Year: 2014
Type: article
Abstract: Fragmentation Domain-specificityGlăveanu is right that there is a crisis in creativity research, but his prescription would make things worse, not better.It is the attempt to build grand, domain-transcending, allencompassing theories that has crippled creativity research and led to a field in which it is the norm for research results to contradict each other.Creativity is more like expertise (where every domain has its own definition and understanding of what constitutes expertise) than intelligence (where g reigns, albeit not without critics).The skills, traits, and motivations that lead to creative performance in physics, poetry, and painting are not fungible: one's intrinsic motivation to write poetry cannot be transmuted into a love of painting, one's openness to experience in art does not make one more open to new ideas in physics, and one's physicsrelated divergent-thinking skill will not lead to more creative poems.Intrinsic motivation, openness to experience, and divergent thinking may promote creativity in many (but probably not all) domains, but they are different in each domain, as will be their effects.Treating them as domain-general skills or attributes invites confusion.We need more fragmentation, in the sense of more domain-specific theories, if we want to make progress in understanding creativity.Glăveanu's (2014) paper, "The Psychology of Creativity: A Critical Reading," is very interesting, and there are many areas in which I find myself in agreement with his analysis: "the psychology of creativity is close to a crisis" (Glăveanu, 2014, p. 10) "the definition and assessment of creativity have long been a subject of disagreement and dissatisfaction among psychologists" (Glăveanu, 2014, p. 14) "The whole edifice of psychometric creativity testing. . . is mainly built around divergent thinking tasks . . .We can legitimately ask, how is this experiential and ontological richness of creativity as a phenomenon ever contained in tasks like 'please generate as many uses as possible for a brick'?"(Glăveanu, 2014, p. 16) "Finding the neurological correlates of creativity is a current fascination, but what this
Author: John Baer
Institution: Rider University
Language: English
Subfield: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W2108551473