Having A Creative Life

Creativity transforms.

Creativity is a relatively new word. It seems to have its origins in psychology, and has been discussed and researched for some fifty years.

In the early 1950’s, J.P. Guilford, then president of the American Psychology Association, gave a speech that is often called the beginning of the modern interest in creativity as a measurable phenomenon.

Guilford became the developer of the theory called The Structure of the Intellect in which he theorized there are 120 kinds of measurable intellect.

Gilford was the one who differentiated between convergent thinking (a way of thinking that emphasized being able to learn and being able to remember it), and divergent thinking (a way of thinking that emphasized revising what was known, exploring what could be known, and building new information).

Some of Guilford’s original psychometric terms include: Fluency…novelty…flexibility…synthesizing ability…analyzing ability…reorganization or redefining already existing ideas…degree of complexity…evaluation.

Guilford developed ways to measure these traits and he called them "divergent production" – this has sometimes been confused with ‘creativity’.

In the 1960’s researchers at the University of Chicago were trying to quantify creativity (to test divergent production).

By the early 1970’s researchers at the University of Chicago said the most fruitful researchers would probably be in to the areas of creativity within domains. Domain-based creativity emphasizes the domain itself.

By the 1980’s, Benjamin Bloom was of the first psychologists to study creativity in domains:

• example:
  • literature is a field…poetry is a domain
  • math is a field…algebra is a domain
    
• This is important as a field is transformed through individual creators pushing the boundaries of their domain.
• Bloom and his colleagues studied people in different domains (they explored the patterns in the lives of pianists, mathematicians, sculptors, tennis players, etc).
  

E.P. Torrance, an educational psychologist, set out to design tests that would identify creative potential. His tests, Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking, are used in schools. These tests were similar to the Guilford tests. The thinking was the higher the score, the more potentially creative the child was.

According to Dr. Piirto, divergent production may be a part of creativity – but it was mistaken for creativity, and is not the whole picture.

Another who influenced these times was Dr. Joseph Renzulli, educational psychologist, who came up with a definition of giftedness. He said a gifted person had three characteristics: above average intelligence, creativity and task commitment. He and his colleagues developed a widely used creativity checklist to identify creative children.

By 1986, a definition of creativity appeared in the Dictionary of Developmental and Educational Psychology—a person’s capacity to produce new ideas, insights, inventions, or artistic objects, which are accepted of being of social, spiritual, aesthetic, scientific, or technical value.

In the early 1990’s, cognitive psychologist Howard Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences and Creativity was developed. These areas of intelligences are not domains of creativity.

Domain-based creativity emphasizes the domain itself.Examples- literature, visual arts, science, mathematics, music, theatre, dance, etc.

• It defines what products are creative and what people are creative.
• The creative person is creative in something specific, not just generally creative.
• Depending on the domain in which the creativity is practiced, successful creators have similar patterns of education and family influence.

By 2004, researchers Kaufman and Baer studied persons by domain of creativity, rather than general creative aptitude. Studies of creative people within domains of achievement have led to some of the best evidence of what behaviors and situations predict the likelihood of creative production in adulthood. Each domain has its own rules of accomplishment and paths to achievement.

Real creators in real domains were looked at through their biographies, memoirs, and interviews. Real creators do not talk about fluency, flexibility or elaboration. Rather, real creators in real domains talk about their creative process, and core attitudes of naiveté, self-discipline, risk-taking and team/group trust show up.

Real creators in business, sciences, and the arts practice these additional aspects, often termed the Seven I’s:

• inspiration
• imagination
• imagery
• intuition
• insight
• incubation
• improvisation

Other characteristics of creatives include: the need for solitude, an immense concentration and creative routines.

So, examining creativity over the decades has brought us to a new place—a consideration of what real creators in domains do when they are being creative. For many, people’s lives are their creative products.

This summary is by Caryl Sue Abendroth from the Keynote Speech at the Australia Association for the Gifted Conference, held on August 15, 2004. These comments are from presenter Dr. Jane Piirto of Ashland University, Ashland, Ohio.