मुख्य Explaining Creativity: The Science of Human Innovation

Explaining Creativity: The Science of Human Innovation


वर्ष: 2012
संस्करण: 2
प्रकाशक: Oxford University Press
भाषा: english
पन्ने: 568
ISBN 10: 0199737576
ISBN 13: 9780199737574
File: PDF, 5.79 MB

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The Science of
Human Innovation

R. Keith Sawyer


in research, scholarship, and education.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sawyer, R. Keith (Robert Keith)
Explaining creativity: the science of human innovation/R. Keith Sawyer.—2nd ed.
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Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-19-973757-4 (pbk) 1. Creative ability. I. Title.
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lot has happened since I finished writing the first edition of Explaining Creativity in 2003.
There’s been an explosion of new and exciting research on creativity and innovation—in
neuroscience, cognitive science, assessment, education, and group creativity. This second
edition has new chapters on all of these topics (seven new chapters in all), and every other
chapter has been rewritten to incorporate new scientific studies.
Soon after the first edition was published in January 2006, three other overviews of creativity
research were also published: Robert Weisberg’s Creativity (April 2006), Mark Runco’s Creativity
(2007), and James Kaufman’s Creativity 101 (2009). Each of these books took an individualist
approach, one that focuses on psychological studies of the creative person; in my first edition,
I chose instead to focus on a sociocultural approach that emphasized social and cultural contexts
(as noted by reviewers: Kaufman, 2007; Simonton, 2007). In addition to these textbooks, there
are now four handbooks of creativity (Kaufman & Sternberg, 2006, 2010; Runco, 1997; Sternberg,
1999) and a two-volume encyclopedia (Runco & Pritzker, 1999).
As I studied these recent books, I became convinced that I should have included a more
complete treatment of individualist approaches. The keyword for my first edition was sociocultural; the keyword for this edition is interdisciplinary because I bring together individualist
approaches and sociocultural approaches. The new material on individualist approaches is found
primarily in Chapters 3, 5, 6, 7, 9, and 10, which are completely new; I’m particularly excited
about Chapter 10, where I describe the latest research in cognitive neuroscience—research that
takes images of the brain while it’s engaged in cognitive tasks related to creativity.
My goal is to present the most comprehensive overview of what scientists have learned about
creativity. It’s always a challenge to be comprehensive; as the old saying goes, the risk is that you
focus on the trees and lose sight of the forest—if you pay too much attention to small details, you
no longer see the big picture. Dean Keith Simonton (2007) grouped creativity overviews into
two broad categories: those that focus on the “forest” and present a unified narrative approach
(he mentions my first edition and Weisberg, 2006) and those that focus on the “trees” and
describe every study that’s ever been published (he mentions Piirto, 1992, 1998, 2004, and
Runco, 2007). This second edition is much more detailed and comprehensive than my first; but
still, I retain a narrative thread, and I make sure to bring all the research together to provide the
field’s consensus as a take-home message.


Preface to the Second Edition

I’ve chosen to dedicate more attention to areas where the field has experienced controversy—
for example, whether or not creativity is related to mental illness, or to what extent creativity
tests are effective, or whether creativity is domain-general or domain-specific (or a bit of both).
I’ve tried to be fair to all positions that have some basis in scientific studies. But at the end of each
argument, I tell you what the consensus of the field is. After many years of research into these
controversies, we have a pretty good idea of what the reality is.
Another reason I decided to unite individualist and sociocultural approaches in this second
edition was my experience writing my 2007 book Group Genius. That book had three parts, and
in the second part I reviewed research showing how often individual mental processes are influenced by collaborative conversations. Paul Silvia called this book an “integration of the sociocultural approach and the cognitive approach” and suggested that the book “could spark attempts
to unify the sociocultural and cognitive traditions” (Silvia, 2007, p. 255). I liked that idea and
realized no book had done that yet; here’s my attempt.
In my first edition, I provided a broad historical and cultural context for creativity research.
For these perspectives I went outside of the field of psychology; you can find excellent booklength treatments by Robert Paul Weiner (Creativity & Beyond, 2000) and Rob Pope (Creativity:
Theory, History, Practice, 2005). In this second edition, I’ve further elaborated these reflective
perspectives in an attempt to capture the collective creation that is “creativity research.” I’ve
combed through historical documents to assemble eight appendices that include key dates, publications, journals, conferences, and scholars that have advanced our understanding of creativity. This material is not gathered together in any other book, and I hope it will serve as a reference
for everyone interested in the scientific study of creativity.
My ambition for this second edition is the same as it was for the first edition: to deliver on the
ambitious title Explaining Creativity: The Science of Human Innovation by presenting everything
that scientists have learned about creativity. I hope that this book will serve as a shared reference
representing the state of the art and the consensus of the field. Explaining Creativity is for everyone who wants to learn what scholars today know about the science of human innovation.



have been studying and teaching creativity for over 20 years and have published several
academic books on the topic. But when you write a book like this one, summarizing an
entire field for the interested general reader, it’s like learning the material all over again. It’s
been a wonderful experience! I begin by thanking Mike Csikszentmihalyi for introducing
me to the field of creativity research. I thank all of my colleagues who work in the field of creativity research for sharing ideas and research in countless conversations. I owe a debt to my
students, who have helped me discover how best to explain creativity. I’d like to thank all of the
musicians, actors, and artists whom I’ve observed and interviewed through the years for sharing
with me their perspectives on creativity. I am grateful to Abby Gross and Joanna Ng of Oxford
University Press. And I’d like to thank my wife, Barb, who made this book possible.

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1. Introduction 3
2. Conceptions of Creativity 15


3. Defining Creativity Through Assessment 37
4. The Creative Personality 63
5. The Creative Process, Part 1 87
6. The Creative Process, Part 2 107
7. The Creative Process, Part 3 129
8. Computer Simulations of the Creative Process 143
9. Biology and Creativity 157
10. Cognitive Neuroscience and Creativity 185




11. The Sociology of Creativity 211
12. Group Creativity 231
13. Organizational Creativity 249
14. Culture and Creativity 265
15. History and Creativity 281


16. Visual Arts 297
17. Writing 319
18. Music 337
19. Theater 357
20. Science 371


21. Education and Creativity 389
22. How To Be More Creative 405
23. Conclusion: The Future of Creativity 427


Appendix A: Creativity Timeline 439
Appendix B: Creativity Overviews 443
Appendix C: Journals that Publish Creativity Research 445
Appendix D: Influential Books in Creativity Research 447
Appendix E: Journal Special Issues 457


Appendix F: Important Creativity Researchers 463
Appendix G: Colleges and Universities with a Degree or
Certificate in Creativity 473
Appendix H: Professional Associations and Conferences 475
References 477



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P A R T



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C H A P T E R




enius. Invention. Talent. And, of course, creativity. These words describe the highest
levels of human performance. When we’re engaged in the act of being creative, we feel
our lives.
Creativity is part of what makes us human. Our nearest relatives, chimpanzees and other
primates, are often quite intelligent but never reach these high levels of performance. And
although advanced “artificially intelligent” computer programs hold the world title in chess, and
cannot master everyday creative skills.
Politicians, educators, and business leaders in the United States have realized that creativity
and innovation are central to economic success (Business Roundtable, 2005; Council on
Competitiveness, 2005; Sawyer, 2006e). Creativity is also needed to solve pressing social problems. The European Union dubbed 2009 “The European Year of Creativity and Innovation,”
pronouncing in its manifesto that “Europe’s future depends on the imagination and creativity of
its people” (2009, p. 1). Asian countries such as Singapore and China have announced major
initiatives in creativity (Lau, Hui, & Ng, 2004; Singapore Ministry of Education, 2002). All of
these countries have transformed from industrial economies to creative knowledge economies,
where economic activity is focused on producing ideas rather than producing things.
Creativity will continue to increase in importance, due to several broad societal and economic trends:
1. Increasingly globalized markets result in greater competitiveness, even for industries
that historically had been protected from significant challenge.
2. Increasingly sophisticated information and communication technologies result in
shorter product development cycles.
3. Jobs that don’t require creativity are increasingly being automated, or are moving to
extremely low-wage countries.
4. Increasing wealth and leisure time in advanced countries (and beyond) have increased
the demand for the products of the creative industries. As of 2007, the creative industries represented over 11% of U.S. GDP (Gantchev, 2007).
Despite its increasing importance, creativity hasn’t received much attention from scientists.
Until very recently, only a few researchers had studied creativity. Most psychologists instead



study what they believe are more fundamental mental properties—such as memory, logical reasoning, and attention. But in recent years psychologists—along with increasing numbers of sociologists, anthropologists, biologists, and computer scientists—have increasingly turned their
attention to creativity. Because creativity isn’t a central topic in any of these fields, these scholars
work without big research grants, and without a lot of attention from the leaders of their fields.
Even so, their research findings have gradually accumulated, and our knowledge about creativity
has now attained a critical mass. Perhaps for the first time, we hold in our grasp the potential to
explain creativity.
Modern creativity research began in the 1950s and 1960s. This first wave of creativity
research was focused on studying the personalities of exceptional creators (Chapters 3 and 4). In
the 1970s and 1980s, researchers shifted their attention to the cognitive approach, a second wave
based in cognitive psychology and focused on the internal mental processes that occur while
people are engaged in creative behavior (Chapters 5, 6, and 7). In the 1980s and 1990s, the cognitive approach was complemented by the emergence of a third wave, the sociocultural approach,
an interdisciplinary approach that focused on creative social systems: groups of people in social
and cultural contexts (Chapters 11 through 15). This third wave includes research by sociologists, anthropologists, historians, and others.
After decades of research, we’re closer than ever to an explanation of creativity. The problem
is that each of the three waves has largely proceeded in “parochial isolation,” in the words of
leading creativity researchers Lucille Wehner, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, and István MagyariBeck (1991, p. 270). Two other famous creativity researchers, Robert Sternberg and Todd Lubart
(1999), also claimed that this lack of multidisciplinarity had blocked our understanding of
creativity (p. 9).
My goal in this book is to address this problem by bringing together the three waves of
creativity research—the personality approach, the cognitive approach, and the sociocultural
approach—in what I call the interdisciplinary approach. In addition to the scientists who study
the creative individual—psychologists, neuroscientists, and biologists—I also present research
by scientists who study the contexts of creativity: sociologists of science and art, and anthropologists who study art, ritual performance, and verbal creativity in different cultures. For additional perspective, I occasionally draw on the work of scholars who study specific creative
domains: musicologists, historians of art, scholars of theatrical performance, philosophers of
science, legal scholars who study intellectual property—particularly in Part IV. By combining
everything that scientists have learned about how people generate new things, the interdisciplinary approach provides us with a powerful explanation of creativity.

