Theories of Creativity

Encyclopedia of Creativity 2020

Introduction

For millennia, human beings have pondered the nature of creativity. Much of this speculation has served as commentary on the spectacular achievements of our species, with creators themselves often furnishing detailed descriptions of their own processes and motivations (Ghiselin, 1952). Until recently, theoretical conceptions of the nature of creativity have been rooted in first-person introspection or on case-study – like familiarity with the works of a small number of creators. However, in the last half century or so, scholars and researchers – mainly from psychology, but from other domains as well – have tried to advance on this armchair tradition (Kaufman and Sternberg, 2010; Runco, 2007; Sternberg, 1999). They have applied more rigorous research methodologies, increasingly sophisticated analytic techniques, far richer datasets, and (often) a pragmatic, applied orientation. Importantly, their approaches have also been informed by and grounded in knowledge from other relevant domains, including other sub-disciplines within psychology. The resulting surge of research activity has yielded a diverse array of theoretical approaches for understanding creativity. The purpose of this article is to describe contemporary theories of creativity and to offer a critical yet constructive appraisal of current theories and their promise for continued discovery about the nature of creativity.

 

Ways of Understanding Theories of Creativity

Pluralism

A generous-spirited way of understanding contemporary research on creativity is to emphasize pluralism, whereby a robust under-standing is achieved through a multitude of perspectives, each characterized by different assumptions, definitions, and methods, operating at different levels of analysis, and making connections with various other disciplines. When faced with an array of perspec-tives, the need to characterize commonalities among theories, while still recognizing differences, becomes apparent. Here, to set the stage for main categories of creativity theories, four thematic frameworks are discussed: a more scientific versus a more metaphoric quality, a purely theoretical versus applied focus, level of creative magnitude, and emphases among the so-called six P’s and five A’s of creativity. While there is some overlap among these themes, they may be regarded as largely independent, so that any particular theory might partake any combination of the levels of these frameworks.

 

Scientific Versus Metaphoric Theories

One common distinction, in many areas of study, is between more overtly scientific theories versus more metaphorical ones. Scientifically-oriented theories have an underlying goal of mapping the empirical reality of creative phenomena and aspire to tradi-tional scientific standards: a search for objective truth, generating empirically falsifiable hypotheses, and developing formal or computational models. In contrast, metaphorically-oriented theories offer a more speculative stance focusing on provoking new understandings and possibilities and offering a moderating counterbalance to the stark empirical focus of scientific theories. Such theories are of maximal use when they balance speculation with agreed-upon methods and standards of empirical exploration and peer review. The varied, complex, and interdisciplinary nature of creativity naturally lends itself to exploration by both kinds of theories.

 

Theoretical Versus Applied

Creativity researchers have varied goals. For some, it is understanding creativity as its own phenomenon, in a disinterested, ‘pure’ scientific way, without overt interest in the practical applications or implications of discoveries. Others’ goals are more pragmatic – usually, to increase creativity by identifying factors associated with its natural development (and to create environments with such characteristics) or by designing specific interventions to promote creative thought. While some theories focus more on one than the other, most have implications for both pure and applied research.

 

Levels of Creative Magnitude

Another framework concerns what may be called level of creative magnitude. Not all instances of creativity are equal. A standard distinction is between ‘Big-C’ (truly great, history-making instances of creative breakthroughs among eminent individuals) versus ‘little-c’ creativity (a private but novel insight or realization in an ordinary person). Kaufman and Beghetto (2009) proposed two additional categories of creative magnitude: a ‘mini-c’ category provides more room for subjective or personal instances of creativity; a ‘Pro-C’ category allows for professional-level creators who have not yet attained eminence, but who are well beyond little-c crea-tors in knowledge, motivation, and performance.

A focus on a particular magnitude will constrain a researcher’s basic questions, sources of data, and methodologies. Widely acknowledged Big-C or Pro-C achievements are more often approached by the analysis of archival data (creative products, labora-tory notebooks, sketches, etc.) or by carefully targeted laboratory or case study investigations on select individuals. In contrast, little-c and mini-c creativity lend themselves to more varied methods, including laboratory experiments, paper and pencil surveys and inventories, microgenetic studies of creative behaviors, and introspective self-reports of the subjective aspects of the creative experience.

