Creativity is More Than a Trait: It’s a Relation
About a century later and without hereditary reasoning, Guilford (1950) began working on a concept to describe intelligence as a multi-dimensional, non-hierarchical trait. The resulting structure of intellect (Guilford, 1956) encompasses three main dimensions describing the (a) input, (b) operations and (c) output of intellectual abilities. The operations include divergent production, the mental process of generating more than one solution to a given task. This mental process is similar to what many researchers call creativity. Guilford (1950) planned to test divergent production, or divergent thinking as it is often called, with paper-and-pencil tests. Although admitting this kind of behavior represents “lower degrees of distinction” (ibid., p. 445), it would be an opportunity to collect larger samples than the ones of eminent creators previously investigated.
The noteworthy contributions made by Galton and Guilford are exemplary for two kinds of individual, or trait, perspectives oncreativity, “big C” and “small c” creativity (cf. Amabile, 1996; Sawyer, 2006). The term “big C” is used to describe eminent creators. These are people who have literally gone down in history for their achievements, such as Nobel Prize winners and renowned musicians. However, the world is full of people who do creative work without large-scale public recognition, and the term “small c” is reserved for describing such creators. Boden (2004) makes a similar distinction when she defines historical and individual creativity. A historical creative act is one which has never occurred before to humankind’s knowledge, and individual creativity is reserved for acts which are new to the person creating, but not necessarily new to humankind in general.
Apart from intellectual abilities, certain personality characteristics have been consistently related to creative performance, such as openness to experience, impulsivity, ambition, nonconformity, flexibility and autonomy (Feist, 1999). Openness to experience is one of five major personality traits (McCrae & John, 1992) and it correlates with performance in divergent thinking tests (McCrae, 1987). Individuals open to experience are, for example, intellectually curious, imaginative, sensitive to their inner feelings, aesthetically oriented and flexible in thought.
From the Great Trait to More Individuality
Before the turn of the century, Feldhusen and Goh (1995) remarked, “...those who search for the essence of creativity in current theory and research are apt to be overwhelmed by both the current breadth of conceptions of the field as well as the relative uncertainty of its fundamental components” (p. 232). After the era of personality psychology approaches to creativity, a cognitive psychology wave advanced (Sawyer, 2006), and creativity research was no longer restricted to unraveling the creative personality. The scientific focus turned from the creative person to the creative process. Creating individuals were still central in studies, but now the way they created was investigated. The process is commonly divided into four stages (cf. Csikszentmihalyi & Sawyer, 1995; Finke, Ward, & Smith, 1996): (a) preparation (b) incubation (c) insight or illumination and (d) verification. This stage model of creativity is still quite popular in pragmatic approaches (Nöllke, 2006) and much research has been conducted on incubation and insight. Contemporarily, it is viewed as a heuristic model characterized by overlapping and iterative stages (Sawyer, 2006).
In the relay to unravel creativity, cognitive psychology passed the stick to neurological approaches to creativity (Martindale, 2004;Sawyer, 2006). This research trend did not only evolve due to technological advancements in medical imaging, but also because psychological methods were unable to clearly account for what actually happens during incubation, the phase right before insight, i.e. the moment a creator perceives the outcome of this mental process. The neurological approach has lead to attempts to localize the so-called “creative drive” (Flaherty, 2005) and the realm of creativity and innovation production (Vandervert, Schimpf, & Liu, 2007).