The scientific study of creativity makes some people nervous. For example, practicing artists
may worry, “Isn’t the whole project just a mistaken attempt to impose the analytic worldview of
science onto the arts? Isn’t creativity a mysterious force that will forever resist scientific explanation?” Some artists worry that if they become too analytic, it could interfere with their muse.
Other people are skeptical about corporations harnessing individual creativity for greater profit
(Osborn, 2003). I believe that these worries are unfounded. Explaining creativity is important
for many reasons.



Explaining creativity can help us identify and realize every person’s unique creative talents.
Without explaining creativity, it’s easy to fail to recognize and nurture individuals with important creative abilities. If we hope to solve all of the pressing problems facing our society and our
world, we must take advantage of the creative talents of everyone.
society. Researchers have discovered that creativity is an essential skill for effective leadership
(Bennis & Biederman, 1997; Simonton, 1994). Creative leaders have much more impact because
they can motivate their teams more effectively. Creative leaders are especially effective at handling novel challenges that force them to go outside the typical routines. At the beginning of this
chapter, I pointed out changes in the modern economy that make creativity more important
than ever (also see Florida, 2002). Before the 1980s, creativity was thought to be only occasionally important to a corporation; today, most business leaders believe that creativity is critical to
the survival of their organization.
Explaining creativity can help us all to be better problem solvers. We each face problems in our
everyday lives that require creative responses. Our society faces challenges like pollution, poverty, and terrorism. Some of these problems can be solved simply by a single individual having
a good idea, but most of them will require groups of people working together.
Explaining creativity helps us realize the importance of positive, peak experiences to mental
health. During peak experiences known as flow, people are at their most creative. Researchers
studying positive psychology have discovered that flow and creativity contribute to a happy, fulfilling life (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990b). A better explanation of creativity can help people to
achieve these positive, healthy experiences.
Explaining creativity can help educators teach more effectively. Educational psychologists are
increasingly discovering the role that creativity plays in development and learning (Sawyer et al.,
2003). In recent decades, psychologists have identified the step-by-step creative processes that
underpin learning (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 2000; Sawyer, 2006b). Creativity is important
not only to classroom learning but also to the critical informal learning that occurs in the preschool years—how to speak a first language, how to behave at the dinner table, how to make
friends and engage in group play (Sawyer, 1997b).
Explaining creativity provides more than intellectual satisfaction; it will lead to a more
creative society, and will enhance the creative potential of our families, our workplaces, and our

Almost all scientific books about creativity have been limited to those expressions of creativity
that are highly valued in Western cultures.1 By limiting their studies to “high” forms—to fine art
painting rather than decorative painting, graphic arts, or animation; to basic science rather than

1. We find this bias in many books about creativity. Winner’s 1982 book Invented Worlds: The Psychology
of the Arts focuses on painting, music, and literature, and explicitly excludes what she calls “popular forms
of art” such as television, jazz, and comic strips (p. 11). Wilson’s 1985 book The Psychology of the Performing
Arts focuses on “classical drama, music and opera” (p. i). Csikszentmihalyi’s 1996 book Creativity is based



applied science, engineering, or technology; to symphonic compositions rather than the creativity of the violinist, the ensemble interaction of a chamber quartet, or the improvisation of a jazz
group—these researchers have implicitly accepted a set of values that is culturally and historically specific. These biases must be discarded if we want to explain creativity in all societies, in
all cultures, and in all historical time periods.
To explain creativity, we have to consider a broad range of creative behaviors, not only the
high arts of Western, European cultures. In addition to fine art painting, symphonic performance of the European classical repertoire, and dramatic performance of scripted plays, a complete explanation of creativity must also explain comic strips, animated cartoons, movies, music
videos, mathematical theory, experimental laboratory science, the improvised performances of
jazz and rock music, and the broad range of performance genres found in the world’s cultures.
In this book, I examine creativity in non-Western cultures, and the creativity associated with the
most influential contemporary developments in media and art—movies, television, computer
software, music videos, multimedia, videogames, performance, and installation art.
The bias in creativity research toward the fine arts is a little out of keeping with the times;
postwar America has been characterized by its valorization of spontaneity and improvisation,
not only in performance but even in writing and painting: Black Mountain and beat poets,
bebop musicians, abstract Expressionists, modern dance, and installation art (Belgrad, 1998;
Sawyer, 2000). The visual arts have been heavily influenced by the creative potential of performance art, resulting in installation-specific pieces and multimedia works that integrate video
images or taped sounds. That’s why in Chapter 16, on visual creativity, I discuss not only fine art
painting but also movies and installation art. And in Chapter 18, on musical creativity, I examine not only European symphonic composition but also the improvisational performances of
jazz and of a broad range of non-Western cultures.
It’s strange that psychologists in recent decades have been so focused on the fine arts; after
all, within the arts themselves, such categories have increasingly been challenged and broken
down since the 1960s (see Fry, 1970). In the 1960s, pop artists like Andy Warhol and Roy
Lichtenstein broke the boundaries between high and low art, incorporating elements of advertising graphics and comic strips into their paintings. The Fluxus group began experimenting
with performance and installation art, and in the following decades, installation art has become
increasingly prominent within the mainstream art world. In the 1960s through the present,
American popular music has experienced a flourishing of creativity that some believe is the
historical equivalent to prior bursts of creativity in European symphonic music. In the 1970s, the
New Hollywood era in film was a major creative break in movie production. In the 1980s,
the advent of MTV and its music videos enabled a new burst of creativity among dance choreographers and film artists. And in the early years of this new century, the Internet has enabled
participatory creativity; today, anyone can edit and post a video, a story, or a new song and share

on interviews with approximately 100 highly creative individuals; all of these individuals create in areas
highly valued in dominant cultural groups in Western, European cultures: the sciences, the fine arts.
Mumford (2003), in a review of two massive handbooks that surveyed the field of creativity research
(Runco, 1997; Sternberg, 1999a), pointed out that they “talk about artists, scientists, and musicians at
length, [but] I could find no mention of engineers, computer programmers, designers, marketing and
advertising executives, consultants, or managers . . . there appears to be a tendency in the field toward a
platonic, class-stereotypic view of the creative act” (p. 110).



it with the world. Although audiences have been declining for the so-called high arts, the audiences for these new creative forms are huge and continually expanding. Any serious study of
creativity in the 21st century must explain the full range of human innovation.

To explain creativity, we first need to agree on what it is, and this turns out to be surprisingly
difficult. All of the social sciences face the task of defining concepts that seem everyday and
familiar. Psychologists argue over the definitions of intelligence, emotion, and memory; sociologists argue over the definitions of group, social movement, and institution. But defining creativity may be one of the most difficult tasks facing the social sciences.
Creativity researchers can be grouped into two major traditions of research: an individualist
approach and a sociocultural approach. Each of them has its own distinctive analytic focus, and
each of them defines creativity slightly differently.


The individualist approach studies a single person while that person is engaged in creative
thought or behavior. This is the approach associated with first-wave personality psychology—
which studies the traits of creative people—and second-wave experimental cognitive psychology—the branch of psychology that studies how people think, perceive, learn, and remember.
Because individualists focus on single individuals, the individualist definition of creativity refers
only to structures and processes that are associated with a single person.
Individualist definition: Creativity is a new mental combination that is expressed in the
• Creativity is new. The most basic requirement of a creative thought or action is that it
must be novel or original. Repeating a previously mastered sequence of behaviors isn’t
creative; repeating a sentence verbatim isn’t creative; speaking from memory isn’t creative.
Our minds spend large parts of every day engaged in non-creative activities—driving or
walking the same route to work or school; preparing coffee and breakfast every morning;
dialing a phone number; typing at a keyboard. These activities are non-creative because
they repeat already mastered behavioral patterns.
• Creativity is a combination. All thoughts and concepts are combinations of existing
thoughts and concepts. The mind is an immense web of symbolic material; most of it has
been previously mastered, and simply recalling from memory isn’t creative. Creativity
involves a combination of two or more thoughts or concepts that have never been combined before by that individual.
• Creativity is expressed in the world. Creativity researchers can’t study what they can’t see.
This is why the scientific definition of creativity has to exclude ideas that stay in a person’s
head and are never expressed, and ideas that no one else can see or understand. Under this
definition, your nightly dreams aren’t creative; ideas that you have but never write down
or communicate to anyone else aren’t creative.



