. Nevertheless, the three most common perspectives are cognitive processes, personal characteristics, and social contexts.

Cognitive Processes: How Do Creators Think?

Cognitive scientists have long been interested in the thinking processes that lead to creative ideas (Simonton & Damian, 2013). Indeed, many so-called “creativity tests” are actually measures of the thought processes believed to underlie the creative act (Simonton, 2003b). The following two measures are among the best known.

The first is the Remote Associates Test, or RAT, that was introduced by Mednick (1962). Mednick believed that the creative process requires the ability to associate ideas that are considered very far apart conceptually. The RAT consists of items that require the respondent to identify a word that can be associated to three rather distinct stimulus words. For example, what word can be associated with the words “widow, bite, monkey”? The answer is spider (black widow spider, spider bite, spider monkey). This particular question is relatively easy, others are much more difficult, but it gives you the basic idea.

What do you see? An ordinary piece of building material? Those who score higher on the Unusual Uses Task are able to imagine many possibilities for the humble brick.

The second measure is the Unusual Uses Task (Guilford, 1967; Torrance, 1974). Here, the participant is asked to generate alternative uses for a common object, such as a brick. The responses can be scored on four dimensions: (a) fluency, the total number of appropriate uses generated; (b) originality, the statistical rarity of the uses given; (c) flexibility, the number of distinct conceptual categories implied by the various uses; and (d) elaboration, the amount of detail given for the generated uses. For example, using a brick as a paperweight represents a different conceptual category that using its volume to conserve water in a toilet tank. The capacity to produce unusual uses is but one example of the general cognitive ability to engage in divergent thinking (Guilford, 1967). Unlike convergent thinking, which converges on the single best answer or solution, divergent thinking comes up with multiple possibilities that might vary greatly in usefulness.

Unfortunately, many different cognitive processes have been linked to creativity (Simonton & Damian, 2013). That is why we cannot use the singular; there is no such thing as the “creative process.” Nonetheless, the various processes do share one feature: All enable the person to “think outside the box” imposed by routine thinking—to venture into territory that would otherwise be ignored (Simonton, 2011). Creativity requires that you go where you don’t know where you’re going.

Personal Characteristics: Who Is Creative?

Can anybody be creative? Or is creativity subject to individual differences, such as intelligence? Might creativity even be normally distributed just like scores on IQ tests? The answer is complex. Unlike general intelligence, which represents a more or less cohesive cognitive ability, creativity is just as much a personal attribute as an intellectual capacity. This feature is evident in the fact that some “creativity tests” are actually measures of personality, interests, and values (Simonton, 2003b). An example is the Creative Personality Scale of the Gough Adjective Check List (Gough, 1979; see also Carson, Peterson, & Higgins, 2005). In this measure, a person is asked to check off whatever adjectives are viewed as especially self-descriptive. The relevant adjectives are shown in Table 1. How would you describe yourself? Would you use more adjectives in the left column or the right column?

Table 1. The Creative Personality Scale of the Gough (1979) Adjective Check List. Note. The Adjective Check List actually contains 300 adjectives arranged in alphabetical order from “absent-minded” to “zany,” but the above adjectives are the only ones scored.

Another reason to speak of the “creative personality” is that creativity correlates with scores on standard personality measures (Feist, 1998). Most notably, the creative person is more likely to score on the openness-to-experience factor of the Big Five Factor Model (Carson, Peterson, & Higgins, 2005; Harris, 2004; McCrae, 1987). This factor concerns whether a person has a strong intellectual curiosity, preference for variety, and an active imagination and is aesthetically sensitive, attentive to inner feelings, as well as receptive to new ideas and values. It would seem obvious that persons high on this factor would behave differently than those scoring low. For instance, we would expect such persons to be less conventional, to have a wider range of leisure activities, and to be more versatile. Yet, it is equally important to note that people high in openness also think differently. Besides scoring higher in divergent thinking (Carson, Peterson, & Higgins, 2005), openness is also associated with the diminished capacity to filter out extraneous information, a tendency often called cognitive disinhibition or reduced latent inhibition (Peterson & Carson, 2000). This “defocused attention” enables the creative person to make observations that others would overlook—such as what happens in serendipitous discovery. A classic example was when Alexander Flemming noticed that a bacteria culture was being killed by a certain mold, a discovery that directly led to penicillin.

Leonardo da Vinci’s design for a flying machine. Leonardo spent years as a young man working as an artist’s apprentice and later studied subjects such as engineering, anatomy, and mathematics.

