Creativity is More Than a Trait: It’s a Relation
Creativity scholars started with the individual and moved on to examining the process. Other scientists have made attempts to describe the outcomes, or products, of creative behavior (Amabile, 1996; Gruber & Wallace, 1999). Although only a fraction ofcreativity definitions have been mentioned here, they have one thing in common: their trait or individual character. Creativity is interpreted as a potential outcome of either a) intellectual, personality and/or neurological attributes or b) individual cognitive skills. Although the latter skills are not inherent and may be trained to improve creative performance, they are particular to the individual. This implies creativity is either attributed to a stable trait (Meyer, 1999) or individual skills. However, such attributions result from others observing and evaluating individual behavior, be it on personality or performance tests. Yet who is responsible for this decision?
The Relation
Think of a creative person you admire. What makes you believe this person is creative? An educated guess is that you have seen something he or she has made, e.g. an art performance, a new recipe or an organizational change at your workplace. This thought experiment introduces the first necessity in the relational definition of creativity: the product (Amabile, 1996; Westmeyer, 2001). Before deeming someone creative, we must recognize what type of behavior this person exhibited to be considered so, and behavior is manifested in an observable outcome. This is the basis of numerous approaches to creativity, including the ones by Galton (1865) and Guilford (1950) sketched earlier. Yet in deeming someone or something creative, we are not, as often assumed, only recognizing their traits or skills. Instead, we are observing a behavioral outcome and adopting a position on it (Amabile, 1996; Nicholls, 1972; Westmeyer, 2001). This postulate is not as novel as it may sound; the same thing occurs when psychologists assess creativity with psychometric tests (Hocevar & Bachelor, 1989; Csikszentmihalyi, 1999).
Csikszentmihalyi (1999) developed a model to describe how this observation and judgment process proceeds. Instead of viewing creativity as an objective property of a person, process or product, he sees it as the effect something is able to produce on others. Similar to an audience’s fanatic reaction to a concert band, creativity is the judgmental outcome of people witnessing and implicitly or explicitly evaluating a particular focal output. According to Csikszentmihalyi (1999), this relational approach is based on the interaction between three social systems: the individual, the field and the domain (see Figure 1).
The field and the domain constitute an individual’s environment. The field represents a part of society, i.e. a social group in the position to decide how much impact individual creative output will have. The domain represents a part of the individual’s and thefield’s culture. It is a symbolic system including ideas, behaviors, styles, etc. Csikszentmihalyi (1999) uses the term “meme” to describe these symbols. Furthermore, a society can have many fields just as a culture can be composed of more than onedomain. To illustrate the model in Figure 1, think of schoolchildren (individuals with specific backgrounds and experiences) participating in an art contest to decorate the walls of their otherwise dismal school hallways. The school art teachers (a field) will select the most creative pictures to put on display, so their vote will decide which types of art will go down in this school’s history (domain). Even though parents or the children themselves (other fields) could disagree with the art teachers’ selection, the latter social group is the relevant field for deciding on which art types (memes, e.g. motifs, color choice, material) are deemed creative enough for the school’s hallways. In representing different fields, parents and art teachers can use varying judgment criteria for deciding on the creativity of schoolchildren’s artwork, and their decisions affect how long and where a creative product spends its life (domains, culture). For example, even if a particular artwork does not make school (hallway) history, it could very easily make it on the family’s refrigerator door. Several researchers, such as Hargreaves, Galton, and Robinson (1996) as well as Hennessey (2003), have investigated the evaluation of schoolchildren’s artwork from different social group perspectives.