The individualist definition is based on one of the oldest theories in psychology: associationism. Well over 100 years ago, psychologist Alexander Bain (1818–1903) first argued that “new
combinations grow out of elements already in the possession of the mind” (1855/1977, p. 572).
Most of these combinations won’t be completely new to the world, but as long as they’re new in
that person’s mind, they satisfy the individualist definition. Creativity researchers refer to this as
“little c” creativity. Little c creativity includes activities that people engage in every day: modifying a recipe when you don’t have all of the ingredients called for; avoiding a traffic jam by finding
a new way through side streets; figuring out how to apologize to a friend for an unintended
insult; a child building a block tower (or even a baby stuffing peas into his nose for the first time).
Thousands, or even millions, of people may have already solved those same problems, but as
long as it’s your first time, it meets the individualist definition.
How can we know if a combination is new for a particular person? Creativity researchers
have developed a wide variety of clever experiments to do exactly this. For example, we can
display three abstract geometric shapes and ask people to combine them to make an invention
(see Chapter 6); we can present three randomly chosen words and ask people to write a story
using them (see Chapter 3); or we can ask children to combine magazine photos to make a collage (see Chapter 3). Many other individualist measures of creativity are described in Chapter 3
on assessment.


The third-wave sociocultural approach studies creative people working together in social and
cultural systems. Socioculturalists study how groups collectively generate innovation, and the
structures and processes of social, cultural, and organizational systems that are creative. A jazz
ensemble or a theater group is a fundamentally ensemble art form. A hit videogame or a
computer-animated movie typically has 200 different creative people participating in its
creation. A scientific paper that reports a new discovery often has 50 or 100 authors.
Even works that are generated mostly in solitude, like paintings, poems, or novels, are difficult to understand without incorporating the sociocultural level of analysis in addition to the
individual level. That’s because the only works that survive and that are disseminated to a broad
public are those that successfully navigate a complex social and organizational system of gatekeepers, curators, and experts (see Chapter 11 on the sociology of creativity).
Sociocultural definition: Creativity is the generation of a product that is judged to be novel
The sociocultural definition of creativity requires that some socially valuable product be
generated before the act or the person is called “creative.” Only solutions to extremely difficult
problems, or significant works of genius, are recognized as creative. This is sometimes called
“big C” Creativity. All creations that satisfy this definition will by default also satisfy the individual or “little c” definition—because any product that is novel to a social group must also be
novel to each individual within that social group.
The sociocultural definition is quite similar to definitions of innovation in organizations;
Amabile (1988) defined innovation as “the successful implementation of creative ideas within an
organization” (p. 126). Most business scholars distinguish between “creativity” as the ideas
or products generated by individuals, and “innovation” as the successful execution of a
new product or service by an entire organization (Sawyer & Bunderson, in press). The study of



organizations is a central element of the sociocultural approach; we’ll focus on organizations
most directly in Chapter 12 on group creativity and Chapter 13 on organizations.
To satisfy the sociocultural definition, novelty to the creator isn’t enough. Creators themselves can’t know if their work is truly the first one in the history of the world; the identical creation might already exist, and the creator just doesn’t know about it. Sociocultural novelty can
be judged only by a social group, who can collectively determine whether an individual creation
really is new. In addition, to satisfy the sociocultural definition, novelty isn’t sufficient; the creation must also be appropriate, recognized as socially valuable in some way to some community.
Appropriateness, like novelty, can be judged only by a social group.
The sociocultural definition of creativity has been widely adopted in creativity research—
even by personality and cognitive psychologists.2 That’s because it’s extremely difficult to scientifically define what is a “new combination” for an individual, under the individual definition.
But there’s a problem with including appropriateness as a criterion for creativity: because a
work’s appropriateness can be defined only by a society at a given historical moment, it becomes
hard to distinguish creativity from worldly success and power. The influential creativity
researcher Dean Keith Simonton accepted the appropriateness criterion and then argued that
only eminent people can be said to be creative (1999b). You might prefer a conception of creativity that allows for unrecognized genius, people who are ahead of their time, or works that are
simply so innovative that they are rejected as bizarre by the society, and thus aren’t judged to be
Although appropriateness may seem incompatible with creativity at first glance, it’s not as
bad as it may first seem. After all, creativity can’t exist, even in principle, without appropriateness. For example, almost all musical compositions use the 12-tone Western scale—the notation
system that all musicians learn in training—and are composed for instruments that are widely
manufactured, distributed, and taught. Just because a work conforms to these conventions
doesn’t mean that we would say it’s not creative. To be creative, you don’t have to compose a
work for a 42-tone scale, using instruments that don’t exist and that no one knows how to play.
If you did that, you’d be rejecting appropriateness but you’d certainly satisfy the “originality”
Composer Harry Partch (1949) became famous for doing exactly this. He spent his career
writing such music, inventing and constructing his own unique instruments to perform his
compositions (see Chapter 18). Certainly no one would disagree that his work is novel, nor that
his work failed to satisfy criteria of appropriateness. And because it doesn’t meet the appropriateness criterion, it’s almost impossible to perform; it could be performed only if Partch himself
guided a process that typically took about a year. First, Partch had a group of students build his
instruments. After several months of construction, they would spend a few months learning
Partch’s idiosyncratic notation system and learning to play the instruments. After seven or eight
months of work, the ensemble was ready to perform a few hours of music. Contrast this lengthy
process with the eight hours or less of rehearsal that it takes a trained symphony orchestra to

2. The first wave of personality psychologists also emphasized that true creativity required not only
novelty but also appropriateness (MacKinnon, 1962): “Novelty or originality of thought or action, while
a necessary aspect of creativity, is not sufficient . . . It must to some extent be adaptive to, or of, reality”
(p. 485). Stein (1961/1963, 1967, 1974) emphasized both novelty and usefulness at a point in time. The
earliest published use of the little c/Big C terminology that I’ve found is in Stein (1987).



perform a new composition that follows the usual conventions, and we see the problems that
face creators whose work is not appropriate—it’s hard to display, disseminate, or perform.
Certain genres of music have an even more closely specified set of constraints; a sonata must
have a certain form, or else it can’t be categorized as a sonata at all. And just because all sonatas
share many characteristics doesn’t mean that all of them are the same, or that a new sonata is
somehow only a copy of all of the other sonatas. Defining how different a work has to be to be
considered a novel work is a complex issue facing critics and experts in many creative domains.
For example, folklorists typically expect there to be some variation in the performance of traditional songs like Appalachian mountain tunes or Southern gospel songs, and even with performance variation, most of the audience would consider all of the variations to be instances of the
same song, even though they aren’t exactly the same.
Individual style provides another set of constraints that don’t seem to be antithetical to creativity. Many listeners who aren’t connoisseurs in a certain musical genre have had the experience
of thinking “it all sounds the same.” In recent years, I’ve heard this said of several rock bands,
including the Grateful Dead and R.E.M., of all bluegrass music, and of anything played on the
accordion. I’m sure that many people feel the same way about the harpsichord compositions of
Bach, bebop jazz, or hip-hop. Just because a painter generates a painting that is recognizably in a
certain style or genre doesn’t lead us to say that it’s “the same” painting as every other one in that
style. Many painters’ careers are characterized by first discovering a new style and then continuing to explore that style, for years or even decades (see my discussion of Cézanne on pp. 281–283).
Many popular bands continue to play in the same familiar style for their entire careers. In both
painting and music, one can point to the exceptional rare individual who develops a new style
every few years—for example, Picasso and Madonna. These individuals are rare because art markets and galleries pressure artists to continue working in the same recognizable style, so that
they’ll generate a known product and thus develop a reputation and a market for that work.
Record companies are infamous for insisting that popular bands under contract for multiple
albums continue to produce albums that sound like their first big hit, because they know that fans
become loyal to a band in part because they can count on consistency and reliability in style.
The scientific studies of creativity that I review in this book focus on both individual creativity and sociocultural creativity, both little c and big C Creativity. These two bodies of research are
complementary; understanding the cognitive processes behind a single idea is important to
understanding those earth-shattering innovations that change the world. And understanding
the social dimensions of creative fields can also help us understand the cognitive processes that
result in new ideas.


The two-level definition of creativity is widely accepted by creativity researchers, with the two
levels typically referred to as “Big C” and “little c” creativity. Some researchers have proposed
three or more types of creativity, rather than only two. Taylor (1959) identified five types of
• Expressive: Independent expression, where the quality and originality of the product are
not important, such as the drawings of children



• Productive: Artistic or scientific products that restrict and control free play and develop
techniques for producing finished products
• Inventive: Inventors, explorers, discoverers; ingenuity is displayed with materials,
methods, and techniques
• Innovative: Improvement through modification involving conceptualizing skills
• Emergentive: An entirely new principle or assumption around which new schools
Kaufman and Beghetto (2009) argued for two levels of creativity in addition to Big-C and
• mini-c: The creativity inherent in the learning process, when children discover something
for the first time
• Pro-c: Professional expertise in a creative domain that does not attain the level of
transforming the domain
Feldman (2003) proposed a three-part definition, using the metaphor of a piano keyboard.
High C is equivalent to Big C creativity; low C is equivalent to little c creativity; and middle C is
roughly equivalent to Pro-c as proposed by Kaufman and Beghetto (see Morelock & Feldman,
This book is organized around two definitions of creativity, because they are widely accepted
by scholars in the field and also because they correspond to the two primary levels of analysis
that are found in the social world—individuals at a lower level of analysis and social entities at a
higher, complex system level of analysis (Sawyer, 2005b). A complete explanation of creativity
requires an explanation of both types—combining the sciences of the individual with the sciences of groups.


Many creativity researchers have been influenced by a four-part division of creativity research
proposed by Mel Rhodes back in 1961, the four P framework:
• Product: Research that focuses on the products judged to be novel and appropriate by the
relevant social group. Product creativity is almost always defined and evaluated using a
sociocultural definition.
• Person: Research that studies the personality traits or personality types associated
with creativity. Creative people are those identified with an individualist definition, or
they are identified indirectly, as those people who have generated creative products. (See
Chapter 3.)
• Process: Research that studies the processes involved during creative work or creative
thought. (See Chapters 5, 6, and 7.)
• Press: Research that focuses on the external forces or “pressures” acting on the creative
person or process, such as the social and cultural context. (See Part III.)



