Individual Differences: The Structure and Measure of Cognitive - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

Individual Differences: The Structure and Measure

• f Cognitive Abilities III:

Creativity

• Dr. Simon Sherwood

covering for Dr. David Luke

Aims of the lecture

• 1. The Concept of Creativity – what is it?
• 2. Approaches to the study of creativity
• Person, process, press, product?
• Links with intelligence, personality, psychopathology?
• 3. Measurement of Creativity
• Types of measures

Key Reading

Chamorro-Premuzic, T. (2011). Personality and individual differences (2nd ed.). Chichester: BPS Blackwell. (Chpt. 10) Maltby, J., Day, L., & Macaskill, A. (2013). Personality, individual differences and intelligence (3rd ed.). Harlow:

• Pearson. (Chpt. 16).

http://www.pearsoned.co.uk/maltby

Further Reading

Barron, F., & Harrington, D. M. (1981). Creativity, intelligence, and

• personality. Annual Review of Psychology, 32, 439-476.

http://www.corwin.com/upm-data/33595_Anderson.pdf Batey, M., & Furnham, A. (2006). Creativity, intelligence, and personality: A critical review of the scattered literature. Genetic, Social, and General Psychology Monographs, 132, 355-429. http://my.psychologytoday.com/files/attachments/33524/creativity- intelligence-and-personality-review-the-scattered-literature.pdf Feist, G. J. (1998). A meta-analysis of personality in scientific and artistic

• creativity. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 2, 290-309.

http://www.gwern.net/docs/1998-feist.pdf Hennessey, B. A., & Amabile, T. M. (2010). Creativity. Annual Review of Psychology, 61, 569-598. http://llk.media.mit.edu/courses/readings/HennesseyCrRev.pdf

Other reading

Hocevar, D. (1981). Measurement of creativity: Review and critique. Journal

• f Personality Assessment, 45(5), 450-465.

Feldhunsen, J. F. and Goh, B. E. (1995) Assessing and accessing creativity: An integrative review of theory, research, and development. Creativity Research Journal, 8(3), 231-247. Sternberg, R. J., & Kaufman, S. B. (Eds.) (2011). The Cambridge Handbook

• f intelligence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Sternberg, R. J., & O’Hara, L. A. (2000). Intelligence and creativity. In R. J. Sternberg (Ed.), Handbook of intelligence (pp. 611-630). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Documentary – Brain Story - All in the Mind c. 30:00- min http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAzroGRU5fQ

Creativity: What is it?

“Creativity is defined as intelligent, goal- directed search within a culturally defined domain for novel solutions to more or less well defined problems, resulting in the generation of a novel product (Nielson, 1996)”

Creativity: What is it?

“Creativity is defined as intelligent, goal- directed search within a culturally defined domain for novel solutions to more or less well defined problems, resulting in the generation of a novel product (Nielson, 1996)”

Creativity: What is it?

“… creativity appears to be the same tendency which we discover so deeply as the curative force in psychotherapy – man’s tendency to actualise himself, to become his

• potentialities. … the urge to expand, extend,

develop, mature, the tendency to express and activate all the capacities

• f

the

• rganism, to the extent that such activation

enhances … the self (Rogers, 1959, p. 76).”

Creativity: What is it?

“ … creative thinking, [is] defined as the thought processes involved in producing work of acknowledged greatness in art or science (Weisberg, 1989, p. 148).”

Creativity: What is it?

“… creativity refers to the abilities that are most characteristic of creative people. Creative abilities determine whether the individual has the power to exhibit creative behavior to a noteworthy degree. … In other words, the psychologist’s problem is that of creative personality (Guilford, 1950, p.33).”

Creativity: What is it?

• Eminence?

Beethoven (music) Dali (painting) Shakespeare (literature) Gaudi (architecture)

• According to Sternberg (1988):

Creative product: is original and appropriate. Creative person: is one who produces creative products.

Creativity: What is it?

• Eminence?

Beethoven (music) Dali (painting) Shakespeare (literature) Gaudi (architecture)

• According to Sternberg (1988):

Creative product: is original and appropriate. Creative person: is that one who produces creative products. Different types of creativity – Sternberg (2005)

Internal-External, Individual-Collective Perspectives

Person, Process, Product & Press

Runco (2004) suggested 4 approaches to study of creativity:

• 1. Person
• Personal characteristics e.g., traits, motivation
• 2. Process
• Thoughts, actions, behaviours underpinning process
• 3. Press
• Environmental influences e.g., cultural, organisational,

family, peer

• 4. Product
• Outcomes or results of creative process

The Concept of Creativity

• Two contrasting views:
• Getzels (1975): There is no universal agreement on the

definition of creativity.

• Vernon (1989): There is agreement on creativity as:
• “... a person’s capacity to produce ideas, inventions,

artistic objects, insights, and products which are evaluated by experts as being of high scientific, aesthetic, social, or technological value.” (p. 232).

The Concept of Creativity

• Other researchers stress the importance of the product,

rather than the process, in their definitions of creativity:

• Amabile (1987): “ A product is creative if it is an

appropriate solution to an open-ended task.” (p. 227).

