Psychology and creativity

Psychology and Creativity

‘Is creativity a property of people, products or processes?’ (Mayer, 1999).

Psychology folklore has it that, following his address to the American Psychological Association in 1950, J. P. Guilford (the APA president), ‘almost single-handedly’ rallied support for creativity, which was until then described as ‘one of psychology’s poor orphans’ (Sternberg & O’Hara, 1999; Sternberg & Lubart, 1999). From this watershed event, American Psychology led the research into creativity, establishing as early as the 1960s its own journals devoted to the subject: The Journal of Creative Behavior and Creativity Research Journal. Psychology’s research has focussed on defining creativity by endeavouring to locate its source: is it found in people and their personalities or cognitive processes, or is creativity located in products?

The creative product provided Psychology with the basis for defining creativity. Teresa Amabile makes the point that ‘most explicit definitions have used the creative product as the distinguishing sign of creativity’ (Amabile, 1983). Moreover, there was an overwhelming consensus within Psychology that the creative product, and therefore creativity itself, had two defining criteria: novelty and value. Mayer claims unequivocally that the ‘majority endorses the idea that creativity involves the creation of an original and useful product’ (Mayer, 1999). Wallace and Gruber concur: like ‘most definitions of creativity, ours includes novelty and value. The creative product must be new and must be given value according to some external criteria’ (Wallace & Gruber, 1989). Sternberg and Lubart comment that creativity ‘is the ability to produce work that is both novel (i.e. original, unexpected) and appropriate (i.e. useful, adaptive concerning task and constraints)’ (Sternberg & Lubart, 1999). Amabile argues that a ‘product or response will be judged as creative to the extent […] it is both a novel and appropriate, useful, correct or valuable response to the task at hand’ (Amabile, 1983). Finally, Hausman, speaking from outside Psychology, claims that ‘an act that is creative must, in a special way, be controlled and must yield a product which is valuable and new with respect to its Structure and Form’ (Hausman, 1984).

However, these criteria are clearly too broad: on its own admission, sixty years after Psychology set itself the task of saying what creativity is, it is no closer to a definition based on product. Mayer is unequivocal: an ‘important challenge for the next fifty years of creativity research is to develop a clearer definition of creativity’ (Mayer, 1999). Sternberg echoes this: ‘the definition and criteria of creativity are a matter of ongoing debate’ (Sternberg, 2003), and Boden concedes that there ‘are fundamental conceptual difficulties in saying what creativity is’ (Boden, 2004).

Attempts to analyse the creative product have not provided Psychology with a clear definition of creativity, nor has the product proved to be creativity’s source. Creative products—the artefacts, texts, ideas, theories, performances, discoveries and so forth which creativity yields—might be evidence of creativity occurring, but they are not in themselves generators of creativity. Logically, before we have a creative product, there must be somebody creating it. Psychology therefore turned its attention to the creative person—his or her personality or cognitive processes. Given Psychology’s disciplinary focus, this was a natural move. However, before moving on to the creative person, let’s return, for a moment, to the question of the creativity of acting and ask: what is the creative product of acting?

If the painter creates a painting, the poet a poem, the sculptor a sculpture, the playwright a play, and so forth, then what does the actor create? Following the formula, it would appear to be an action or act. Yet several other answers also come to mind: character, emotion, audience response, just to name a few. The answer to what constitutes the creative product of acting is crucial, for it determines how acting and its creativity are defined. It also informs how we train actors. If, for example, the creative product of acting is considered to be character, then the training is focused on character-creation and acting is judged in terms of characterisation: how true-to-life, convincing, complex, consistent with the playwright’s fictional character may just be a few of the criteria used to assess the actor’s success and creativity.

On the other hand, if the creative product of acting is deemed to be performance, then other criteria come into play: is the performance well paced? Is it suspenseful when necessary? Does it hold the spectators’ attention? Did it elicit gasps of rapturous response? Is it clear? Can the actors be seen and heard?...

'What is the creative product of acting?’—proves to be a useful question and one I frequently put to my students. Nine times out of ten the answer I get is: ‘Characters. It’s obvious, isn’t it? Acting is about creating characters.’ Not without reason is this the common reply. After all, our hegemonic acting style is psychological realism, which is character-driven. However, with a little further questioning, other responses surface as acting students come to realise that while they do create characters, they create much more and to restrict acting to characterisation is to short-change its creativity.