 

The Six P’s and Five A’s of Creativity

Another common framework, described by Kozbelt et al. (2010), involves the so-called six P’s of creativity: process, product, person, place, persuasion, and potential. Since this alliterative scaffold nicely organizes many issues in the study of creativity, it is a useful way to compare the scope of different theories.

Theories that focus on the creative process aim to understand the nature of the mental mechanisms that occur when a person is engaged in creative thinking. Process theories typically identify different specify stages of processing or particular mechanisms as the components of creative thought. Another approach focuses on creative products: works of art, inventions, publications, etc. Prod-ucts can usually be counted, permitting quantitative objectivity, and they are often available for judging, so inter-rater reliability can be readily determined – two substantial advantages; however, products themselves say little about their creators or the creative process that engendered them.

Studies of the creative person (or personality) tend to focus on identifying and understanding individual difference traits that are associated with creativity, such as intrinsic motivation, wide interests, openness to experience, and autonomy; some traits also seem more pervasive either among persons in artistic or scientific domains. The actualization of creativity also depends on the place or setting in which an individual resides. Research on place factors is especially useful in defining such interactions between persons and environments, which tend to be optimal for creativity when there are opportunities for exploration and independent work and when originality is valued.

Another view describes creativity as persuasion: creative people change the way others think, so they must be persuasive to be recognized as creative. This notion shares assumptions with a number of theories, in which persuasive individuals are the ones who influence the direction taken by a domain. Finally, the notion of creative potential addresses the need to examine and understand the latent capacity for creative thought in children and others, who may have what it takes ultimately to be creative, but who require 634 Theories of Creativity educational opportunities or other support before they can do so. Obviously, the goal of realizing creative potential is a major goal in education, so studies of creative potential often have a strong practical focus.

Beyond the classic framework of the P’s of creativity, a more recent and roughly analogous model, Gl aveanu’s (2012) so-called five A’s of creativity, has also been proposed. The five A’s (and their P analogues) are: actor (person), action (process), artefact (product), audience (press), and affordances (also press). While there is some degree of overlap, the five A’s framework places greater stress on socio-cultural modes of creativity and distributed cognition, compared to the emphasis on the individual within the P’s framework.

 

Categories of Theories of Creativity

Overview

Ten major categories of theories are now described: Developmental, Psychometric, Economic, Stage and Componential Process, Cognitive, Problem Solving and Expertise-Based, Problem Finding, Evolutionary, Typological, and Systems. The goal is to provide a big-picture overview of each type – for more detail, see Kozbelt et al. (2010). Most theories described here have been discussed in the literature for at least several decades, boast considerable research support, and span multiple P’s (and A’s), levels of analysis, and methodologies. Excluded are theories that are limited to understanding a specialized subtopic – like creativity’s relation to mental illness or to personality, its biological underpinnings, cultural differences, and so on.

Developmental Theories

Developmental theories pragmatically aim to understand the roots of creativity, as suggested by the backgrounds of Big-C creators, but they also often suggest how to design environments to fulfil creative potential (Feldman, 1999). They mainly emphasize the person, place, and potential aspects of creativity (and analogous A’s), and range from mini-c to Pro-c. Early developmental theories were devised by examining the lives and backgrounds of eminent creative persons; these suggested that particular devel-opmental experiences were correlated with later creativity, such as exposure to diverse experiences, and not being overly restricted.

Other theories focus on family structure (e.g., birth order, ordinal position within the family, age interval between siblings, etc.).

For instance, evidence suggests that middle children often rebel against their parents and the status quo, to attract attention away from older siblings whose maturity earns them praise. Rebellion may occur within the context of the family, in one’s thinking, or, during adulthood, in artistic or scientific revolutions (Sulloway, 1996).

Longitudinal methods provide another powerful perspective on development. Findings from this tradition indicate that during their childhoods, the truly gifted also had the support to make cognitive and emotional transitions – one from general to creative talent, and the other from capability to a motivational state which leads directly to actual achievement. Such studies reinforce devel-opmental theories of creativity that consider cognitive processes, motivation, affect, and personality.