Now you may wonder, isn’t cognitive disinhibition a bad way of thinking? Isn’t it a good thing to be able to ignore irrelevant stimuli? The answer is yes. In fact, reduced latent inhibition is also connected with mental illness (Carson, 2011; Eysenck, 1995). Thus arises a link between creativity and psychopathology (Simonton, 2010). Even so, creative individuals are seldom outright mentally ill. Instead, creators possess other personal traits and capacities that convert a potential cognitive disability into an exceptional ability (Carson, 2011). Among the most important of these characteristics is high general intelligence (Carson, Peterson, & Higgins, 2005; Kéri, 2011). The creator then has the capacity not just to generate original and surprising ideas but also to test and develop them for usefulness. Mental illness arises when the person always skips the last step—the reality check.

At this point, we must add an important qualification: For Big-C Creativity, you have to have more going for you than boasting a creative personality that can engage in creative thought. You also must acquire appropriate expertise in the domain in which you hope to make creative contributions. Einstein had to learn physics and mathematics; Leonardo da Vinci had to learn how to draw and paint. In fact, it typically requires about a decade of extensive training and practice before a person can become a Big-C Creator (Ericsson, 1996). Even so, just because you become an expert in your field it does not mean that you’ll be creative, too.

Social Contexts: What Environments Affect Creativity?

Although creativity is often viewed as an entirely psychological phenomenon, research by social psychologists shows that certain social environments have a part to play as well. These contextual influences can assume many forms. Sometimes these effects are relatively short term or transient. Other times the effects can be more long lasting.

To illustrate the former possibility, creativity is often enhanced when persons are exposed to incongruous or novel stimuli. For example, one recent experiment used virtual reality to create three conditions (Ritter et al., 2012). In one condition, participants walked around in a room in which the normal laws of physics were violated. Objects fell up rather than fell down, and the objects got smaller as you approached them rather than getting bigger. In a second condition, the participants were in the same virtual reality situation, but everything behaved as it would in normal reality. In the third and last condition, the participants merely saw a film clip of what the participants in the first condition experienced—a passive rather than active exposure to an otherworldly environment. Only those who directly experienced the strange environment showed an increase in cognitive flexibility, an important component of creativity, as noted earlier. In a second experiment, the participants were again subjected to three conditions, but this time the manipulation concerned cultural scripts—in this case, the customary way to make a popular breakfast meal. Only those participants who directly experienced the violation of the norms showed an increase in cognitive flexibility. Those who made breakfast the normal way or who vicariously watched somebody else make breakfast an unusual way showed no effect.

The above effect is most likely transient. It is doubtful that those participants exposed to such incongruous experiences would exhibit any long-term change in their creativity. But what would happen if the exposure was much longer, years rather than minutes? Then the benefit might endure a lifetime. An example is the long-term benefits that accrue to persons who have acquired multicultural experiences, such as living in a foreign country for a significant amount of time (Leung, Maddux, Galinsky, & Chiu, 2008). Daily life abroad exposes a person to different ways of doing everyday activities. Moreover, because the visitor quickly learns that “when in Rome do as the Romans do,” the exposure becomes direct rather than vicarious (Maddux, Adam, & Galinsky, 2010). To be sure, not everybody’s creativity benefits from multicultural environments. The person also has to score high on openness to experience (Leung & Chiu, 2008). Otherwise, they will close themselves off from the potential stimulation, and then just gripe about the “peculiar customs of the natives” rather than actively practice those customs—such as making a totally different breakfast!

Multicultural experiences are advantageous for creative thinking.

Finally, both little-c and Big-C creativity—but especially the latter—are more likely to appear in specific sociocultural systems (Simonton, 2003a). Some political, social, cultural, and economic environments are supportive of exceptional creativity, whereas others tend to suppress if not destroy creativity. For this reason, the history of any civilization or nation tends to have “Dark Ages” as well as “Golden Ages.” Early medieval Europe illustrates the former, while Renaissance Italy exemplifies the latter. It would take us too far beyond introductory psychology to discuss all of the relevant factors. Yet, one factor fits nicely with what was discussed in the previous paragraph. Highly creative societies are far more likely to be multicultural, with abundant influences from other civilizations. For instance, Japanese civilization tended to undergo a revival of creativity after the infusion of new ideas from other civilizations, including Korean, Chinese, Indian, and European (Simonton, 1997). This influx involved not just Japanese living abroad but also non-Japanese immigrating to Japan.