Beliefs about creativity vary from country to country. Many readers of this book are likely to be
living in the United States, and most people in the United States—and in the Western world
more generally—share a set of implicit assumptions about creativity. Anthropologists refer to an
integrated framework of assumptions as a cultural model (Holland & Quinn, 1987). Below,
I identify ten features of the Western cultural model—I’ll call them creativity beliefs. Chapter 14
contains a discussion of research on creativity beliefs in non-Western cultures; there’s some
overlap across cultures, but also many differences. As you read through these, ask yourself: How
many of the ten beliefs do I believe? If you’re from a non-Western culture, see how your own
cultural model differs from these beliefs.
As you read through this book, I’d like you to keep these beliefs in mind and constantly
evaluate them against the scientific evidence. As we journey through our survey of creativity
research, we’ll have many opportunities to consider whether or not each of these beliefs is supported by scientific research. Some of them are completely false; most of them are partially true,
but a bit misleading. At the end of this book, in the final chapter, we’ll return to these ten creativity beliefs and re-examine them from the new perspectives that we’ve gained from scientific


Creative people get their great idea in a flash of insight. After that, all they have to do is execute
it. They could even delegate its execution to someone else, because execution generally doesn’t
require creativity.


Creative people have radical new ideas that come out of nowhere and that can’t be explained by
their prior experience.


Creative people blindly ignore convention; convention is the enemy of creativity, because it
blocks the pure inspiration welling up from the creative spirit. The best artists reject tradition
and convention; they’re not influenced by the prevailing ideas taught in art schools or advocated
by rich collectors or influential museum curators. The best scientists reject the dominant theories that they learn in graduate school, and strike out on their own.
Variation: Children are more creative than adults.




Sometimes the most creative people know the least about the domain. The leading people in any
field are so bound up in the old way of doing things that they never have the great new ideas. It
takes someone from the outside to see things in a new way; it’s better if the outsider doesn’t learn
those old ways of doing things.


Other people interfere with creativity; it’s best to just go away by yourself. If you can, get yourself
a cabin in the woods, like Thoreau at Walden Pond. Whatever you do, don’t stay in the city
center, where you’re surrounded by people.


Creative people are far ahead of their time, and their brilliance is not acknowledged during their
lifetime. They’re recognized only after death, when everyone else moves along to catch up with
their vision.


Creativity is a general personality trait, like IQ. If you’re a more creative person, you’ll be more
creative at everything that you do. People who don’t have much of this personality trait have very
little hope of being creative.
Variation: Creativity is genetic, and some people are born with more of it.


Creativity is in the right brain, and creative people display a “right-brained” pattern of behavior
and thought.
General variation: Creative brains have identifiable biologic differences from uncreative


Creative people are more likely to be mentally ill, and mental illness has a silver lining—it brings
increased creativity. The inner turmoil associated with mental illness is the source of ideas and
inspiration, so that when mental illness is treated, people become less creative.




Creative activities are the fullest realization of human experience. They express the inner being
of the person, and result in great personal fulfillment. Creative activities contribute to psychological health; this is why art therapy and music therapy are effective.

Creativity is precisely the kind of problem which eludes explanation within one
—Howard Gardner, in the first issue of the Creativity Research Journal (1988, p. 22)
Creativity arises through a system of interrelated forces operating at multiple levels, often
requiring interdisciplinary investigation.
—Hennessey and Amabile, (2010, p. 571)

My goal in this book is to present all of the research on creativity—at both the individual level
and the sociocultural level. My hope is to present a more comprehensive explanation of creativity than is possible with any one level of analysis—to take the interdisciplinary approach that
Howard Gardner advised in the above epigraph from the inaugural issue of the Creativity
Research Journal back in 1988. Many of my colleagues agree that it’s time for an interdisciplinary
synthesis; when Beth Hennessey and Teresa Amabile reviewed the research on creativity in
2010, they were struck by “a growing fragmentation of the field . . . investigators in one subfield
often seem entirely unaware of advances in another” (p. 571). As long as the three waves of
creativity research—cognitive, personality, and sociocultural—proceed on separate tracks, we
will fail to explain creativity (e.g., Tardif & Sternberg, 1988, p. 429). My goal with this book is to
help correct this situation, and bring together the full range of scientific perspectives.
scientific research. Instead of reporting scientific findings, they often do no more than present
the Western cultural model of creativity—but with catchy new terms and engaging anecdotes.
My goal in this book is to take us beyond any one cultural model of creativity, and give us a
scientific explanation of creativity. I’ve cast a broad net, and our journey will range far and
wide—through psychology and sociology, through art history and literary criticism. So, keeping
in mind that there is always more to learn—that science is, by definition, unfinished business—
let’s start our journey.

C H A P T E R




s the applause swelled, Dr. Guilford took a deep breath, smoothed his tie and jacket, and
began to walk to the podium. It was Sept. 5, 1950, and Dr. Guilford was at the peak of his
long and illustrious career. He had dedicated his life to psychological research. He’d played
a key leadership role during World War II, helping the U.S. military carry out the most
massive testing program in history. And now, he had attained the highest honor that the discipline of psychology could give—he had been elected president of the American Psychological
Every year, at the annual meeting of the Association, the president gives the keynote speech,
and in 1950 at Pennsylvania State College, this was Dr. J. P. Guilford’s moment (Fig. 2.1).
Presidents traditionally use this opportunity to emphasize an important issue that they think
deserves more psychological study. As Dr. Guilford began his talk, the hundreds of assembled
psychologists in the room were shocked when they realized the topic he had chosen: the APA
president had chosen to talk about creativity.
To understand why a professional psychologist in 1950 would be shocked to hear a speech
about creativity from the APA president, you need to know a little about the field of psychology
at the time. Since the 1920s, American psychology had been dominated by behaviorism—think
of Pavlov’s salivating dog and Skinner’s experiments with pigeons. Behaviorists studied only
behaviors they could see. Anything that happened inside the brain was off limits—they reasoned
that because the mind couldn’t be directly observed, it couldn’t be studied scientifically. By the
1970s, this approach had been rejected by most psychologists, but 1950 was the heyday of behaviorism, and behaviorism didn’t have much to say about creativity.1
A second prominent approach in 1950s American psychology was Freudian psychoanalysis.
To a Freudian, creativity was a subliminal activity masking unexpressed or instinctual wishes;
the people who chose to become artists were just redirecting repressed and unfulfilled sexual
desires (Freud, 1917/1966, p. 467). The arts were based on illusion and the creation of a fantasy
world, and were thought to be similar to a psychiatric disorder called neurosis (see Chapter 4,
pp. 82–83).

1. Behaviorism’s critics often pointed to the phenomenon of human creativity, and claimed that reinforcement methods couldn’t teach creativity. Skinner realized the importance of this criticism, and repeatedly
tried, although unsuccessfully, to respond (1968, 1972). Also see Epstein (1990, 1999) for a more recent
behaviorist account of creativity.



FIGURE 2.1: J. P. Guilford. (Courtesy of the University of Southern California, on behalf of the USC
Specialized Libraries and Archival Collections.)

A third reason that psychologists in 1950 didn’t study creativity was that exceptional creativity was thought to be a byproduct of high intelligence. Soon after World War I, Lewis Terman of
Stanford University adapted Frenchman Alfred Binet’s new intelligence test for the United States,
and for decades after that, the study of talent and human potential was dominated by the study
of intelligence (see Chapter 3, pp. 52–58).
Modern creativity research began with Guilford’s influential 1950 APA presidential address
(Guilford, 1950). After Guilford’s stamp of approval at the national psychology conference, studies of creativity blossomed. During the years that followed Guilford’s address there were almost
as many studies of creativity published in each year as there were for the entire 23 years prior to
his address (Getzels, 1987; Sternberg & Dess, 2001).
Of course, one evening’s talk can’t change an entire scientific discipline overnight. But
Guilford’s APA address was the right message at the right time. In the years after World War II,
the United States was an economic powerhouse, a machine exporting its products around the
world, generating jobs for everyone. But the booming economy of the 1950s was very different
from the 1990s information technology boom; there were no start-ups, no venture capital, no
NASDAQ. Instead, almost everyone worked for a large, stable corporation, and the work environments were much more structured than in America today. IBM was legendary for requiring
each employee to wear a white shirt and a navy blue suit, every day. Businesses were organized
into strict hierarchies—almost like the military—and everyone knew their place in the pecking
Like the military, these companies were extremely efficient. But many thoughtful commentators were concerned. After all, the U.S. had just fought World War II to defend freedom, and
its Cold War adversary—the Soviet Union—was criticized as a restricted and controlled society.
So it was disturbing that U.S. society was beginning to seem increasingly constrained and