Psychometric Theories

Psychometric theories focus on measurement and thus inform all other creativity theories (Guilford, 1968). Emphasizing products (or artifacts) over the other P’s (or A’s), they range from little-c to Big-C creativity and are concerned, among other things, with the reliability (agreement or consistency of measurement) and validity (accuracy) of assessment, which are issues in all creativity research. Besides establishing basic principles of the measurement of aspects of creativity, psychometric theories have also addressed issues like how creativity differs from intelligence, the relation between performance on convergent thinking (one right answer) tasks and divergent thinking (many correct answers) tasks, and the extent to which creativity is rooted in particular domains of activity (like music, mathematics, or writing) versus being a domain-general ability.

Economic Theories

Another category of theories draws on economic metaphors (Rubenson and Runco, 1992). The macro-level quality of these theories encompasses all of the P’s (and A’s) except process (or action), and spans little-c to Big-C creativity. There are several economic or investment theories of creativity. Some describe the market for creativity, which illustrates macro-level processes and interactions involving the allocation of resources. Markets can provide benefits to certain behaviors or impose costs upon them, which can be defined in psychological terms. Other research has examined the market for creative behaviors, defining a creative class or segment of society and arguing that a key component of the market for creative work is tolerance; unconventional people sometimes need to be tolerated, and creative societies do a good job of that. Other work has emphasized investments in creative behavior, in that creativity can result when a person buys low (i.e., invests in an idea which is currently unpopular) and then sells high (i.e., the idea gains respect).

Stage and Componential Process Theories

As noted earlier, many models of the creative process have been proposed. Some attempt to understand the creative process in terms of stages, which can be sequential or recursive; others focus on underlying componential cognitive processes. Such models range from mini-c to Big-C creativity and obviously emphasize process (or action) over the other P’s (or A’s).

Stage theories usually try to understand how moments of creative insight occur, typically by positing a particular sequence of processes – for instance, Wallas’s (1926) venerable model of preparation (gathering information and defining a problem), followed by incubation (taking some time away from the problem), followed by illumination or insight (having a sudden realization of the answer), followed by verification (applying the solution). Since the strict linearity of such models has been largely discredited, more recent models have acknowledged the need for recursion, whereby an individual may cycle through the stages multiple times, in various combinations.

As an alternative to sequential or recursive stages, some recent theories have defined the creative process in terms of component mechanisms or processes, which operate in a more inter-connected manner. Various componential frameworks emphasize factors like domain-relevant skills, cognitive style, knowledge of heuristics for generating novel ideas, attitudes towards specific tasks, and perceptions of one’s motives, and how these components interact to generate novelty.

Cognitive Theories

Cognitive theories emphasize the creative process (action) and person (actor): process, in emphasizing the role of cognitive mech-anisms as a basis for creative thought; and person, in considering individual differences in such mechanisms. Some cognitive theo-ries focus on universal capacities, like attention or memory; others emphasize individual differences, like those indexed by divergent thinking tasks; some focus on conscious operations; others, on preconscious, implicit, or unintentional processes.

One classic cognitive theory, by Mednick (1962), holds that creative insights result from associative processes in memory. In this view, ideas are chained together, one after another, and more remote associates tend to be more original. This perspective argues that more creative individuals have flatter hierarchies of associations than less creative individuals; thus, more creative people have many more relatively strong associates for a given concept, rather than only a few. This is thought to provide greater scope for the simul-taneous activation of far-flung representations, which some believe is an important engine of creative thought.

Along similar lines, another cognitive theory focuses on how concepts are combined to generate novelty. Research suggests that conceptual combination – bringing two different sets of information together – is often involved in creative ideation, that original insights are more likely when two disparate features are brought together, and that connections between these concepts might only be seen at a very high level of abstraction. This kind of thinking has been called metaphoric logical, the idea being that something like “angry weather” is only comprehensible in a non-literal fashion. Such processes may suggest creative alternatives to well-worn lines of thought.

More generally, research in the ‘creative cognition approach’ tradition, another important contemporary view of creativity developed mainly by Finke et al. (1992), has likewise emphasized ideas drawn from cognitive psychology. These include conceptual combination, conceptual expansion, creative imagery, and metaphor, all of which are used to understand how individuals generate ideas and explore their implications in laboratory-based invention and design tasks. Such processes are thought to play out in two fundamental regimes of thought: generating ideas and exploring their implications. In practice, the two are strongly interleaved and combined in the ‘geneplore’ model of creative thought (from generate þ explore).

