The Nature of Creativity Robert J.Sternberg
Tufts University
ABSTRACT:Like E.Paul Torrance,my colleagues and I have tried to understand the nature of creativ-ity,to asss it,and to improve instruction by teach-ing for creativity as well as teaching students to think creatively.This article reviews our investment theory of creativity,propulsion theory of creative contribu-tions,and some of the data we have collected with re-gard to creativity.It also describes the propulsion theory of creative contributions.Finally,it draws some conclusions.
The field of creativity as it exists today emerged largely as a result of the pioneering efforts of J.P.Guilford (1950)and E.Paul Torrance(1962,1974).It is wholly fitting to dedicate a special issue of the Creativity Re-arch Journal to Torrance becau of his minal con-tributions to thinking about creativity.To this day,the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking(Torrance,1974) remain the most widely ud asssments of creative talent.
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Guilford and Torrance had many more agreements than disagreements about the nature of creativity and the ways to measure it.Both were basically psychometric theorists and conceived of and attempted to measure creativity from a psychometric standpoint. However,both were broad thinkers,and their con
cep-tions were much more expansive than the operationalizations of the conceptions through their tests.Both concentrated on divergent thinking as the basis of creativity and devid tests that emphasized the asssment of divergent thinking.Both left behind numerous students and disciples to carry on their pio-neering work.Torrance,in particular,was a warm,car-ing,and positive person.I met him only a few times, but I was enormously impresd with the modesty he displayed,given his preeminence in the field.He showed that the best people in the field have no need for the pretensions to which less-distinguished aca-demics can be so susceptible.
There are a number of different approaches one can take to understanding creativity.Torrance preferred a psychometric approach to understanding creativity. My colleagues and ,Sternberg,Kaufman,& Pretz,2002;Sternberg&Lubart,1995,1996)have chon to u a confluence approach as a basis for our work on creativity.I will discuss two of the theories un-derlying our work and some of the empirical work we have done to test our ideas.The theories are part of a more general theory—WICS—of wisdom,intelli-gence, and creativity synthesized (Sternberg, 2003b).
The Investment Theory of Creativity Our investment theory of creativity(Sternberg& Lubart,1991,1995)is a confluence theory according to which creative people are tho who are willin
g and able to“buy low and ll high”in the realm of ideas (e also Rubenson&Runco,1992,for the u of con-cepts from economic theory).Buying low means pur-suing ideas that are unknown or out of favor but that
Creativity Rearch Journal 2006, V ol.18, No.1,87–98
Copyright ©2006by
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. Preparation of this article was supported by Grant REC–9979843 from the National Science Foundation and by a grant under the Javits Act Program(Grant No.R206R000001)as administered by the In-stitute of Education Sciences,U.S.Department of Education. Grantees undertaking such projects are encouraged to express their professional judgment freely.This article,therefore,does not neces-sarily reprent the position or policies of the National Science Foundation,Institute of Education Sciences,or the U.S.Department of Education, and no official endorment should be inferred.
Correspondence and requests for reprints should be nt to Rob-ert J.Sternberg,Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences,Tufts Uni-versity,Ballou Hall,Medford,MA02155.E-mail:Robert.sternberg @tufts.edu
have growth potential.Often,when the ideas are first prented,they encounter resistance.The creative indi-vidual persists in the face of this resistance and eventu-ally lls high,moving on to the next new or unpopular idea.
Aspects of the Investment Theory
According to the investment theory,creativity re-quires a confluence of six distinct but interrelated re-sources:intellectual abilities,knowledge,styles of thinking,personality,motivation,and environment. Although levels of the resources are sources of indi-vidual differences,often the decision to u a resource is a more important source of individual differences.In the following ctions,I discuss the resources and the role of decision making in each.
Intellectual skills.Three intellectual skills are particularly important(Sternberg,1985):(a)the syn-thetic skill to e problems in new ways and to escape the bounds of conventional thinking,(b)the analytic skill to recognize which of one’s ideas are worth pursu-ing and which are not,and(c)the practical–contextual skill to know how to persuade others of—to ll other people on—the value of one’s ideas.The confluence of the three skills is also important.Analytic skills ud in the abnce of the other two skills results in power-ful critical,but not creative,thinking.Synthetic skill ud in the abnc
e of the other two skills results in new ideas that are not subjected to the scrutiny required to improve them and make them work.Practical–con-textual skill in the abnce of the other two skills may result in societal acceptance of ideas not becau the ideas are good,but rather,becau the ideas have been well and powerfully prented.
