Looking Inside the Fishbowl of Creativity
By Senior Editors Johnna Wagner and Natalia Urbanowicz.
Ever wonder why some people are more creative than others? What factors contribute to that creativity? Like you, many others have asked the same questions which has resulted in a study of one hundred and fifty one psychology students at Brandeis University. The study was intended to cover a variety of types of creativity including problem solving (participants were given random materials and were told to build a fifteen inch structure), art (participants were told to make a collage using only supplied materials), and writing (participants were told to write an American Haiku poem). The researches used many different techniques to follow the participants’ thought processes:
- Videotaping the participants while they worked
- Having the participants fill out a questionnaire
- Telling 2/3 of the participants to think out loud as they worked
Researchers discovered that there was no difference in creativity between those who were told to think aloud and those who were not. Gender of the participant did not make a difference nor did the order in which the tasks were performed.
Each task yielded its own major creativity predictors. In the structure building task, the two strongest predictors of creativity were the participants’ attention to certain parts of the task (structure stability) and the number of times they second-guessed themselves. Much like the structure task, the collage activity showed that attention to certain aspects of the activity such as the planning process or even the participants’ playfulness during the task proved to be a strong behavioral predictor, and “Aha!†moments and changes in train of thought were positive predictions whereas speaking negatively of oneself or one’s project showed negative effects on creativeness. Following the pattern of the other two activities, the poetry portion of the study also showed a prediction pattern in the participants’ involvement with the task like their enjoyment and concentration.
To sum, people’s potential for creativity can be somewhat predictable if we study their behavior patterns and verbalizations while completing a task. Negative thoughts and uncertainty put a damper on creativity causing us to become frustrated and much less likely to produce anything of value.
The study shows that our involvement in, attentiveness to, and process of completing an activity is directly related to our intrinsic motivation, which, in turn, plays a major role in how creative we are.
In an article from the Sydney Morning Gerald the author states:
“But when their intrinsic motivation is undermined, they’re likely to substitute quantity for quality, they’re likely to learn less about complex tasks and be less creative.â€
This research suggests that the more interest and curiosity we have in what we are working on, the more creative our outcome will be. Participants that were truly thinking about and enjoying the activities that they were asked to do were noticeably more creative than those who performed the tasks merely for the sake of completion.
People like Picasso and Mozart don’t just set out to paint a picture or write a song with no motive. They have a keen interest and a deep passion for those activities and that fervor drives them to create more than just a paint-by-number or a children’s sing-along. Their strong intrinsic motivation is what sets them apart from the average artist and ordinary musician. Intrinsic motivation is the driving force of creativity, and the foundation of anything we create.
I think we really need to take into account that the studies were done on students by educational establishments. Both groups, tend toward conformity. If studies were done on intelligent people who did not feel they wanted to be caged by the strictures of academia, then the results may be more meaningful.
Think about highly creative intelligent people like Patrick Leigh Fermor, Gore Vidal, and Bill Gates. These exceptionally creative people never went to college.