Conceptions of Creativity


regimented. By the late 1950s, Americans were increasingly worried about this “age of conformity,” and a 1956 book called The Organization Man by William H. Whyte became a national
bestseller. Its theme—that the regimented economy was resulting in an America full of uncreative, identical conformists—was echoed in similar books through the early 1960s. In 1961,
management theorists Tom Burns and G. M. Stalker published an influential book arguing that
these rigid hierarchical organizations were rarely innovative; instead, creativity came from companies with flat hierarchies, empowered workers, and authority distributed throughout the
organization (Burns & Stalker, 1961). The research psychologists who studied creativity in the
late 1950s and early 1960s were profoundly influenced by these nationwide concerns (as can be
seen in transcripts of discussions at the five influential Utah conferences on creativity in 1955,
1957, 1959, 1961, and 1962: Taylor, 1959, 1964a, 1964b; Taylor & Barron, 1963).
Like Guilford, many of the early creativity scholars got their start during World War II,
evaluating personality traits for the military. Donald MacKinnon and Morris Stein worked for
the Office of Strategic Services, the predecessor to the CIA. They worked at the Assessment
Center, a group that was charged with evaluating which people would best be suited for demanding roles overseas—irregular warfare, spies, counterespionage agents, and leaders of resistance
groups (MacKinnon, 1978, p. xi). Guilford worked for the U.S. Air Force, developing tests to
identify the intellectual abilities essential to flying a plane. After World War II, these military
psychologists founded several research institutes to study creative individuals. MacKinnon
founded the Institute of Personality Assessment and Research (IPAR) at the University of
California at Berkeley in 1949. Guilford founded the Aptitudes Research Project at the University
of Southern California in the early 1950s. Stein founded the Center for the Study of Creativity
and Mental Health at the University of Chicago in 1952.
Creativity research was a high-stakes game during the nuclear arms race: in 1954, psychologist Carl Rogers warned that “the lights will go out . . . international annihilation will be the price
we pay for a lack of creativity” (p. 250). Around that time, the government began to give research
grants to psychologists studying creativity—funding research to identify creative talent early in
life, to educate for creativity, and to design more creative workplaces. The goal of this research
was no less than to better understand freedom and its place in American society. As Morris Stein
wrote at the time, “To be capable of [creative insights], the individual requires freedom—
to express that which is within him without fear of censure or concern about evaluation”
(1961/1963, p. 119).
In 1950, the government created the National Science Foundation, and one of its first programs was the provision of fellowship funding to graduate students. To do this successfully, the
NSF wanted to develop a test to identify the most promising future scientists. Personality psychologist Calvin W. Taylor led that research effort from 1952 to 1954; when he stepped down in
1954, he drew on his NSF connections to get funding for a series of conferences at the University
of Utah on the identification of creative scientific talent, and the first one was held in 1955
(Taylor, 1964b; Taylor & Barron, 1963). The Utah Conferences brought together most of the
first-wave personality psychologists studying creativity. The fifth conference in 1963 even
attracted Harvard professor and legendary LSD guru Timothy Leary (Fig. 2.2).
Like Carl Rogers and Morris Stein, these creativity researchers believed they were defending
freedom and helping to save the world from nuclear annihilation. Today, most people in America
and in Europe agree with Stein that liberal democratic societies are those most conducive to
creativity (Weiner, 2000). At the first Utah Conference in 1955, Frank Barron of the Berkeley



FIGURE 2.2: Participants in the 1963 Utah Conference on the identification and development of Creative
Scientific Talent. (Frontispiece from Taylor, 1964a.) Front row, left to right: Taylor, Torrance, Drevdahl,

Clark, Leary, MacKinnon, Guilford, Sprecher, Wight; second row: Westcott, Jablonski, Hyman, Datta,
Fiedler, Parnes, Gamble; third row: Roberts, McRae, Mednick, Levine, Holland, Beittel; fourth row: Astin,
McPherson, Mullins, Brust, Barron, Elliott, Ghiselin.

IPAR described the creative society; it had “freedom of expression and movement, lack of fear of
dissent and contradiction, a willingness to break with custom, a spirit of play as well as of dedication to work” (1963b, p. 152). By 1960, creativity scholars began to sound as if they were writing the playbook for the hippie era that came only a few years later. In 1961, Morris Stein argued
that “A society fosters creativity to the extent that it encourages openness to internal and external experiences . . . Societies that are full of ‘don’ts,’ ‘shouldn’ts,’ and ‘mustn’ts’ restrict freedom of
inquiry and autonomy . . . [Society] discourages creativity to the extent that social pressures to
conformity are so intense that deviations are punished directly or indirectly through social isolation and ostracism” (Stein, 1961/1963, p. 130). In 1962, Donald MacKinnon advised parents
and teachers “to encourage in their children and in their students an openness to all ideas and
especially to those which most challenge and threaten their own judgments” (1962, p. 493).
Creativity researcher Frank Barron claimed to have first introduced Harvard’s Timothy Leary to
the psychoactive properties of the psilocybin mushroom (Barron, 1963a, p. 74). Leary would go
on to become a famous champion of psychedelic drugs, widely known for his saying “Turn on,
tune in, drop out.” If you think parents were too permissive in the 1960s and after, you can’t lay
all the blame at Benjamin Spock’s door (also see Hulbert, 2003).
People’s ideas about creativity are always influenced by their society and their historical time.
We shouldn’t be surprised that postwar American psychologists emphasized a conception of creativity that fit exactly with a liberal democratic vision of society, one that contrasted the United
States with the Soviet Union during the darkest years of the Cold War (see also Joncich, 1964).

Conceptions of Creativity


Personality psychologists were largely unaware that their own conceptions of creativity were
socially and historically unique (Raina, 1993; Stein, 1987). It turns out that what gets called creative has varied according to the historical and cultural period (Sass, 2000–2001, p. 57); these
variations are the focus of this chapter.

Many people who hold to the Western cultural model of creativity (see Chapter 1) believe that
creative expression represents inner truth, the spirit of a unique individual. European
Enlightenment humanism emphasized the divine nature of humanity; the human being became
a sort of god. If creativity represents the purest expression of the spirit of the individual, it might
capture the essence of this divinity (Becker, 2000–2001). Robert Weiner has argued that globalization is expanding this Enlightenment individualism beyond Europe, into a “global ideology
of creativity” (2000, p. 113).
No past historical period would recognize today’s concept of “creativity”; what we mean by
that term has evolved through a complex historical and cultural process. The word “creativity”
was invented in the late 19th century, when many people began to draw connections between
the arts and the sciences. It appeared in an 1875 text History of Dramatic English Literature, by
Adolfus William Ward (Weiner, 2000, p. 89), used in such a way as to suggest there is something
similar across all disciplines (Weiner, 2000). The word doesn’t appear in French or Italian
until 50 years after that, and didn’t appear in standard English dictionaries until after World
War II (it’s not in the second edition of the New International Dictionary in 1934, but it is in
the Third New International Dictionary of 1961: Kristeller, 1983). The word comes from the
English word “create,” which derives from a hypothesized Indo-European root, ker, kere (to
grow) via the Latin, creatio or creatus (to make or grow). But in the Roman era, this word was
used for biological creation; ars and artis were more commonly used for human making (Weiner,
2000, p. 41).
Until the modern era, creativity was attributed to a superhuman force; all novel ideas
originated with the gods. After all, how could a person create something that didn’t exist before
the divine act of creation? The Latin meaning of the verb “inspire” is “to breath into,” reflecting
the belief that creative inspiration was akin to the moment in creation when God first breathed
life into man. Plato (427–327 BCE) argued that the poet was possessed by divine inspiration.
Plato argued that the works of poets were entirely the invention of the Muses, who possess the
poets and inspire them (Weiner, 2000, p. 35).
Plotin (204–270 CE) wrote that art could be beautiful only if it descended from God. The
artist’s job was not to imitate nature but rather to reveal the sacred and transcendent qualities of
nature. Plato likewise held that all art was an imitation of nature; but for Plato, the nature that
we see is an imitation of eternal ideas, so artworks are imitations of imitations (Weiner, 2000,
p. 35). Art could be only a pale imitation of the perfection of the world of ideas (Honour &
Fleming, 1999). Greek artists didn’t blindly imitate what they saw in reality; instead, they tried
to represent the pure, true forms underlying reality, resulting in a sort of compromise between
abstraction and accuracy.



Most people who live in the United States share a common set of beliefs about artists, one that
derives from the Western cultural model of creativity. We think that most artists work alone.
They’re blessed with a special gift or genius. They have a uniquely valuable message to communicate, and generally have a relatively high social status. We believe that artworks should be
signed by their creators; knowing who created a work is important to us. Art buyers seek out the
best artists and buy their works. If you’re one of the famous artists, your work will be collected
by major museums. Imitations of your paintings aren’t valuable, no matter how skillfully executed they are.
But these beliefs about artists are extremely recent. For example, the idea that an artist works
alone is less than 200 years old. In the ancient system of apprenticeship in studios, artists worked
in hierarchically structured teams. To learn art, a child—sometimes as young as the age of
seven—was apprenticed to a master. All products of the studio were attributed to the master,
even though a great portion of the work may have actually been completed by his assistants.
The master acted as a sort of artistic director, composing the overall picture and executing only
the most difficult portions.
The idea that the artist has high social status is also less than 200 years old. In the non-noble
classes of Europe, status was based on economic success, and artists didn’t make a lot of money.
Artists were considered lower status than butchers and silversmiths, for example. This began to
change during the Italian Renaissance, as artists began to be recognized for their knowledge and
their genius. Nobility began to value art, and they competed with one another to take the best
artists under their wing.
The idea that artists have a unique message to communicate is also only a few hundred years
old. For most of European history, artists were considered primarily craftsmen. When a noble
contracted for a work with a painter, the contract specified details like the quantities of gold and
blue paint to appear in the work, the deadline, and penalties for delays (Baxandall, 1972). A contract in 1485 between the painter Domenico Ghirlandaio and a client specified that Ghirlandaio
would “colour the panel at his own expense with good colours and with powdered gold on such
ornaments as demand it . . . and the blue must be ultramarine of the value about four florins the
ounce” (quoted in Baxandall, 1972, p. 6). In some contracts, artists were paid by the time worked
rather than a fixed price for the completed work. These contract details show us that art was
considered to be a trade—a very different conception of the artist than we hold today.
The idea that the artist creates a novel and original work that breaks with convention is only
a few hundred years old. Before the Renaissance, creativity was associated with the ability to
imitate established masters, and to accurately represent nature (Becker, 2000–2001, p. 46; Weiner,
2000). Although some people, including da Vinci and Vasari, argued that genio should not just
be imitative, but should also incorporate originality, this argument did not become widely
accepted until the late Renaissance (Lange-Eichbaum, 1930/1932).
During the Renaissance, Western conceptions of creativity began to change more dramatically. In the late 15th century in Florence, the idea became widespread that one could make a
distinction between divine inspiration and human making. Art was still thought of as imitation,
but as the direct imitation of divine ideas (rather than Plato’s imitation of an imitation), and thus
could surpass nature as we observe it (Weiner, 2000, p. 54). But the artist was not valorized; even
Leonardo da Vinci didn’t sign his works.