The Creative Personality:

Psychology has focussed its energy on defining the creative personality and identifying those traits that, putatively, make a person creative. To do this, researchers have taken high-profile creators and extrapolated their personality traits. These have then become the defining characteristics of the creative personality.

There are, however, problems with this approach. The supposed traits are too numerous and varied to be of any definitive use. The research has yielded such an unwieldy array of personality traits that they are rendered invalid as a useful set of descriptors. In her ‘Pyramid of Talent Development’, for instance, Jane Piirto lists the following personality traits: ‘drive’, ‘passion’, ‘self-discipline’, ‘intuition’, ‘curiosity’, ‘openness’, ‘naivety’, ‘imagination’, ‘risk-taking’, ‘perception’, ‘insight’, ‘tolerance for ambiguity’, ‘perfectionism’, ‘volition’, ‘resilience’, ‘androgyny’, ‘persistence’, ‘over-excitability’, ‘intellect’, ‘emotion’, ‘imagination’, ‘sensuality’ and ‘creativity’ itself (Piirto, 2005). Plucker and Renzulli list: ‘awareness of their creativity’, ‘originality’, ‘independence’, ‘risk-taking’, ‘personal energy’, ‘curiosity’, ‘humour’, ‘attraction to complexity and novelty’, ‘artistic sense’, ‘open-mindedness’, ‘need for privacy’, ‘heightened perception’ and ‘a tolerance for ambiguity’ (Plucker & Renzulli, 1999). Dean Keith Simonton includes ‘motivation’, a ‘creative cognitive style’, ‘relative introversion’ and a ‘high degree of independence and autonomy’ (Simonton, 2005). It would appear from these traits, that when it comes to the creative personality, almost anything goes.

Moreover, from the earliest personality-trait research there were contradictions in the findings. In 1931, Joseph Rossman identified ‘self-confidence’ as a characteristic of the creative personality, whereas in the same year, William Hirst distinguished ‘bashfulness’ and ‘over-sensitivity’ (Melrose, 1989). Apart from such contradictions, there exists the questionable assumption that people are either one or the other, but not both. It assumes that in all situations people will consistently display one trait and not its opposite, whereas empirical evidence reveals that people are frequently both—depending on the situation or the stage of the creative process. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi makes the point that ‘persons are characterized not so much by single traits. […] They are not just introverted, but can be both extroverted and introverted, depending on the phase of the [creative] process’ (Csikszentmihalyi, 1999). The way around this paradox is to argue that the creative personality can be both, but this has brought Psychology no nearer to a definition of the creative personality as such.

Beyond these objections, there is a fundamental fallacy to this ‘eminent personality’ approach: entrapment in a classic hermeneutic circle. Any personality traits which define the creative personality must themselves be derived from a preconceived notion of what these traits are. This preconceived notion, however, must have already been derived from the traits it now purports to establish. So around we go in a hermeneutic circle…

As neither the creative product nor the person has led Psychology closer to the source of creativity, it has turned to the last member of the triumvirate—the creative process, specifically cognitive processes, how creative people think. But before venturing there, I would like to once more take the lead from Psychology and pose the question: Is the creativity of acting to be found in the personality of the actor?

Playwright Louis Nowra suggests that actor Judy Davis’s ‘dark’ and ‘obnoxious personality’—a ‘combination of self-loathing and narcissism and haughty ego’—is necessary fuel for her prodigious talent (Nowra, 2004). One of Australia’s leading actors’ agents, Bill Shanahan, thought that ‘neurosis’ was the ‘special ingredient’ a good actor should possess (Trengrove, 1991). Within Psychology’s research, some attention has been given to creativity as located in the actor’s personality—or more accurately, their neuroses. A prominent study by Hammond and Edelman in 1991 found that professional actors scored significantly higher on the neuroticism scale than did non-actor subjects (Feist, 1999). In the view of psychologist Otto Fenichel, the actor is at heart an exhibitionist who in acting fulfills ‘a certain erogenous’ and ‘narcissistic satisfaction’ and whose greatest anxiety is ‘castration fear’. Sensitive creatures, actors require ‘success on stage. . in the same way as milk and affection are needed by the infant’ (Fenichel, 1960). Most actors I know would find all of this amusing, and it is little more than that. Not surprisingly, studies on the personality of actors have yielded no useful data and to reduce the actor’s creativity to neuroses, or even personality, is reductive, denying the complexity of acting.