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In 2023, I was in the top 0.05% of Spotify listeners of Manic Street Preachers. It was one song on repeat. I would bet good money that there is no one in the world who has listened to their cover of Burt Bacharach’s and Hal David’s Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head as much as me. No one except my daughter, who was also there as it played through the night, and through every nap, too, for the first 15 months of her life…….Continue reading….
By: Moya Sarner
Source: Manic Street Preachers | The Guardian
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Critics:
In a summary of scientific research into creativity, psychology professor Michael Mumford wrote, “We seem to have reached a general agreement that creativity involves the production of novel, useful products.” In psychologist Robert Sternberg’s words, creativity produces “something original and worthwhile”. Authors have diverged dramatically in their precise definitions beyond these general commonalities: social geographer Peter Meusburger estimated that over a hundred different definitions can be found in literature.
One definition given by Dr. E. Paul Torrance in the context of assessing an individual’s creative ability is “a process of becoming sensitive to problems, deficiencies, gaps in knowledge, missing elements, disharmonies, and so on; identifying the difficulty; searching for solutions, making guesses, or formulating hypotheses about the deficiencies: testing and retesting these hypotheses and possibly modifying and retesting them; and finally communicating the results.”
Philosophy professor Ignacio L. Götz, following the etymology of the word, argued that creativity is not necessarily “making”. He confined it to the act of creating without thinking about the end product. While many definitions of creativity seem almost synonymous with originality, Götz also emphasized the difference between creativity and originality.
Götz asserted that one can be creative without necessarily being original. When someone creates something, they are certainly creative at that point, but they may not be original in the sense that their creation is not something new. However, originality and creativity can go hand-in-hand.
Creativity in general is usually distinguished from innovation in particular, where the emphasis is on implementation. Academics and authors Teresa Amabile and Michael Pratt defined creativity as the production of novel and useful ideas and innovation as the implementation of creative ideas, while the OECD and Eurostat stated that “innovation is more than a new idea or an invention; an innovation requires implementation, either by being put into active use or by being made available for use by other parties, firms, individuals, or organizations.”
Therefore, while creativity involves generating new ideas, innovation is about transforming those ideas into tangible outcomes that have practical applications. The distinction is critical because creativity without implementation remains an idea, whereas innovation leads to real-world impact. There is also emotional creativity, which is described as a pattern of cognitive abilities and personality traits related to originality and appropriateness in emotional experience.
Theories of creativity (and empirical investigations of why some people are more creative than others) have focused on a variety of aspects. The dominant factors are usually identified as “the four P’s,” a framework first put forward by Mel Rhodes: A focus on process is shown in cognitive approaches that try to describe thought mechanisms and techniques for creative thinking. Theories invoking divergent rather than convergent thinking (such as that of Guilford), or those describing the staging of the creative process (such as that of Wallas) are primarily theories of the creative process.
A focus on a creative product usually attempts to assess creative output, whether for psychometrics (see below) or to understand why some objects are considered creative. It is from a consideration of product that the standard definition of creativity as the production of something both novel and useful arises. A focus on the nature of the creative person considers more general intellectual habits, such as openness, levels of ideation, autonomy, expertise, exploratory behavior, and so on.
A focus on place (or press) considers the circumstances in which creativity flourishes, such as degrees of autonomy, access to resources, and the nature of gatekeepers. Creative lifestyles are characterized by nonconforming attitudes and behaviors, as well as flexibility. B.F. Skinner attributed creativity to accidental behaviors that are reinforced by the environment.[79] In behaviorism, creativity can be understood as novel or unusual behaviors that are reinforced if they produce a desired outcome. Spontaneous behaviors by living creatures are thought to reflect past learned behaviors. In this way,
A behaviorist may say that prior learning caused novel behaviors to be reinforced many times over, and the individual has been shaped to produce increasingly novel behaviors. A creative person, according to this definition, is someone who has been reinforced more often for novel behaviors than others. Behaviorists suggest that anyone can be creative, they just need to be reinforced to learn to produce novel behaviors.
Researchers have taken a social-personality approach by using personality traits such as independence of judgement, self-confidence, attraction to complexity, aesthetic orientation, and risk-taking as measures of personal creativity. Within the framework of the Big Five personality traits, a consistent few of these traits have emerged as being correlated to creativity. Openness to experience is consistently related to a host of different assessments of creativity.
Investigation of the other Big Five traits has demonstrated subtle differences between different domains of creativity. Compared to non-artists, artists tend to have higher levels of openness to experience and lower levels of conscientiousness, while scientists are more open to experience, conscientious, and higher in the confidence-dominance facets of extraversion compared to non-scientists.
A number of researchers include creativity, either explicitly or implicitly, as a key component of intelligence, for example: Sternberg’s Theory of Successful Intelligence includes creativity as a main component and comprises three sub-theories: contextual (analytic), contextual (practical), and experiential (creative). Experiential sub-theory—the ability to use pre-existing knowledge and skills to solve new and novel problems—is directly related to creativity.
The Cattell–Horn–Carroll theory (CHC) includes creativity as a subset of intelligence, associated with the broad group factor of long-term storage and retrieval (Glr). Glr narrows abilities relating to creativity include ideational fluency, associational fluency, and originality/creativity. Silvia et al. conducted a study to look at the relationship between divergent thinking and verbal fluency tests and reported that both fluency and originality in divergent thinking were significantly affected by the broad-level Glr factor.
Martindale extended the CHC-theory by proposing that people who are creative are also selective in their processing speed. Martindale argues that in the creative process, larger amounts of information are processed more slowly in the early stages, and as a person begins to understand the problem, the processing speed is increased. The Dual Process Theory of Intelligence posits a two-factor or type model of intelligence.
Type 1 is a conscious process and concerns goal-directed thoughts. Type 2 is an unconscious process, and concerns spontaneous cognition, which encompasses daydreaming and implicit learning ability. Kaufman argues that creativity occurs as a result of Type 1 and Type 2 processes working together in combination. Each type in the creative process can be used to varying degrees. Links have been identified between creativity and mood disorders, particularly manic-depressive disorder (a.k.a. bipolar disorder) and depressive disorder (a.k.a. unipolar disorder).
However, different artists have described mental illness as having both positive and negative effects on their work. In general, people who have worked in the arts industry throughout history have faced many environmental factors that are associated with, and can sometimes influence, mental illness—things such as poverty, persecution, social alienation, psychological trauma, substance abuse, and high stress. Creativity can be expressed in a variety of ways, depending on the uniqueness of people and environments.
Theorists have suggested a number of different models of the creative person. However, the creativity-profiling approach must take into account the tension between predicting the creative profile of an individual, as characterized by the psychometric approach, and the evidence that group creativity is founded on diversity and difference.
From a personality-traits perspective, there are a number of traits that are associated with creativity in people. Creative people tend to be more open to new experiences, are more self-confident, are more ambitious, self-accepting, impulsive, driven, dominant, and hostile, compared to people who are less creative.
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