Finally, metacognitive processes (thinking about one’s own thinking) are also frequently tied to creativity. Many tactics for increasing creative problem solving have been proposed and popularized, including “think backwards,” “shift your perspective,” “put the problem aside,” and “question assumptions.” Tactical thinking is especially useful for programs designed to facilitate crea-tive problem solving since they are a function of conscious decisions and can be employed whenever necessary.

Problem Solving and Expertise-Based Theories

A related major category of creativity theories, again drawn from cognitive psychology, emphasizes problem solving processes and expert knowledge (Weisberg, 2006). This is largely a theory of the creative person (actor) and process (action): person, in empha-sizing domain-specific expertise as necessary for significant creative achievements; process, in emphasizing how traditional cognitive psychological concepts like problem representations and search though problem spaces explain how people devise creative solu-tions to problems. Such principles can be readily applied to ill-defined problems, which are under-specified and which admit multiple good enough solutions, rather than one uniquely correct answer. Ill-defined problems can often be broken into several well-defined problems, which can then be solved in familiar ways. Moreover, one can search not only for a solution, but also for an appropriate way to formulate a problem.

The problem solving/expertise view boasts support from many lines of evidence. Many of the processes and structures described in the creative cognition approach can be straightforwardly related to those of the problem solving/expertise view. Archival studies of great creators reinforce the importance of domain-specific knowledge for high-level creative achievement, for instance in the ‘ten-year rule,’ whereby at least a decade of intensive work in a domain is required before a creator produces any original works of lasting value. The archival study of creative episodes taken from the notebooks of eminent scientists has also generated a number of computational models of the creative process, which have replicated many major scientific discoveries.

Overall, the problem solving/expertise view regards creativity as a largely rational phenomenon, in being amenable to rigorous empirical study by researchers, and to meaningful strategic guidance and long-term learning by creators themselves. Thus, another advantage of this view is pragmatic: its foci are strategic factors that individuals can partly control; at the same time, the problem solving/expertise view acknowledges that Big-C problems are extremely difficult.

However, this view has some limitations. For instance, expertise is a necessary but not sufficient condition for Big-C creativity; many other factors also contribute to high-level creativity. Also, the expertise view arguably overstates the role of cumulative delib-erate practice, at the expense of talent. Finally, some have criticized the computational approach to creativity as fundamentally misguided.

Problem Finding Theories

Problem finding, another influential view of creativity, originally postulated by Getzels and Csikszentmihalyi (1976), can be seen as a reaction against the traditional problem solving approach to creativity. The problem finding view holds that the problem solving view is inadequate to explain how creators come to realize that a problem exists in the first place and how they are motivated to bring their subjective experience to understand the problem. Problem finding is often regarded as independent of problem solving, and it is mainly as a theory of the creative process (action); it can also be seen as a theory of the creative person (actor). In terms of creative magnitude, problem finding is often construed as an instance of mini-c creativity, though there is also room for higher levels.

Early research on problem finding focused on understanding the exploratory behavior of creative visual artists, with a strong emphasis on their motivational factors and existential concerns. Since problem finding is more subjectively-oriented and harder to define than problem solving, it is more difficult to cite evidence definitively bearing on problem finding, either pro or con. The problem finding view may also overemphasize on-line discovery, at the expense of considering habitual behavior patterns.

Overall, the distinction between the problem solving and problem finding frameworks may be less due to substantive differences between the theories and more a matter of the taste of individual scholars. In any case, more recent models have often focused less on such labels and more on the nature of the underlying processes, using terms like ‘problem construction’ to encapsulate the constellation of processes involved in devising a creative solution to an ill-defined problem.

Evolutionary Theories

Researchers have proposed several theories of creativity drawing on ideas from evolutionary biology. Of these, a strong candidate for the most comprehensive general theory of creativity is the Darwinian model of Simonton (1999), which, to varying extents, covers all of the P’s (or A’s) of creativity: person and potential, in identifying dispositional and developmental idiosyncrasies associated with the realization of initial creative potential into actual creative achievements; process, in laying out a two-step model of ideation and elaboration, in which chance combinations of ideas play a paramount role and whose complexities are hard to control; product, in noting sometimes unreliable initial assessments versus longer-term stable judgments of creative artifacts; place, in iden-tifying social factors leading to outstanding creativity; and persuasion, in emphasizing how social dynamics establish verdicts of creative outcomes. More than any other theory, Simonton’s Darwinian view aims to understand the nature of genius, eminence, and Big-C achievements.

