Creativity

We talked about this a bit in class, however I wanted to briefly comment on Mr. Power’s comment to Clause that being an artist is for “women... women and pansies.” This stereotype came up in class I believe when we were talking about how culture plays into creativity. I think that also culture may put someone in the right (or wrong) place and time to be optimally creative, i think the most important factor to consider is the intrinsic motivation piece. If Claude had been told as a boy that being a musician was for women or pansies, I don’t think it would have affected him much, because his intrinsic motivation to play was so high. Similarly, if culture puts a person around no opportunities to be creative, and the person does have an intrinsic motivation to express themselves through things they create, they will defy culture and express their creativity. These are just my thoughts though, I wonder if there has been a study on this, but I would assume not because it seems close to impossible to measure and control.

When I try to tease apart a creative personality, I think the best way to put it is that there is not a “trait” of creativity that belongs in personality, like say introversion vs. extroversion, because there are not (or we have not yet been able to identify) concrete behaviors of a highly creative or lack thereof. However, i think there is a place for the study of creativity in psychology because it could correlate with, say, openness to experience or neuroticism. This could be an interesting intersection of personality and positive psychology to research.

Claude’s lesson are set up so he can optimally achieve a state of flow: he works on tedious lessons to improve his skill, and sight-reading is a challenge. Claude should be feeling that his skills are high yet match the high challenge he is presented with, which is exactly where Mike C says flow should happen.

The passage about Claude intrinsically creating an elaborate song to girls skipping rope grabs me. In thinking about creativity, it’s this sort of motivation that keeps Claude practicing. Music is a part of who he is. We’ve read articles by Amabile and Hennessey about how to best foster creativity and the common theme is that someone needs to enjoy what they’re doing to be the most creative, and so far this is highly present in Claude’s story. 

When Claude’s music teacher meets Claude’s mother for the first time, he mentions that Claude has a god-given gift, to which his mother retorts that God has nothing to do with it. This makes me wonder about whether or not there is a genetic disposition for creativity. We’ve discussed this in class but Mike C and other researchers have done some on this and the general consensus is, like most things in psychology, there’s a little bit of nature and a little bit of nurture involved in fostering creativity. I think the most important aspects to focus on, however, are the one’s we can control.

So as part of my creative inspirations sections, I’ve noticed recently that the word creativity or creative is almost a buzz word now. We’ve talked about this a bit in class but I will post a picture of signs I see with the word creativity and talk about if they’re using the word in a correct-psychological-construct sense.

Our whole innovation group process has been really eye-opening, and I’ve been extremely aware of the creative process throughout the semester. I think I have really honed in on how to illicit creativity in myself when its needed through my studies of our innovation group process. The researchers who’s ideas I think were most important to keep in mind during this innovation group process were Amabile, Hennessey, and Mike C. Of course, other’s ideas were very important but I think these theorists’ ideas explicitly related to our process as I’ve described in some of my previous posts. Overall I’m really happy with the app we’ve created, and our powerpoint runs smoothly! I’m excited to share with the class.

We Brainstormed about possible names for our product and narrowed it down to “health check” or “check app” the most. I think it would be interesting to take a survey of people and ask them which of our possible names they liked the most, and then which ones they thought were the most creative. Obviously this is a case like we did in one of the very first classes where we rated collages on technical goodness and creativeness. Usually the two correlated with each other, which I think would be the case with the survey I’m proposing. The survey I’m proposing I think could have higher implications for creativity in popular culture which I’ve talked about in other parts of this blog. The fact that people would rate name as both creative and the one they like most (or the one they think has the most technical goodness) speaks to some reasoning as to why creativity has become a buzzword today. I think it would be interesting to get to the root of this (i.e. whether goodness actually causes us to rate something as creative or if something thats creative causes us to rate it as good.) For now I can only speculate, but I think the widespread use of people associating something that is originally creative as good has lead to a misconception in pop culture that the reverse is also true.