Conceptions of Creativity


The first use of the word “create” in English was in 1589, by George Puttenham—in comparing poetic creation to divine creation (Weiner, 2000, p. 55). Artists began to differentiate
themselves from craftsmen, and intellectuals began to think of what they did as something more
than just craft or technique; the difference was that they could claim to “create”—unlike the
mechanical arts. In the 18th century, poetry, music, and the visual arts were grouped together
for the first time as “fine arts,” and the word “creative” began to be applied to artists (Kristeller,
It was during Enlightenment humanism that the conception of man as an intentional creator
began to flourish. In 1474, the Venetian city-state created the first regularized administrative
system for granting patents, giving sole property to the originator for ten years (Merges, 1995).
In 1624, Britain introduced patent protection for 14 years, granted to “the true and first inventor
and inventors of such manufacturers” (Merges, 1995, p. 106; Weiner, 2000, p. 68).
These historical developments show that our current conception of the artist became widespread only about 200 years ago (Heinich, 1993). Many distinct developments converged in
Europe to result in the modern Western conception of the artist. In the 15th century, the art of
the portrait was born in Europe, a radical break with the prior tradition of painting only religious icons and scenes. Paintings and sculptures were increasingly signed by the artist in France,
Germany, Flanders, and Italy. Consistent with Renaissance thought more generally, this was the
beginning of the idea that the artist was a unique individual with his own perceptions and abilities, and that his paintings and his conceptions were unique. By the 16th century, the artist
began to be seen as a member of a prestigious minority, working apart from any court or church.
This was the beginning of an idea that has continued through the modern era: that artists are
independent from society’s normal standards of taste, that artists are inspired innovators, and
that the function of art is to communicate the inner insights of the artist to the viewer.
The conception of the artist as internally driven by vision, inspiration, or imagination
assumes that the creator doesn’t know who will ultimately consume his creation, and furthermore assumes that it’s not important for the creator to be aware of the ultimate audience. This
historical situation was a result of the demise of patronage and the rise of mass audiences. Prior
to that time, the artist was always working for a client—whether royalty, the church, or a rich
merchant—with the goal of satisfying that client’s demands (Clark, 1997, p. 11). Albrecht Dürer
(1471–1528) produced the first works designed and published by the artist, not commissioned
by a patron, and he was one of the first to sign his works (Weiner, 2000, p. 63).
From the 16th through the 18th centuries, the institutions of the art world were first established throughout Europe: museums, a tradition of art criticism and the study of the history of
art, an art market with dealers and patrons. Schools for teaching art—run by the government
and apart from apprenticeship in a studio—were founded in Florence in 1563 and in Rome in
1577. These state-run academies allowed aspiring artists to learn without apprenticeship to a
master (Fig. 2.3).
And finally, in the Industrial Revolution, economic changes led to the end of the studio
system. For centuries, apprentices had to learn how to make their own paints from scratch materials, and also to make their own paintbrushes; but after the 19th-century Industrial Revolution,
an artist could purchase paints and brushes that were mass produced. The 19th-century French
Impressionists are known for their radical new idea of painting outdoors, but this innovation
would not have been possible without the invention of tubes of paint, which became available
only in the 19th century. The modern concept of the artist—isolated, independent, inspired—
could emerge only after all of these social and economic developments.



FIGURE 2.3: Woodcarving of a painting academy from the early 17th century. (Reprinted from Elkins, 2001,

p. 17, Pierfrancesco Alberti Painter’s Academy, early 17th century, Bartsch XVII.313.1. Used with
permission of James Elkins.)

After several hundred years of broad social changes, during the 19th century Europeans
began to see the artist as we conceive of him today: as a figure balancing the tension between the
conventions of academic quality and the demand for originality (Heinich, 1993). For example,
in the 19th century, anti-academism emerged in France—one of the first artistic movements to
explicitly reject academic convention. Delacroix, Corot, and Courbet rejected the conventional
hierarchy of subjects that placed historical and heroic scenes at the top, and instead painted
realistic, everyday scenes—an important early influence on Impressionism.
Freudian psychoanalysis aligned readily with Romanticist thought. Freud argued that creativity emerged unpredictably from the unconscious mind, resulting from drives and conflicts
that the creator is not consciously aware of. Freud’s association between artistic creation and
neurosis also aligned with a common strain of thought, in the late 19th century, that creative
geniuses were somehow disturbed—similar to the mentally ill, physically sick, or criminals (see
Chapter 4, pp. 82–83). Although Freud’s psychodynamic theory has mostly been discarded
today, these ideas about creativity remain a part of the Western cultural model.
Ironically, through the 20th century and increasingly after World War II in the United States,
artists have been entering art schools in increasingly large numbers to be trained in the conventions of the art world. In the United States today, a greater proportion of working artists have the
MFA degree than at any other time in history. Yet few of us are aware of the growing influence
of formal schooling in fine art.
Today, at the beginning of the 21st century, most readers are likely to hold to the modern
conception of the artist—a unique and inspired individual who expresses and communicates
his or her unique vision through the art work. And of course, this conception is completely

Conceptions of Creativity


consistent with the Western cultural model of creativity. Yet this conception of the artist is no
more than 200 years old.

Over the centuries, conceptions of creativity have veered between two broad ideas: rationalism
and Romanticism. Rationalism is the belief that creativity is generated by the conscious, deliberating, intelligent, rational mind; Romanticism is the belief that creativity bubbles up from an
irrational unconscious, and that rational deliberation interferes with the creative process.
Over 2,300 years ago, Aristotle’s view of art emphasized rationality and deliberation, and
stressed the conscious work required to bring a creative inspiration to completion. Aristotle gave
credit not only to the Muses, but also to human skill and inspiration (Weiner, 2000, p. 36). The
rationalist conception was dominant through the European Renaissance and Enlightenment,
when reason was valued above all. Enlightenment conceptions of creativity emphasized rationality, proportion, and harmony. In 1650, Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) called the invocation of
the Muses the reasonless imitation of a foolish custom, “by which a man, enabled to speak wisely
from the principles of Nature and his own meditation, loves rather to be thought to speak by
inspiration, like a Bagpipe” (quoted in Smith, 1961, p. 24). Reason, knowledge, training, and
education were considered necessary to create good art. When the term originality was coined,
it meant newness and truth of observation, not a radical break with convention. The most original artists were those who best imitated nature (Smith, 1961).
During the 18th century, the term genius was first used to describe creative individuals
(Becker, 2000–2001; Tonelli, 1973), and this new concept of genius was primarily associated
with rational, conscious processes (Gerard, 1774/1966; Tonelli, 1973). Genius was associated
with both scientists and artists, and was thought to be based in imagination, judgment, and
memory (Becker, 2000–2001, p. 47).
The idea of the imagination emerged in England and Germany during the late Enlightenment
in the 18th century (Engell, 1981; Taylor, 1989). The imagination “became the compelling force
in artistic and intellectual life” from 1750 onward (Engell, 1981, p. 4). The imagination was the
mental faculty responsible for generating novelty, and this conception would later form the core
of the concept of “creativity” (Taylor, 1989). Theories of the imagination were a reaction against,
and a rejection of, the abstract and mechanical formalism of the early 1700s, the empiricist idea
that “Invention is nothing else but the habit acquired by practices of assembling ideas or truths”
(Turnbull, 1740, I, p. 60; quoted in Engell, 1981, p. 70). Theories of the imagination made possible the conception of genius, which was due to an internal stimulus not explainable in terms of
impressions received from the senses (Engell, 1981, pp. 79–80). Gerard’s 1774 An Essay on
Genius argued that “It is imagination that produces genius” (1774/1966, p. 26). Sir Joshua
Reynolds’ 13th discourse (delivered at the Royal Academy in 1786) was subtitled “Art Not Merely
Imitation, But under the Direction of the Imagination” (Engell, 1981, p. 185).
In the late 1700s and early 1800s, writers in the English Romantic movement began to think
that art might be created through nonrational processes (Abrams, 1984; Smith, 1961, p. 23). This
line of thinking gradually evolved into the Romanticist belief that rational deliberation would
kill the creative impulse (Abrams, 1953, p. 205). Instead of thinking rationally and deliberately,
the artist should simply listen to the inner muse and create without conscious control.