The basis of the Darwinian model is a mental process involving the blind generation and selective retention and elaboration of ideas. Ideas are combined in some blind fashion, typically below the threshold of awareness; the most interesting combinations are then consciously elaborated into finished creative products; these in turn are judged by other people. This process can be elaborated into a mathematical model that accurately describes how creative productivity unfolds over the lifespan, and a great deal of quan-titative archival evidence supports the predictions of the theory. Indeed, the model’s quantitative basis gives it a rigor unsurpassed by any other major theory of creativity.

The Darwinian view has major psychological implications. Given the complexity of the creative process, creators should have little control over guiding the progress of their works. Creators should also not be particularly good judges of their ideas or works. Moreover, once works are finished, creators have little control over their fates, since this is a social judgment; thus, mass-production is the optimal strategy for those seeking eminence.

Despite its comprehensiveness, the Darwinian view can be critiqued along several lines. It arguably over-emphasizes the role of chance factors in explaining creativity. Also, despite its mathematical parsimony, process particulars are left unspecified. Moreover, an array of theoretical arguments has also been offered that dispute fundamental premises of the Darwinian view, as well as objec-tions based on empirical data that do not conform to the predictions of the theory. Finally, however well the Darwinian view works as a first approximation to many phenomena in the study of creativity, it explains little of the considerable error variance in relations between productivity and eminence, age and productivity, the production of masterworks versus minor works, or in creators’ varied career trajectories. Understanding such individual differences is a focus of the next category of theories.

Typological Theories

One approach to understanding variation in creators’ personalities, working methods, and career trajectories has been to posit typologies of creators, who differ in systematic ways (Galenson, 2006). A number of such frameworks exist, many of which have elements in common; however, at least as often, they differ in their particulars, so that different typologies can be difficult to relate to one another. As a group, however, typological theories differ from the nomothetic (or universalist) emphasis of other theo-ries, in aiming to explain variability among creators rather than overall trends. Various typologies touch on aspects of all of the P’s (or A’s) and levels of creative magnitude.

Typologies are most often cast as a set of categories, often construed as mutually exclusive. This is convenient for readily under-standing the big picture, but it may be misleading when a typology is generalized too broadly, or individuals are made to try to fit into a category they may only partially exemplify; this latter point also raises the issue of potentially poor reliability in categorizing individual creators. Setting up mutually exclusive categories is also limited in precluding multi-dimensionality, which can seem antithetical to the multi-faceted nature of creativity.

An alternative is to cast individual differences not in terms of discrete categories, but multiple continuous dimensions, which creates a space of possibilities in which a particular creator can be located. Going even further, at their best, typological theories not only note the factors along which creators differ but attempt to relate these factors to each other across multiple levels of analysis.

Considered as such, typological theories are promising for achieving an integrated, multi-level understanding of creativity, as research moves forward. A key virtue of such an approach is the potential rapprochement between historically opposed camps in the study of creativity, such as the problem solving/expertise and Darwinian approaches, both of which can be at least partly absorbed into typological models. It is debatable whether such a unified theory of creativity is possible – or even desirable, from the standpoint of pluralism raised at the outset of this article. However, taking into account the unique and highly varied char-acteristics of individual creators is an issue that any comprehensive account of creativity ultimately has to face. These higher-level themes are also characteristic of our final category of models: ‘systems’ views of creativity.

Systems Theories

Some of the broadest and most ambitious theories of creativity take the view that creativity is best conceptualized not as a single entity, but as a phenomenon emerging from a complex system with interacting subcomponents. Such ‘systems’ theo-ries take a broad and often quite qualitative contextual view of creativity. A number of such theories have been proposed, almost all of which address each of the P’s (and A’s), though with different emphases, depending on the relevant level of creative magnitude.