• McKinnon

(1962): “...a response or an idea that is (1) novel or statistically infrequent... (2) It must serve to solve a problem, fit a situation,

• r

accomplish some recognisable goal. And (3) creativity involves sustaining of the original insight, an evaluation, and elaboration of it to the full.”

Creativity & Intelligence?

From Chamorro-Premuzic (2011, p. 303)

Creativity & Intelligence?

Chamorro-Premuzic (2011)

“The most widely held view on the relationship between creativity and intelligence is that both constructs are related. In psychometric terms, this means that creativity and intelligence share a substantial amount of variance; in plain English, this means that creativity and intelligence have much in common.” (p. 308, my emphasis) Variable correlations -.05 to .3 or .4 – vary according to measures used? “At best, then, creativity and intelligence are related but distinct constructs.” (p. 309)

Creativity & Intelligence?

Sternberg & Lubart (1995) – IQ as part of creativity

Creativity & Personality?

Chamorro-Premuzic (2011, p. 322)

Creativity & Psychopathology?

Chamorro-Premuzic (2011, p. 314) “Overall, the literature shows a relatively inconsistent pattern of results for the relationship between creativity measures and diverse indicators of abnormal behaviour, though associations between creativity and mental disorders have been frequent.”

Creativity & Psychopathology?

Chamorro-Premuzic (2011, p. 316) “[T]here are no doubt salient features that differentiate creative from mentally ill individuals; such features should not be undermined….” “[C]reative individuals may have every intention of producing

• riginal associations, while psychotic individuals may have little

alternative or control over their original, unusual, or eccentric ideas.” Is creativity a form of ‘controlled weirdness’? Barron

Theoretical Models of Creativity

• A) Creativity as a complex cognitive process (Amabile, 1990)
• Amabile proposes a model of creativity in 5 stages
• Stage 1: External input + an impetus
• Stage 2: Preparation: Role of the stimulus as a “chance for creativity”
• Stage 3: Response generation: Subject searches memory/environment
• Stage 4: Evaluation of the response
• Stage 5: Creative response: Success, failure, or partial success
• A number of factors that influence the process:

motivation, domain-relevant skills, and creativity-relevant skills

Theoretical Models of Creativity

• B)

Creativity as problem-solving (Treffinger, Feldhusen, & Isaksen, 1990)

• Creativity compared to problem solving.

Model of productive thinking. Creativity is understood as a set of cognitive processes.

• In productive thinking process we depart from a series of:

Skills – knowledge – motivation – dispositions – metacognitions

• which are used by the individual in:

Critical thinking / divergent thinking (alternative solutions)

• to finally make a decision and produce a solution.

Creativity as decision making - problem solving

Theoretical Models of Creativity

• C) Creativity as a social phenomenon (Czikszentmihalyi, 1990)
• Creativity is not an individual ’ s attribute but society attributes

creativity to individuals

• Creativity as an interaction: Domain – Person – Field
• 1st - The domain is the set of opportunities and constraints

communicated to the person (e.g. through education).

• 2nd - The person produces a variant product.
• 3rd - The field is the group of experts that would, finally, decide

whether the product meets the criteria of the domain.

Theoretical Models of Creativity

• D) Creativity as Adaptive Novelty (Holt, 2007)
• “Creativity is a multi-dimensional, multi-phasic, multi-state,

contextually dependant dynamic” … the creative process as cognitive, affective and perceptual “looseness”.

• Adaptive Novelty – in that something new emerges, which is original

but also useful, valuable and adaptive.

• Creativity in any sphere must be useful, valuable or adaptive in order

to distinguish creative thinking from merely

• riginal

and

• r

psychopathological thinking.

• A variable typified by “controllable oddness”.

Measures of Creativity

• Difficult if no clear consensus on what it is?

Thus diverse range of measures available

• Open-ended measures better suited but hard to score
• bjectively
• MC questions less suited as require single pre-defined

response but easier to score objectively

• Usual psychometric requirements
• Validity
• Reliability

Measures of Creativity

Chamorro-Premuzic (2011, pp.320-322) “Tests of divergent thinking represent the most widely employed measure of creativity and have been reported to be good predictors of creative achievement across a variety iof settings…” Relationships are often weak though

Measures of Creativity

“To this day, the best regarded test of creativity is the Torrance Test of Creativity and Thinking (TTCT; Torrance, 1974), which is based on the earlier version of Torrance’s (1966) creativity test.”

Name all of the things you can think of that are red and edible In what ways are dogs and cats related? Write as many sentences as you can using the words ‘rain,’ ‘station,’ and ‘summer.’

Aggregate TTCT score r = .51 with creative achievement measures (Torrance, 1975)

Measures of Creativity

Hocevear (1981) – divides assessment techniques into 10 categories.

