Vlad Glăveanu
EJOP Co-Editor
London School of Economics
v.p.glaveanu@lse.ac.uk
As in the previous decades it is with great hope that researchers in general and psychology researchers in particular turn to the study of creativity. The hope rests primarily in the enormous relevance of the topic for most segments of any society from scientists to practitioners, from politicians to artists, from teachers to economists, from specialists to lay people. Current changes at the macro level, challenges that threaten the economic stability of so many, wars that disrupt the lives of many others, all require solutions, transformations and innovation. To a great extent, all require creativity.
One of the most basic definitions of creativity within psychology looks at the creative product (material or conceptual) and emphasizes its novelty / originality and its utility. This “double criteria” is useful since it should put some boundaries to all that one could call “creative”. Nonetheless, new interrogations soon arise: for whom is the creative outcome novel or original? for whom is it useful? Creativity assessment may have found criteria to follow but forgot the people who answer and replaced them with “experts”, an easy solution that cuts creativity away from the everyday contexts of its emergence and isolates only some forms of expression, usually in the field of the artistic, the scientific, the technical etc. In all these areas creative outputs stand easier apart than in the “messy” contexts of everyday life and so do their authors. The image of the creative individual, the genius, is probably one of the most pervasive cultural representations, at least in the West. Millennia of philosophical thought traceable as far back as ancestral myths of creation and discovery chain creativity to the individual. Of course it is not any individual. The genius for example is defined by singularity, by isolation, by solitude. It is an image of “disconnection”, of detachment from all that is common, known, shared and… social. The birth of psychological research on creativity has been marked by a rejection of this image, however partial that was. Creativity gained universality (everyone is creative in a myriad of different ways) but not sociality. The creative person is from this perspective everyone, but taken separately. Even in group creativity the framework of analysis usually isolates individual contributions and fails to locate creativity in the “in between”, in the actual interactions. It is one of the reasons why the third main approach to creativity (beside the one based on product and the one focused on person), envisioning creativity as a process, also pays little attention to contextual or social factors. Either by proposing stages of the creative process or, more practically, suggestions for creativity enhancement, it continually looks nowhere outside the individual “box” of creativity theory and research.
Recent decades have nevertheless seen an increasing number of social psychological studies of creativity. Alimented by previous questions about the role of the “environment” in the creative process this line of research looks primarily at the social conditioning of creativity. How social is in the end the social psychology of creativity? The answer to this question depends on how “the social” is understood and theorized. If one thinks of social psychology as the branch that focuses on the social influence – of others, of groups, of society – upon human behaviour (in this case creative behaviour) than the social psychology of creativity is as social as any other related area (for example social cognition). If on the other hand social psychology is understood as the study of the social roots of our knowledge and behaviour than the social psychology of creativity still endorses the individualistic stance that dominates our theories. This individualism encourages studies that look at the social environment as an organized set of stimuli (more or less different than any other input received by the individual from the environment, such as physical stimuli), a particular stimulation that has the power to facilitate or inhibit a person’s creativity. It is the perfect illustration of exterior forces shaping the creative process, forces that may even be decisive at times especially when properly understood and controlled or manipulated. Typical examples of this are the countless schematic models of creativity that include the social environment as a “rectangle” among others and of course depict a series of arrows starting from it and showing how and where in the creative process is the social more influential. Certainly one may ask what is actually wrong with such a vision, and, even if some of its assertions may be flawed, how can it be corrected?
The individualistic and pseudo-social view on creativity fails to consider the social and cultural nature of the phenomenon. It aims to make universalistic assumptions about how creativity “works” and struggles to control social factors in empirical research rather than consider their true role and dynamics. Therefore it is generally unequipped to offer any valuable insights into how creativity takes place in the everyday, how it is deeply connected to the identities and practices of different communities (from neighbourhoods to scientific or artistic communities), how it uses cultural artefacts and current knowledge to generate new artefacts and to further this knowledge. From a socio-cultural perspective the social is “inside” every creative act, even those performed in complete isolation, since all our tools for creativity (our knowledge, our abilities, our techniques, our assessment criteria etc.) come from our life as a socialized member of a human society and the multiple communities within it. A socio-cultural perspective is fundamentally a contextual perspective, one that links the judgements about a creative outcome’s novelty and utility to the knowledge, experience and interests of different communities, one that understands the creative person as a social actor and the creative process as situational.
In terms of research the socio-cultural perspective argues for studies with increased ecological validity, sometimes obtained at the price of a less rigorous manipulation of variables but with the gain of a more comprehensive view of why, when and how persons or groups generate the “new”. In this framework the meaning of “cultural” does not imply the study of different cultures (as in cross-cultural investigations) but calls for a careful consideration of the worldview and cultural “toolkit” specific to different groups and communities even within the same society. It is a call for increased sensitivity towards the contexts of creation and also towards the systemic interdependence between self and others, between groups and societies, between societies and cultures. Only through these we may come to realize that creativity does not exist in the “self” or in the “other”, but “in between self and other”, that it is a highly interactional and intersubjective process. Further more, we can consequently start looking for creativity outside of scientific laboratories, of artists’ studios, of advertisers’ meetings or inventors’ gatherings and look more to the streets, to the meeting places, to the normal homes, to the regular life of most people. As a unified and unifying framework the socio-cultural approach bridges the instances of path-breaking creativity (in science, art etc.) with instances of the “everyday-life” creativity and treats them as equally valuable and social in nature.
This editorial stands as an invitation. It is first of all an invitation to think about our personal beliefs about creativity. Secondly, it is an invitation to question the deeply-rooted assumptions psychologists hold about creativity. Without advocating that the socio-cultural approach is the only suitable way forward for theory and research on creativity it tries to problematize the suppositions of an individualistic view and to point to their consequences. Thus, for the most part, it is an invitation to open up the box of individualism and think outside it. That is, after all, the fundamental quality of all creativity.