One influential systems theory, devised by Csikszentmihalyi (1988), takes as its starting point not the question, “What is creativity?” but rather, “Where is creativity?” In this view, creativity emerges via three interacting components: 1) the domain, or body of knowledge that exists in a particular discipline at a particular time; 2) the individual, who acquires domain knowl-edge and produces variations on the existing knowledge; and 3) the field, comprised of other experts and members of the disci-pline, who decide which new works are worth preserving for the next generation. Each has a role in determining what counts as creative.

This perspective involves multiple factors and takes a very broad view of creativity, emphasizing the ubiquitous role of place (or environment) among the P’s, especially for Big-C achievements. It also elaborates the nature of the creative person by detailing how individuals other than the creator contribute to the emergence of creativity and de-emphasizes internal processes and individual contributions, placing more emphasis on collaborative creativity and the societal conditions which can best foster genius. It likewise highlights issues like the importance of ‘gatekeepers’ like journal editors and gallery owners, who play a major practical role in deter-mining which contributions will be given the opportunity to be judged as creative.

This framework has many advantages, not the least of which is acknowledging the importance of extra-personal, socio-cultural factors, which were previously underemphasized in creativity research. However, the qualitative nature of the model makes it diffi-cult to test hypotheses unambiguously, and its strong inter-disciplinarity could be a pragmatic roadblock – though for a rich under-standing of creativity, many more variables and levels of analysis need to be considered besides a quantitative, empirical approach to individual traits.

Another view, pioneered by Gruber (see Wallace and Gruber, 1989), is the ‘evolving systems’ approach. This has mainly been applied to understanding the unique attributes of the creative person, via detailed archival case studies, which are motivated by a particular question – for instance, how Darwin devised the idea of evolution by natural selection. Such case studies focus less on understanding the particulars of one creative act than on how those particulars fit into an individual creator’s goals, knowledge, and reasoning, plus larger social forces and creative paradigms.

The emphasis of the evolving systems approach is on dynamic, developmental processes that play out in complex ways and contexts, over varied timescales. Several key concepts provide a framework for understanding creative individuals in the midst of such complexity. One is the notion that great creators use an ‘ensemble of metaphors’ in their thinking, which together characterize a developmental process leading to creative meaning-making. Another is that of a ‘network of enterprises,’ a system of goals that describes how an eminent creator may work on seemingly disparate topics and projects, consecutively or concurrently, and contin-ually evolve a sense of the relations between the topics. Such analyses put considerable interpretive pressure on researchers, partic-ularly in absorbing the details and global qualities of a large amount of material and in avoiding pat, hindsight-biased conclusions about a creator’s entire career. However, if used judiciously, this method has the potential to characterize creators with a qualitative richness and rigor unmatched by any other approach.

 

Future Directions for Creativity Theories

Pluralism, Again

At the outset of this article, pluralism was put forth as a way of celebrating the diversity of creativity theories currently in the liter-ature. The principle of pluralism may also prove useful in guiding future directions as scholars develop, refine, and connect theo-retical perspectives. Such connections between different theoretical perspectives could potentially lead to attempts at grand, unified theories of creativity; however, unified theories or not, making connections would strongly benefit creativity research anyway, as researchers better situate their theories in the broader theoretical and empirical character of the domain, acknowledging and incor-porating the plurality of perspectives that have taken root and flourished. This applies to all the principal frameworks outlined earlier – including the six P’s and five A’s of creativity, the various levels of creative magnitude, a pure research versus applied focus, and a more scientifically-oriented versus metaphorically-oriented approach.

 

What Do We Know? A Critical Reconsideration of Theories of Creativity

In the light of the preceding exposition and discussion of current theories, let us revisit a theme somewhat related to the scientific-metaphoric distinction: the question of what researchers have actually learned about the nature of creativity, and what role theories have played in that process of discovery.

Creativity researchers work in an inherently uncomfortable position. At any level of magnitude, creativity by definition involves variety and unpredictability, which raises a host of conceptual, methodological, and measurement complications. Beyond that, a more subtle, but also more insidious, issue is that creativity as a topic of study is not some independent natural science phenom-enon, whose physical workings can gradually be understood in reasonably objective terms. Rather, creativity is an all-too-human enterprise, one which our most illustrious forbears – Newton, Michelangelo, Mozart – probably had a far richer experience of – and, perhaps, deeper knowledge of – than virtually any contemporary creativity researcher.