We tested the role of creative intelligence in creativ-ity in veral studies.In one study,we prented80peo-ple with novel kinds of reasoning problems that had a single best answer.For example,they might be told that someobjectsaregreenandothersblue;butstillotherob-jects might be grue,meaning green until the year2000 and blue thereafter,or bleen,meaning blue until the year 2000and green thereafter.Or they might be told of four kinds of people on the planet Kyron—blens,who are born young and die young;kwefs,who are born old and die old;balts,who are born young and die old;and pross,who are born old and die young(Sternberg, 1982;Tetewsky&Sternberg,1986).Their task was to predict future states from past states,given incomplete information.In another t of studies,60people were given more conventional kinds of inductive reasoning problems,such as analogies,ries completions,and classifications,but were told to solve them.However, the problems had premis preceding them that were ei-ther conventional(dancers wear shoes)or novel(danc-ers eat shoes).The participants had to solve the prob-lems as though the counterfactuals were true(Sternberg &Gastel,1989a,1989b).leisure
In the studies,we found that correlations with conventional kinds of tests depended on how novel or nonentrenched the conventional tests were.The more novel the items,the higher the correlations of our tests with scores on successively more novel conven-tional tests.Thus,the components isolated for rela-tively novel items would tend to correlate more highly with more unusual tests of fluid , that of Cattell&Cattell,1973)than with tests of crystallized abilities.We also found that when re-spon times on the relatively novel problems were componentially analyzed,some components better measured the creative aspect of intelligence than did others.For example,in the“grue–bleen”task men-tioned earlier,the information-processing component requiring people to switch from conventional green–blue thinking to grue–bleen thinking and then back to green–blue thinking again was a particularly good measure of the ability to cope with novelty.
In another study,we looked at predictions for ev-eryday kinds of situations,such as when milk will spoil(Sternberg&Kalmar,1997).In this study,we looked at both predictions and postdictions(hypothe-s about the past where information about the past is unknown)and found that postdictions took longer to make than did predictions.Novel predictions and postdictions are more challenging and time-consum-ing than simpler ones.
Creativity and simply thinking in novel ways are fa-cilitated when people are willing to put in up-front
time to think in new ways.We found that better thinkers tend to spend relatively more time than do poorer rea-soners in global,up-front metacomponential planning when they solve difficult,novel-reasoning problems. Poorer reasoners,converly,tend to spend relatively more time in local planning(Sternberg,1981).Pre-sumably,the better thinkers recognize that it is better to invest more time up front so as to be able to process a problem more efficiently later on.
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Knowledge.On the one hand,one needs to know enough about a field to move it forward.One cannot move beyond where a field is if one does not know where it is.On the other hand,knowledge about a field can result in a clod and entrenched perspective,re-sulting in a person’s not moving beyond the way in which he or she has en problems in the past.Knowl-edge thus can help, or it can hinder creativity.
In a study of expert and novice bridge players,for example(Frensch&Sternberg,1989),we found that experts outperformed novices under regular circum-stances.When a superficial change was made in the surface structure of the game,the experts and novices were both hurt slightly in their playing,but they quickly recovered.When a profound,deep-structural change was made in the structure of the ga
me,the ex-perts initially were hurt more than the novices,but the experts later recovered.The reason,presumably,is that experts make more and deeper u of the existing struc-ture and hence have to reformulate their thinking more than novices do when there is a deep-structural change in the rules of the game.Thus,one needs to decide to u one’s past knowledge.主谓宾
Thinking styles.Thinking styles are preferred ways of using one’s skills.In esnce,they are deci-sions about how to deploy the skills available to a per-son.With regard to thinking styles,a legislative style is particularly important for creativity(Sternberg,1988, 1997a),that is,a preference for thinking and a decision to think in new ways.This preference needs to be dis-tinguished from the ability to think creatively:Some-one may like to think along new lines,but not think well,or vice versa.It also helps to become a major cre-ative thinker,if one is able to think globally as well as locally,distinguishing the forest from the trees and thereby recognizing which questions are important and which ones are not.
In our rearch(Sternberg,1997b;Sternberg& Grigorenko,1995),we found that legislative people tend to be better students than less legislative people,if the schools in which they study value creativity.If the schools do not value or devalue creativity,they tend to be wor students.Students also were found to receive higher grades from teachers who own styles of think-ing matched their own.
Personality.Numerous rearch investigations (summarized in Lubart,1994,and Sternberg&Lubart,1991,1995)have supported the importance of certain personality attributes for creative functioning.The attributes include,but are not limited to,willingness to overcome obstacles,willingness to take nsible risks, willingness to tolerate ambiguity,and lf-efficacy.In particular,buying low and lling high typically means defying the crowd,so that one has to be willing to stand up to conventions if one wants to think and act in cre-ative ways(Sternberg,2003a;Sternberg&Lubart, 1995).Often creative people ek opposition;that is, they decide to think in ways that countervail how oth-ers think.Note that none of the attributes of creative thinking is fixed.One can decide to overcome obsta-cles, take nsible risks, and so forth.