Conclusion

Creativity certainly must be considered a crucial human behavior. Indeed, like language, creativity sets Homo sapiens well apart from even our closest evolutionary relatives. It is virtually impossible to imagine a world in which all of the products of the creative mind were removed. I couldn’t even type this very sentence at this instant. Even the alphabet was invented. Creativity permeates every aspect of modern life: technology, science, literature, the visual arts, music, cooking, sports, politics, war, business, advertising … well, I could go on and on. Fortunately, psychologists have made major strides in understanding the phenomenon. In fact, some of the best studies of creativity are also excellent examples of scientific creativity. At the same time, it remains clear that we still have a long ways to go before we know everything we need to know about the psychology of creativity. Hence, creativity research has a bright future.

Problem-Solving

People face problems every day—usually, multiple problems throughout the day. Sometimes these problems are straightforward: To double a recipe for pizza dough, for example, all that is required is that each ingredient in the recipe be doubled. Sometimes, however, the problems we encounter are more complex. For example, say you have a work deadline, and you must mail a printed copy of a report to your supervisor by the end of the business day. The report is time-sensitive and must be sent overnight. You finished the report last night, but your printer will not work today. What should you do? First, you need to identify the problem and then apply a strategy for solving the problem.

The study of human and animal problem solving processes has provided much insight toward the understanding of our conscious experience and led to advancements in computer science and artificial intelligence. Essentially much of cognitive science today represents studies of how we consciously and unconsciously make decisions and solve problems. For instance, when encountered with a large amount of information, how do we go about making decisions about the most efficient way of sorting and analyzing all the information in order to find what you are looking for as in visual search paradigms in cognitive psychology. Or in a situation where a piece of machinery is not working properly, how do we go about organizing how to address the issue and understand what the cause of the problem might be. How do we sort the procedures that will be needed and focus attention on what is important in order to solve problems efficiently. Within this section we will discuss some of these issues and examine processes related to human, animal and computer problem solving.

Steps for solving the Tower of Hanoi in the minimum number of moves when there are 3 disks.

 Graphical representation of nodes (circles) and moves (lines) of Tower of Hanoi.

The Tower of Hanoi is a frequently used psychological technique to study problem solving and procedure analysis. A variation of the Tower of Hanoi known as the Tower of London has been developed which has been an important tool in the neuropsychological diagnosis of executive function disorders and their treatment.

GESTALT PSYCHOLOGY AND PROBLEM SOLVING

As you may recall from the sensation and perception chapter, Gestalt psychology describes whole patterns, forms and configurations of perception and cognition such as closure, good continuation, and figure-ground. In addition to patterns of perception, Wolfgang Kohler, a German Gestalt psychologist traveled to the Spanish island of Tenerife in order to study animals behavior and problem solving in the anthropoid ape.

As an interesting side note to Kohler’s studies of chimp problem solving, Dr. Ronald Ley, professor of psychology at State University of New York provides evidence in his book A Whisper of Espionage (1990) suggesting that while collecting data for what would later be his book The Mentality of Apes (1925) on Tenerife in the Canary Islands between 1914 and 1920, Kohler was additionally an active spy for the German government alerting Germany to ships that were sailing around the Canary Islands. Ley suggests his investigations in England, Germany and elsewhere in Europe confirm that Kohler had served in the German military by building, maintaining and operating a concealed radio that contributed to Germany’s war effort acting as a strategic outpost in the Canary Islands that could monitor naval military activity approaching the north African coast.

While trapped on the island over the course of World War 1, Kohler applied Gestalt principles to animal perception in order to understand how they solve problems. He recognized that the apes on the islands also perceive relations between stimuli and the environment in Gestalt patterns and understand these patterns as wholes as opposed to pieces that make up a whole. Kohler based his theories of animal intelligence on the ability to understand relations between stimuli, and spent much of his time while trapped on the island investigation what he described as insight, the sudden perception of useful or proper relations. In order to study insight in animals, Kohler would present problems to chimpanzee’s by hanging some banana’s or some kind of food so it was suspended higher than the apes could reach. Within the room, Kohler would arrange a variety of boxes, sticks or other tools the chimpanzees could use by combining in patterns or organizing in a way that would allow them to obtain the food (Kohler & Winter, 1925).

While viewing the chimpanzee’s, Kohler noticed one chimp that was more efficient at solving problems than some of the others. The chimp, named Sultan, was able to use long poles to reach through bars and organize objects in specific patterns to obtain food or other desirables that were originally out of reach. In order to study insight within these chimps, Kohler would remove objects from the room to systematically make the food more difficult to obtain. As the story goes, after removing many of the objects Sultan was used to using to obtain the food, he sat down ad sulked for a while, and then suddenly got up going over to two poles lying on the ground. Without hesitation Sultan put one pole inside the end of the other creating a longer pole that he could use to obtain the food demonstrating an ideal example of what Kohler described as insight. In another situation, Sultan discovered how to stand on a box to reach a banana that was suspended from the rafters illustrating Sultan’s perception of relations and the importance of insight in problem solving.