This observation presents enormous conceptual and practical difficulties. This is especially true for researchers of Big-C Creativity, who must grapple with phenomena of unmatched depth, richness, and complexity, and who must achieve some multi-disciplinary understanding of the particulars of the domain of expertise of their subject. (The issue is somewhat less threatening in the realm of little-c creativity, since the creativity of researchers can – hopefully – reasonably be expected to exceed that of most of their subjects.) It is an open question, to what extent any contemporary theory is a substantive improvement on the best armchair speculation antedating the modern psychological approach to the study of creativity. Indeed, from a hard-nosed, ultra-scientific perspective, many so-called ‘theories’ of creativity are arguably not well articulated or substantive enough to be infor-mative about the phenomenon one way or the other.

The written record of eminent creators’ armchair theorizing about creativity thus stands as an elephant in the creativity theory room. If the study of creativity is to be scientifically respectable, it surely needs to go beyond what could merely be arrived at by intuition, like any mature empirical discipline. This includes making falsifiable and counterintuitive predictions (not just common-sense post-dictions), as well as making contact with well-developed neighboring domains and spanning multiple levels of analysis. Doing so need not imply a single unified theory of creativity or an abandonment of metaphorically-oriented theories, but it does require high critical standards. A well-developed theory of creativity also does not entail making error-free predictions. In many ways, the domain of creativity research is more similar to contingency-intensive disciplines like history or biology, both of which have seen the development of rigorous, beautiful theories with great explanatory power, even if they cannot predict the future in great detail.

In considering the prospects and nature of reasonably rigorous theories of creativity, several criteria for the value of a theory are worth remembering. One is accuracy, or correctness: does a theory make good predictions and yield reliable knowledge about a phenomenon? Another, however, is fruitfulness: the capacity of a theory to disclose new phenomena or relations among phenomena and to generate testable hypotheses. Some very accurate theories are sterile; some wrong theories are nevertheless very generative. In the history of science, many wrong ideas have been enormously useful, if only because the process of disproof can lead to greater knowledge and integration. For a topic like creativity, where precise predictions may not be a reasonable goal, fruitfulness may be the better criterion of a theory’s usefulness.

How have current theories of creativity fared by these two criteria? Given the complexity of the phenomena of creativity, it is encouraging that many contemporary theories are able to do a reasonable job accounting for existing data. However, ironically, despite the variety and number of theories in the literature, it is not clear that they do well by the criterion of fruitfulness. Arguably, a book like Eckermann’s (1836/1998) Conversations of Goethe contains more wisdom and could spawn more hypotheses about the nature of creativity than virtually any contemporary psychological overview.

Along these lines, it is also arguable that what is really needed to advance the study of creativity is not a proliferation of more theories, but instead, more, better, and richer data, which could be used to put useful, direction-providing constraints on existing theories. Allied to such datasets, the application of more sophisticated statistical methods – including latent variable models and hierarchical or multi-level regression analyses – would go a long way to documenting and enabling an understanding of the richness of creative phenomena. Importantly, these would also serve to encourage the development of theories that were conceptually equip-ped to take advantage of added empirical rigor.

In terms of sub-topics within the study of creativity, the potential for the development of theories that go beyond the armchair seems most promising for non-first-person, multivariate aspects of creativity – precisely its aspects that are not amenable to introspection. These include the details of and variability in the creative process, the neural and other biological bases of creativity, and larger-scale socio-cultural and trans-historical patterns. Empirical study can greatly benefit, or at least most uniquely contribute to our understanding of these aspects of creativity, which would indeed constitute a real advance on the long tradition of armchair speculation.

 

Conclusion

The variety of current creativity theories has plusses and minuses. On the plus side, there is a pluralistic array of perspectives avail-able. These admirably attempt to understand many aspects of this complex phenomenon, account for current data reasonably well, and have potential for a great deal of integration and cross-connection. On the minus side, many theories have not pro-gressed far beyond earlier speculative claims and have often failed to spark the identification of new phenomena and counterin-tuitive testable hypotheses. While it is too early to forecast the fate of theories of creativity, and the enterprise of studying creativity more generally, it seems likely that the two will rise or fall together. For any real conceptual progress to occur, existing theories must be continually constrained by more and better data and analyses and generate new constructs for measurement and analysis in their turn.

 

References

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