• 1. Tests of Divergent Thinking
• 2. Attitude and Interests Inventories
• 3. Personality Inventories
• 4. Biographical Inventories
• 5. Teacher Nominations
• 6. Peer Nominations
• 7. Supervisors Ratings
• 8. Judgement of Products
• 9. Eminence
• 10. Self-reported Creative Activities and Achievements

Measures of Creativity

• 1. Tests of Divergent Thinking

Based on Guilford’s abilities of divergent thinking. A set of correlated abilities, such as fluency, originality, flexibility, elaboration, redefinition, etc., Examples of tests of divergent thinking:

• The Alternate Uses Test (Christensen, 1960).
• The Plot Titles Test (Berger & Guilford, 1969).

Measures of Creativity

• 2. Attitude and Interests Inventories

Some argue that creativity can be identified from interests and attitudes. More creative people would show more positive attitudes to creativity. Examples:

• Guilford – Zimmerman’s Interest Inventory (Guilford & Zimmerman,

1963).

• The Preconscious Activity Test (Holland & Baird, 1968).

Measures of Creativity

• 3. Personality Inventories

Others argue that creativity can be identified in terms of personality traits. Therefore, several personality inventories have incorporated creativity sub-scales. Examples:

• California Psychological Inventory (Helson, 1965).
• 16PF (Cattell & Butcher, 1968).

Creativity & Personality?

Chamorro-Premuzic (2011, p. 322)

Measures of Creativity

• 4. Biographical Inventories

Because the individual’s present behaviour is influenced by his/her past experience, biographical inventories have also being used to assess creativity. Examples:

• The Alpha Biographical Inventory (Institute for Behavioural Research in

Creativity, 1968).

• The Biographical Inventory (Schaefer, 1970).

Measures of Creativity

• 5. Teacher Nominations

Teachers’ ratings are commonly used to assess pupils’ creativity. This is frequently done in research, where teachers are given specific criteria. Examples of criteria (e.g. Yamamoto, 1963): fluency of ideas, flexibility

• f ideas, elaboration, or originality.

Measures of Creativity

• 6. Peer Nominations

Used above all to assess professionals’ creativity by other professionals in the same area. They also follow pre-established, specific criteria. Example: In a study engineers’ creativity was assessed by peer engineers (e. g. Specher, 1964) on a series of criteria such as skills in reporting results to other, persistence, analytic thinking, fluency of ideas, etc.

• 7. Supervisors Ratings

Supervisors have the advantage of being familiar with work of many individuals and have the expertise to evaluate this work. This approach has been used in industrial settings.

Measures of Creativity

• 8. Judgement of Products
• Creative people should produce creative products.
• Most studies are limited to the judgement of a single product.
• Judges can be experts or naive.
• Criteria in these studies range from very complex to simple.
• 9. Eminence
• Creativity can also be studied in relation to eminence. It would consist in

identifying eminent people in a field. However this rises 2 questions:

• Can the findings be generalised to the normal population?
• Is it legitimate to equate creativity to eminence?

Measures of Creativity

• 10. Self-reported Creative Activities and Achievements
• Easy to identify creative people by asking about past creative activities.
• Problem deciding what activities / achievements are considered creative.
• Researches have proposed lists of creative activities and achievements.

Examples (e.g. Holland & Nichols, 1964):

• 1st, 2nd, or 3rd in a regional, science, literature, etc. context;
• Exhibiting a work or art; have poems, stories, art, etc.
• Published in newspapers; etc.
• Other lists like Holland’s have been used in previous research.
• Individual’s score is number of activities / achievements checked.

Measures of Creativity

Other Measures of Creativity These 10 categories only identify common techniques. There are other techniques to assess creativity which have been developed for specific situations. Examples of other techniques to assess creativity are:

• The Mosaic Construction Test (Hall, 1972)
• Barron-Welsh Art Scale (Barron & Welsh, 1952)
• Starkweather Creativity Test (Starkweather, 1971)
• Pennsylvania Assessment of Creative Tendency: PACT (Rookey, 1971)
• Group Inventory for Finding Creative Talent: GIFT (Rimm & Davis,

1976)

Theoretical Disagreements

Unitary trait? No differentiation between creativity in the art, sciences, literature, etc. We do not know to what extent creativity is associated to expertise. We do not know if a person who is creative in the art will be so in science. Inter-rater reliability Require people to make judgements about other people’s products, ideas. This may introduce subjectivity in the assessment and low inter-rater reliability

Theoretical Disagreements

Discriminant validity We do not know to what extent judges will be able to discern creativity from other abilities and behaviours (e.g., intelligence, writing skills, school grade, logical reasoning, etc.). Convergent validity Scores should be consistent across the different techniques.

• Taylor et al. (1963) tested a group of 166 scientists using 52 different

measures of creativity.

• Correlations among them were generally low.
• By using different psychometric instruments, researchers may be

studying different things.

Aims of the lecture

• 1. The Concept of Creativity – what is it?
• 2. Approaches to the study of creativity
• Person, process, press, product?
• Links with intelligence, personality, psychopathology?
• 3. Measurement of Creativity
• Types of measures

Questions to think about

What is creativity and how can we best measure it? To what extent is creativity linked to intelligence and personality variables? Evaluate the predictive validity of creativity measures