In one study(Lubart&Sternberg,1995),we found that greater risk-taking propensity was associated with creativity for artwork but not for essays.When we in-vestigated why this was so,we found that some evalua-tors tended to mark down essays that took unpopular positions.We learned,therefore,that one of the risks people face when they are creative,even in an experi-ment on risk taking,is that the evaluators will not ap-preciate the risks if they go against their own beliefs!
Motivation.Intrinsic,task-focud motivation is also esntial to creativity.The rearch of Amabile (1983)and others has shown the importance of such motivation for creative work and has suggested
that people rarely do truly creative work in an area unless they really love what they are doing and focus on the work rather than the potential rewards.Motivation is not something inherent in a person:One decides to be motivated by one thing or another.Often,people who need to work in a certain area that does not particularly interest them will decide that,given the need to work in that area,they had better find a way to make it interest them.They will then look for some angle on the work they need to do that makes this work appeal to rather than bore them.flame是什么意思
Environment.Finally,one needs an environ-ment that is supportive and rewarding of creative ideas. One could have all of the internal resources needed to think creatively,but without some environmental sup-port(such as a forum for proposing tho ideas),the creativity that a person has within him or her might never be displayed.
Environments typically are not fully supportive of the u of one’s creativity.The obstacles in a given en-
The Nature of Creativity
vironment may be minor,as when an individual re-ceives negative feedback on his or her creative think-ing,or major,as when one’s well-being or even life are threatened if one thinks in a manner that
bacteriadefies conven-tion.The individual therefore must decide how to re-spond in the face of the nearly omniprent environ-mental challenges that exist.Some people let unfavorable forces in the environment block their cre-ative output; others do not.
Part of the environment is determined by who is do-ing the evaluating.In our studies(Lubart&Sternberg, 1995),we had creative products of people of different ages rated for their creativity by raters of different age cohorts.We found informal evidence of cohort match-ing—that is,raters tended to rate as more creative products of creators of roughly their own age cohort. For example,people will often tend to prefer the popu-lar music of the generation in which they grew up as early adolescents more than the popular music of the generation in which their parents or children grew up. Thus,part of what may determine growth patterns of creativity(Simonton,1994)is in changing criteria for evaluations of creativity on the part of raters.
Confluence.Concerning the confluence of the six components,creativity is hypothesized to involve more than a simple sum of a person’s level on each component.First,there may be thresholds for some ,knowledge)below which creativity is not possible regardless of the levels on other compo-nents.Second,partial compensation may occur in which a strength on one ,motivation) counteracts a weakness on another , environment).Third,
interactions may occur between components,such as intelligence and motivation,in which high levels on both components could multiplicatively enhance creativity.
Creative ideas are both novel and valuable.How-ever,they are often rejected when the creative innova-tor stands up to vested interests and defies the crowd (cf.Csikszentmihalyi,1988).The crowd does not ma-liciously or willfully reject creative notions.Rather,it does not realize,and often does not want to realize,that the propod idea reprents a valid and advanced way of thinking.Society often perceives opposition to the status quo as annoying,offensive,and reason enough to ignore innovative ideas.
Evidence abounds that creative ideas are often re-jected(Sternberg&Lubart,1995).Initial reviews of major works of literature and art are often negative. Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby received negative reviews when it was first published,as did Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar.The first exhibition in Munich of the work of Norwegian painter Edvard Munch opened and clod the same day becau of the strong negative respon from the critics.Some of the greatest scientific articles have been rejected not just by one but by veral jour-nals before being published.For example,John Garcia, a distinguished biopsychologist,was immediately de-nounced when he first propod that a form of learning called classical conditioning could be produced in a single trial of learning (Garcia & Koellin
g, 1966).
From the investment view,then,the creative person buys low by prenting an idea that initially is not val-ued and then attempting to convince other people of its value.After convincing others that the idea is valuable, which increas the perceived value of the investment, the creative person lls high by leaving the idea to oth-ers and moving on to another idea.People typically want others to love their ideas,but immediate universal applau for an idea often indicates that it is not partic-ularly creative.
The Role of Decision Making
Creativity,according to the investment theory,is in large part a decision.The view of creativity as a deci-sion suggests that creativity can be developed.Simply requesting that students be more creative can render them more creative if they believe that the decision to be creative will be rewarded rather than punished (O’Hara & Sternberg, 2000–2001).