The Romantics argued that creativity requires temporary escape from the conscious ego and a
liberation of instinct and emotion, “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” in
Wordsworth’s terms (1800/1957, p. 116). Shelley called it “unpremeditated art” (Shelley, 1901,
p. 381, “To a skylark,” line 5) and wrote: “Poetry is not like reasoning . . . this power arises from
within, like the colour of a flower which fades and changes as it is developed” (Shelley, 1965,
pp. 70–71).
The Romantics were revolutionary; they valued the artist’s imagination more than mastery
of the traditions of the past. Romanticism was the birth of contemporary notions of creativity—
the idea that the poet or artist has a privileged status as the epitome of the human spirit (Engell,
1981). As these Romantic conceptions spread through Europe, artists began to be thought of as
more than craftspeople.
The Romantics believed that creativity required a regression to a state of consciousness characterized by emotion and instinct, a fusion between self and world, and freedom from rationality and convention. These ideas weren’t completely new; for thousands of years, scholars have
connected creativity with altered or heightened states of consciousness. Plato used the term
enthousiasmos, or “divine madness,” to describe creativity. In ancient Greece, creativity was associated with demonic possession. A demon was a semi-deity and was viewed as a divine gift
granted to selected individuals. Socrates, for example, attributed most of his knowledge to his
demon (Becker, 2000–2001). Aristotle believed that creative individuals were melancholic; but
this didn’t mean he thought they were depressed; the word meant something different back then.
In the Hippocratian humoral theory that held sway from ancient Greece through the Middle
Ages, melancholic referred to one of four basic personality types, none of them associated with
mental illness (Wittkower & Wittkower, 1963, p. 102). Qualities associated with the melancholic
temperament included eccentricity, sensitivity, moodiness, and introversion. Emulating melancholia became a fad among young men in 16th-century Europe (Wittkower & Wittkower, 1963,
pp. 98–105).
Although both Plato and Aristotle associated creativity with heightened states of consciousness, neither of them actually believed that mental illness contributed to creativity (see Chapter 9,
pp. 163–176, for an extended discussion of the creativity–madness link). The belief that mental
illness and creativity were related took its modern form during and after the Romantic era; the
association of creativity with mental illness doesn’t predate the 1830s (Becker, 2000–2001). The
Romantics believed that clinical madness was an unfortunate side effect of extreme creativity.
In the same way that melancholia became a trendy affectation in 16th-century Europe, mental
illness became so in the 19th century; many of the Romantic poets began to embrace madness,
and some claimed to experience mental anguish and madness simply because they thought they
were supposed to. This self-fulfilling prophecy continues into our own time: because the Western
cultural model suggests that creativity and madness are linked, writers and artists sometimes
behave eccentrically, and even voluntarily exaggerate these aspects of their personalities in
psychological tests (Becker, 2000–2001). After all, many creative individuals believe that being
normal is the same thing as being typical, and they’re eager to distinguish themselves from the
average person.
Romanticism dominated the 19th century, but by the end of the century, “anti-Romanticism”
was growing. The 20th century saw a rebirth of rationalism known as modernism. Modernism
is characterized by isolation, coolness, and detachment (Abrams, 1984, pp. 109–144). The French
modernist poets Baudelaire and Mallarmé both emphasized the importance of dispassionate
deliberation and conscious craft (Abrams, 1984). In the early 20th century, poets like Ezra Pound

Conceptions of Creativity


formulated a modernist aesthetic that rejected the “mushy emotivism” of “romantic subjectivism” (Sass, 2000–2001, p. 60). In the 1920s, Russian futurists and Czech formalists advocated a
highly detached, analytic perspective on the world, one that stripped away the normal emotional
and cultural associations of objects to instead focus on pure abstracted form (Sass, 1992).
Romanticism had one last burst in the predominantly rationalist 20th century, with 1950s
postwar abstract Expressionism. The abstract Expressionists were said to create spontaneously
from pure emotion and inspiration, unconstrained by planning, rational thought, or conscious
filtering. However, even during the 1950s knowledgeable art experts were aware that this was a
popular fiction. For example, Jackson Pollock’s paintings—which in the popular conception
simply involved flinging paint against canvas without forethought—were in fact carefully
planned and composed. Pollack worked hard to master different techniques for dripping paint,
experimenting with the results, and he composed his works in advance so that they’d give the
appearance of maximum spontaneity.
Within only a few years, the avant-garde of art had moved on beyond these neo-Romantic
conceptions. The contemporary arts of the 1960s onward—sometimes called “postmodern”—
represented a return to rationalism. Postmodern art is critical of our culture’s conceptions of
creativity—deconstructing notions of spontaneity, originality, and individual genius (Sass,
2000–2001, p. 61). Minimalism and pop art explicitly rejected Romantic-era beliefs about art;
they could not have been more obviously unemotional, carefully planned and executed, and in
fact reveled in their own artifice by noting the parallels with advertising, product design, and
comic strips. Andy Warhol famously said, “I want to be a machine” (quoted in Hughes, 1984,
p. 48). Anti-Romanticism is prominent in postmodern art and theory, which rejects the ideals
of authenticity, spontaneity, and personal engagement. This may be why the general public
doesn’t like modern art: because the average person still holds to Romanticist conceptions of

Contemporary Western cultural models of creativity often include the following elements, in
addition to the ten core beliefs I identified in Chapter 1.


Most of us have heard it said that all children are naturally creative, and that all adults would be,
too, if formal schooling hadn’t interfered and smothered our natural creative impulse. In the
lead article in a 1992 issue of the Utne Reader, Anne Cushman wrote, “For most of us, the
extravagant creativity of childhood is soon crushed by the demands of parents, schools, and
society” (p. 53).
This belief originated in the 19th-century Romantic-era belief that children are more pure,
closer to nature, and that society gradually corrupts them as they grow to learn its customs and
ways. These ideas about childhood didn’t exist before the 19th century. In the early 20th century,
modern artists like Kandinksy, Klee, Miro, and Dubuffet looked to children’s art and often
imitated a childlike style in their paintings (see Chapter 16, p. 310).




Another common conception of creativity in the contemporary United States originated in the
1950s with the humanist psychologists, and is today often associated with the “New Age” movement: creativity is a form of self-discovery, therapy, and self-knowledge. It’s quite common for
famous creators to share the widespread cultural beliefs typical of their cultures. Composer
Aaron Copland said that “each added work brings with it an element of self-discovery. I must
create in order to know myself, and since self-knowledge is a never ending search, each new
work is only a part-answer to the question ‘Who am I?’ and brings with it the need to go on to
other and different part-answers” (Copland, 1952, p. 41). As one classically trained singer said,
“If you choose a musical life, you have to recognize that you’re not setting up something that you
are going to do, but you’re cultivating and fulfilling something that you are” (quoted in Berman,
2003, p. 20). Artists with this conception of creativity often speak of the courage required to
pursue creative activity (an idea closely associated with existentialist Rollo May, 1959, 1969). In
the New Age worldview, delving deep and discovering one’s true self is one of the most highly
valued endeavors, but it’s also considered to be risky and difficult, a spiritual journey that results
in personal transformation.

“Creative”, “Creation”, “Creativity” are some of the most overused and ultimately debased
words in the language. Stripped of any special significance by a generation of bureaucrats,
civil servants, managers and politicians, lazily used as political margarine to spread
approvingly and inclusively over any activity with a non-material element to it, the word
“creative” has become almost unusable. Politics and the ideology of ordinariness, the wish
not to put anyone down, the determination not to exalt the exceptional . . . have seen
to that.
—Tusa, (2003, pp. 5–6)

The American ideology of democracy is the deep-rooted belief that everyone is equal (Menand,
1998; Rothstein, 1997; Stein, 1974). Many Americans today use “creative” as a complimentary
term of praise. This ideology leads to a fear of making value-laden distinctions, a tendency to
believe that everyone is creative, and that no one should judge what counts as good art, or even
what counts as “art” (Wallach, 1997; Weiner, 2000). This ideology partly accounts for the resistance to introducing the sociocultural notion of “appropriateness” into creativity.
The humanist account of creativity as a form of universal self-actualization aligns naturally
with American democratic ideals (Weiner, 2000, p. 106) and with the legendary American belief
in the value of repeated self-reinvention, a belief that undergirds the self-help industry.
As Weiner (2000) observed, many of the “how to” books about creativity today “move almost
seamlessly between business innovation and personal self-help, between problem-solving and
self-expression” (p. 106).
This ideology aligns well with individualist definitions of creativity, but not with sociocultural definitions. Science succeeds only because of the active involvement of a national network
of critical review by journal editors, grant reviewers, and department chairs. The art world also

Conceptions of Creativity


requires that distinctions be made, that criteria be applied, and that selection and evaluation
take place (Menand, 1998; Rothstein, 1997).


In 1917, Marcel Duchamp submitted a new work to be considered for an exhibition in New
York: a simple urinal turned on its back, and signed with a fictitious name “R. Mutt.” The exhibition’s judges rejected the work and it wasn’t displayed, yet soon after it was purchased by a
wealthy collector, and today it remains one of the seminal works of 20th-century art, considered
by some to be the origin of modern art. Duchamp’s urinal challenged a core feature of our creativity definitions: a work should be original and unique. After Duchamp’s shocking work, other
artists began to experiment with the conventions of art itself, and art became reflexive, often
commenting on itself and on the art world. The Dadaists experimented with many conventions
of art: materials, techniques, durability, authenticity, even the importance of the “work” itself.
They explicitly rejected any definition of art—as beautiful, tasteful, original, or spiritually
inspired—and at times they tried to shock and disgust viewers.
In the United States, we tend to equate creativity with novelty and originality. But the high
value that we place on novelty isn’t shared universally in all cultures. In performance, for example, we find that in almost all cultures—including our own—improvisation is allowed only in
informal performances; in formal settings, in contrast, improvisation is not allowed (Sawyer,
2003c). Formal performances must follow the movements of the dance, or the words of the
script, verbatim. In most cultures, rituals forbid improvisation. This seems to be related to the
power of ritual; a ritual can perform its supernatural function only if performed exactly, and a
divergence from the appropriate dance or script would result in an ineffective ritual (see Chapter
19). In a traditional U. S. Christian wedding, the religious official is expected to say “I now pronounce you husband and wife”; an unexpected creative improvisation such as “I exclaim that
you are now joined for life” or even “From henceforth you will be married” would be disturbing,
generally not welcomed by the participants and audience (Sawyer, 2001a).
Traditional cultures tend to produce aesthetic objects that people in the United States associate with “craft” rather than “art,” in part because they’re typically functional objects—clothing,
baskets, water vessels, hunting weapons. These artifacts have often been collected in the West,
but not always by art museums—more typically they’re found in “natural history” museums. We
don’t value these objects as highly because they seem to be mostly imitative, and our conception
of creativity is focused almost exclusively on originality. But imitation is a long-established,
deep-rooted form of cultural transmission, even in European fine arts (Delbanco, 2002; Gardner,
1973; Wicklund, 1989). For many centuries, and in many different societies, the ability to imitate
and reproduce the acknowledged masters was highly valued, and developing this skill through
practice was how one learned one’s craft. Yet as Nicholas Delbanco, a director of an MFA program in writing, noted, “We’ve grown so committed as a culture to the ideal of originality that
the artist who admits to working in the manner of another artist will likely stand accused of
being second-rate” (2002, p. 59).
There are many creative domains that require individuals to insert as little of themselves as
possible into the work. In translating a novel or poem into a different language, the translator is
unavoidably creative; this is reflected by the fact that the translator receives attribution, and his
or her name is published in the work next to that of the original author. But the ideal translator