Grande (another chimp in the group studied by Kohler) builds a three-box structure to reach the bananas, while Sultan watches from the ground. Insight, sometimes referred to as an “Ah-ha” experience, was the term Kohler used for the sudden perception of useful relations among objects during problem solving.

PITFALLS TO PROBLEM SOLVING

   Not all problems are successfully solved, however. What challenges stop us from successfully solving a problem? Albert Einstein once said, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.” Imagine a person in a room that has four doorways. One doorway that has always been open in the past is now locked. The person, accustomed to exiting the room by that particular doorway, keeps trying to get out through the same doorway even though the other three doorways are open. The person is stuck—but she just needs to go to another doorway, instead of trying to get out through the locked doorway. A mental set is where you persist in approaching a problem in a way that has worked in the past but is clearly not working now.

Functional fixedness is a type of mental set where you cannot perceive an object being used for something other than what it was designed for. During the Apollo 13 mission to the moon, NASA engineers at Mission Control had to overcome functional fixedness to save the lives of the astronauts aboard the spacecraft. An explosion in a module of the spacecraft damaged multiple systems. The astronauts were in danger of being poisoned by rising levels of carbon dioxide because of problems with the carbon dioxide filters. The engineers found a way for the astronauts to use spare plastic bags, tape, and air hoses to create a makeshift air filter, which saved the lives of the astronauts.

Researchers have investigated whether functional fixedness is affected by culture. In one experiment, individuals from the Shuar group in Ecuador were asked to use an object for a purpose other than that for which the object was originally intended. For example, the participants were told a story about a bear and a rabbit that were separated by a river and asked to select among various objects, including a spoon, a cup, erasers, and so on, to help the animals. The spoon was the only object long enough to span the imaginary river, but if the spoon was presented in a way that reflected its normal usage, it took participants longer to choose the spoon to solve the problem. (German & Barrett, 2005). The researchers wanted to know if exposure to highly specialized tools, as occurs with individuals in industrialized nations, affects their ability to transcend functional fixedness. It was determined that functional fixedness is experienced in both industrialized and nonindustrialized cultures (German & Barrett, 2005).

In order to make good decisions, we use our knowledge and our reasoning. Often, this knowledge and reasoning is sound and solid. Sometimes, however, we are swayed by biases or by others manipulating a situation. For example, let’s say you and three friends wanted to rent a house and had a combined target budget of $1,600. The realtor shows you only very run-down houses for $1,600 and then shows you a very nice house for $2,000. Might you ask each person to pay more in rent to get the $2,000 home? Why would the realtor show you the run-down houses and the nice house? The realtor may be challenging your anchoring bias. An anchoring bias occurs when you focus on one piece of information when making a decision or solving a problem. In this case, you’re so focused on the amount of money you are willing to spend that you may not recognize what kinds of houses are available at that price point.

The confirmation bias is the tendency to focus on information that confirms your existing beliefs. For example, if you think that your professor is not very nice, you notice all of the instances of rude behavior exhibited by the professor while ignoring the countless pleasant interactions he is involved in on a daily basis. Hindsight bias leads you to believe that the event you just experienced was predictable, even though it really wasn’t. In other words, you knew all along that things would turn out the way they did. Representative bias describes a faulty way of thinking, in which you unintentionally stereotype someone or something; for example, you may assume that your professors spend their free time reading books and engaging in intellectual conversation, because the idea of them spending their time playing volleyball or visiting an amusement park does not fit in with your stereotypes of professors.

Finally, the availability heuristic is a heuristic in which you make a decision based on an example, information, or recent experience that is that readily available to you, even though it may not be the best example to inform your decision. Biases tend to “preserve that which is already established—to maintain our preexisting knowledge, beliefs, attitudes, and hypotheses” (Aronson, 1995; Kahneman, 2011). These biases are summarized in the table below.

 

Summary of Decision Biases

Bias	Description
Anchoring	Tendency to focus on one particular piece of information when making decisions or problem-solving
Confirmation	Focuses on information that confirms existing beliefs
Hindsight	Belief that the event just experienced was predictable
Representative	Unintentional stereotyping of someone or something
Availability	Decision is based upon either an available precedent or an example that may be faulty

SUMMARY

   Many different strategies exist for solving problems. Typical strategies include trial and error, applying algorithms, and using heuristics. To solve a large, complicated problem, it often helps to break the problem into smaller steps that can be accomplished individually, leading to an overall solution. Roadblocks to problem solving include a mental set, functional fixedness, and various biases that can cloud decision making skills.

 

Problem-Solving with Critical Thinking