To be creative one must first decide to generate new ideas,analyze the ideas,and ll the ideas to others. In other words,a person may have synthetic,analyti-cal,or practical skills but not apply them to problems that potentially involve creativity.For example,one may decide(a)to follow other people’s contract
ideas rather than synthesize one’s own,(b)not to subject one’s ideas to a careful evaluation,or(c)to expect other peo-ple to listen to one’s ideas and therefore decide not to try to persuade other people of the value of the ideas. The skill is not enough:One first needs to make the de-cision to u the skill.
For example,ability to switch between conven-tional and unconventional modes of thinking is impor-tant to creativity.One aspect of switching between con-ventional and unconventional thinking is the decision
R. J. Sternberg
that one is willing and able to think in unconventional ways—that one is willing to accept thinking in terms different from tho to which one is accustomed and with which one feels comfortable.People show reli-able individual differences in willingness to do so (Dweck,1999).Some people(what Dweck calls“en-tity theorists”)prefer to operate primarily or even ex-clusively in domains that are relatively familiar to them.Other people(what Dweck calls“incremental theorists”)ek out new challenges and new concep-tual domains within which to work.I have propod a number of different decisions by which one can de-velop one’s own creativity as a decision(Sternberg, 2001):(a)redefine problems,(b)coalition
question and analyze assumptions,(c)do not assume that creative ideas ll themlves:ll them,(d)encourage the generation of ideas,(e)recognize that knowledge can both help and hinder creativity,(f)identify and surmount obstacles, (g)take nsible risks,(h)tolerate ambiguity,(i)be-lieve in onelf(lf-efficacy),(j)find what one loves to do,(k)delay gratification,(l)role-model creativity, (m)cross-fertilize ideas,(n)reward creativity,(o)al-low mistakes,(p)encourage collaboration,(q)e things from others’points of view,(r)take responsibil-ity for success and failures,(s)maximize person–en-vironment fit,(t)continue to allow intellectual growth. Evidence Regarding the Investment Theory Asssment.Rearch within the investment framework has yielded support for this model(Lubart &Sternberg,1995).This rearch has ud tasks such as(a)writing short stories using unusual , the octopus’sneakers),(b)drawing pictures with un-usual ,the earth from an inct’s point of view),(c)devising creative advertiments for boring ,cufflinks),and(d)solving unusual sci-entific ,how could we tell if someone had been on the moon within the past month?).Our measures have the same goal as Torrance’s do,but we attempt to u tasks that are more oriented toward what people do in school and in the real world when they think creatively.This rearch showed creative performance to be moderately domain specific and to be predicted by a combination of certain resources,as described as follows.The exact blend of resources and the success with which the resources are blended may v
ary from one culture to another.For example,Niu and Sternberg(2001)found that both American and Chine evaluators rated two distinct artistic products(collages and science fiction charac-ters)of American college students to be more cre-ative than products of Chine college students roughly matched for conventional intelligence(Niu& Sternberg,2001).This finding held up regardless of whether the raters were American or Chine.
One concern we have is whether creative skills can be measured in a way that is distinct from the way g-bad analytical skills are measured,as well as the practical skills that,together with the analytical and creative ones,combine into my theory of successful in-telligence.
In one study(Sternberg,Grigorenko,Ferrari,& Clinkenbeard,1999),we ud the so-called Sternberg Triarchic Abilities Test(STAT;Sternberg,1993)to in-vestigate the relations among the three abilities.Three hundred twenty-six high school students,primarily from diver parts of the United States,took the test, which consisted of12subtests in all.There were four subtests,each measuring analytical,creative,and prac-tical abilities.For each type of ability,there were three multiple-choice tests and one essay test.The multi-ple-choice tests,in turn,involved,respectively,verbal, quantitative,and figural content.Consider the content of each test:
1.Analytical–Verbal:Figuring out meanings of ne-ologisms(artificial words)from natural contexts.Stu-dents e a novel word embedded in a paragraph and have to infer its meaning from the context.
2.Analytical–Quantitative:Number ries.Stu-dents have to say what number should come next in a ries of numbers.
migo3.Analytical–Figural:Matrices.Students e a figural matrix with the lower right entry missing.They have to say which of the options fits into the missing space.
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4.Practical–Verbal:Everyday reasoning.Students are prented with a t of everyday problems in the life of an adolescent and have to lect the option that best solves each problem.
5.Practical–Quantitative:Everyday math.Stu-dents are prented with scenarios requiring the u of math in everyday ,buying tickets for a ballgame)and have to solve math problems bad on the scenarios.
6.Practical–Figural:Route planning.Students are prented with a map of an ,an entertainment
The Nature of Creativityblr