is one who most faithfully retains the creative spirit of the original, thereby keeping his or her
own contribution to the translation as minimal as possible. Dubbing a foreign movie into one’s
own language requires that the translator develop a version of the original line that can most
easily be spoken in the time that the foreign actor’s mouth is moving, and it also requires the
voice-over actors to match their delivery to the moving image. As with translation, the goal of
the creator here is to keep his or her own contribution as minimal as possible. Although these
are unquestionably creative activities, they’re activities in which individual inspiration and originality would be detrimental to the work. Our culture tends to consider such activities to be less
creative—exactly because the creator is more constrained.
All creativity includes elements of imitation and tradition; there’s no such thing as a completely novel work. To explain creativity, we have to examine the balance of imitation and innovation, and the key role played by convention and tradition.


European cultures place a high value on the fine arts—those creative products that have no function other than pleasure. Craft objects are less worthy; because they serve an everyday function,
they’re not purely creative. But this division is culturally and historically relative. Most contemporary high art began as some sort of craft (Baxandall, 1972; Harris, 1966; Martindale, 1972).
The composition and performance of what we now call “classical music” began as a form of craft
music satisfying required functions in the Catholic mass, or the specific entertainment needs of
royal patrons. For example, chamber music really was designed to be performed in chambers—
small intimate rooms in wealthy homes—often as background music, the same way people today
might turn on the stereo while they read or eat a meal. The “dances” composed by famous composers originally did indeed accompany dancing. But today, with the contexts and functions
they were composed for long gone, we consume these works as fine art.
To take a famous example, photography is now considered an art; photographs are in the
collections of all the major museums. But when the technique of photography was invented in
1839, it was considered a new technology and not a new art form. In 1844, the first major exhibition of daguerreotypes was not grouped with the artworks, but was in the Salon de l’Industrie
Française. Between 1839 and 1890, photography was a mass market—focused on portraits—and
there were very few aesthetic concerns (Denoyelle, 2002, p. 41). In 1852, the first exhibition of
photographs with aesthetic intent was displayed at the Society of Arts in London, but these photographers remained marginalized—no market, no recognition—and photography, in the eyes
of the art world, remained only a mechanical technique. Artists of the time were convinced that
photography could never become an art, because the photograph wasn’t created by human
hands, like painting or sculpture.
How did photography became an art? An individualist would hypothesize that either those
technicians working with the new tools gradually became more aesthetically skilled, or that
established artists like painters and sculptors learned how to use the new technology and then
applied their aesthetic abilities there. But what actually happened was that photographers themselves did not change at all; rather, the sociocultural system around them changed.
In 1890, Kodak introduced a cheap consumer camera that everyone could afford. This put
the portrait studios out of business; the newly unemployed photographers needed a way to distinguish between what they did and this new popular photography. The movement of pictorialism was the response, with photographers attempting to imitate the artistic processes of painting;

Conceptions of Creativity


rather than reproducible photos, they worked directly on the negatives and other materials of
the process. They presented their works in art galleries, next to paintings. The elements of an art
world began to form: collegial groups called “photo clubs,” a journal called Camera Work, and
shows and openings. However, art photography remained marginalized; their were no markets,
buyers, or collectors, and museums were not interested in adding photos to their collections.
Pictorialism eventually died out with the onset of the World War I. An art form can’t survive
without a market, venues for display, and collectors.
After World War I, when some painters began to make photographs that we now think
of as art, those painters did not themselves consider their photography to be art. Man Ray,
whom we remember today primarily for his photos, considered himself to be a painter. Brassaï,
who wanted to become an artist, didn’t believe that his photography realized that desire.
Although demand for photographic skill grew with the expansion of daily newspapers and the
demand for wartime news, documentary photographs in newspapers often did not even have a
It wasn’t until 1960 that a market for photographic art began to form in the United States.
This development coincided with a rejection of many traditional notions of art: that it was the
work of the hand, that each work was a unique creation. Prices remained modest, but collectors
began to emerge, and finally, in the 1970s, a true art market was established, with control over
the originality and rarity of the works (limited-edition prints), expositions, galleries, and museums. The most valuable prints are those where the negatives are lost; for this reason, some contemporary photographers destroy their negatives after making a predetermined number of
prints. Where negatives remain available and unlimited prints could, in principle, be made, the
market distinguishes between recent and “vintage” prints. Such a market requires experts who
are able to look at a print and distinguish which year it was made from the negative.
In sum, it was not until the 1970s, well over 100 years after photography was invented, that
photography took on the characteristics associated with art: the valuation of originality and
uniqueness; the system of galleries, museums, and collectors; the supporting network of experts
to evaluated value and confirm authenticity (Newhall, 1964).
Photography became an art only after the social system surrounding the activity became
artlike, adopting the values and conventions of other established arts (Becker, 1982). Even today,
the photos that conform more closely to the values of the art world are worth more—those
made by the plasticians, who, like the pictorialists, produce unique prints by manipulating the
developing process by hand (coloring a black-and-white photo, for example), and who create
ephemeral scenes put together for the sole purpose of being photographed, only then to be
The shift from craft to art happens over and over through history. It’s always a social process,
not a result of individual talent alone. As we learned earlier in this chapter, prior to the 15th
century, painting was considered to be a craft and not an art, though this viewpoint shifted in the
15th century (Baxandall, 1972). To explain changing conceptions of creativity, the sociocultural
approach is particularly valuable.

The individualist definition associates creativity with the human mind, and associates the study
of creativity with psychology. When we look for the creator of a created product, we instinctively



look for a person (Kasof, 1995). The sociocultural definition emphasizes, in contrast, that
creativity doesn’t only emerge from human minds; many natural and social processes can generate appropriate novelty. These two definitions are complementary; our exploration of cognitive
creativity can gain many insights from these other sources of creativity.


In 1917, Köhler (1925) described a chimpanzee who was able to solve a difficult problem. One
by one, six chimpanzees were placed in a room with a banana suspended from the ceiling, out of
reach. A wooden box was sitting on the floor in the corner. Five of the chimpanzees jumped
repeatedly to try to get the banana, and gave up when they discovered it was too high. But the
sixth kept looking at the box, then at the banana—and after five minutes, suddenly pushed the
box under the banana, stepped up, and grabbed it. This action seems to meet our individualist
definition of creativity: it was a new combination (box plus jumping).
Epstein (1990, 1999) demonstrated that pigeons can be taught in such a way that they solve
the banana problem almost immediately. He trained pigeons until they’d mastered a repertory
of different actions:
• First, he trained them to push a small box toward a green spot that was placed at random
on the floor of the cage. (It takes weeks or months for a pigeon to learn this.)
• Second, he trained them to step up onto a box, starting with a short box and moving to
progressively taller boxes. (After stepping up, they were rewarded with food.)
• Third, he trained them to step up onto a box, and peck a banana hanging from the top of
the cage. (After pecking, they were rewarded with food.)
When three pigeons trained in this way were placed in a cage with a banana placed in a
random location on the top of the cage, and with a box placed in a different location, they all
took less than a minute to push the box to the spot directly under the banana, then to step onto
the box and peck the banana (you can watch the video on YouTube). Doesn’t this meet our individualist definition of a new combination, expressed in the world? After all, the pigeons had
never before combined box pushing with box stepping and pecking.
Dissanayake (1988) noted that many animals—including birds and insects—engage in
ritual behaviors that are reminiscent of dance or theater. Chimpanzees have been taught
to paint using brush and canvas (Fig. 2.4). But in human art, specific information is
communicated, and its content isn’t predictable; it varies from one work to another. A second
difference is that the human arts aren’t instinctive; they’re cultural activities that have to be
A third difference is that the combinations discovered by Köhler’s chimpanzee and Epstein’s
pigeons are combinations of observable behavioral sequences, whereas human creativity involves
mental and conceptual combination. A fourth difference is that only very special animals can do
this; five of Köhler’s chimps gave up, and Epstein’s three pigeons required months of training
before they could solve the problem. But all normal people can combine concepts easily, without
training (as we’ll see in Chapter 6).
In any species, intelligent behavior involves some ability for adaptive, novel behavior. But the
consensus among scientists is that creativity is a uniquely human trait.

Conceptions of Creativity


FIGURE 2.4: A painting by Congo, a chimpanzee using a stiff-bristle paintbrush. (Reprinted from

The Biology of Art, by D. Morris Knopf, 1962, plate 19. With permission of Desmond Morris.)


The foundational insight of the Darwinian revolution is that all of the species in the world were
created through natural processes of evolution—variation, selection, and retention. There was
no intentional designer; rather, nature itself is the creator.
Prior to this foundational discovery of the 19th century, for centuries humankind believed
that all species must have been created by a divine creator. The famous “watchmaker” argument
for the existence of God originated in the mechanistic era of the 17th century. William Paley