What's Wrong with Creativity Testing? Sternberg, Robert J.
The Journal of creative behavior,
March 2020, 2020-03-00, Volume:
54, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Creativity testing as it is now done is often based on a defective assumption that different kinds of creativity can be compressed into a single unidimensional scale. There is no reason to believe ...that the different kinds of creativity represent, simply, different amounts of a single unidimensional construct. The article shows how three different ways of viewing creativity lead to different ways of measuring creativity, all at variance with current unidimensional models. The point of view presented here does not suggest that current creativity tests are invalid, but rather, that care must be taken in the nature of claims made for them. Moreover, many of the same arguments could be applied to the measurement of intelligence and even wisdom as well.
Semantic distance is a promising automated measure of creativity. However, it is not yet known whether semantic distance can assess creative products that are both novel and appropriate. To isolate ...novelty and appropriateness, participants were asked to generate a verb in response to a given noun in 3 different ways: (a) generate appropriate but not novel responses (common cue), (b) generate novel but not appropriate responses (random cue), and (c) generate responses that are both novel and appropriate (creative cue). Automated semantic distance scores and subjective ratings of creativity, novelty, and appropriateness were assessed. When participants were explicitly cued to be creative, the increased semantic distance of their responses represented increases in novelty that was constrained by an appropriateness criterion (Experiments 1 and 2). Participants cued to generate random responses had the highest semantic distance scores, but without applying the appropriateness criterion, their creativity scores suffered (Experiments 1 and 2). Additionally, participants appeared to implicitly apply the appropriateness criterion when generating creative responses (Experiment 2). In conclusion, automated measures of semantic distance can assess novel and appropriate creative responses while avoiding the pitfalls inherent to subjective ratings of creativity.
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Using the impact of the Soviet Union’s collapse on the performance of theoretical mathematicians as a natural experiment, we attempt to resolve the controversy in prior research on whether ...specialists or generalists have superior creative performance. While many have highlighted generalists’ advantage due to access to a wider set of knowledge components, others have underlined the benefits that specialists can derive from their deep expertise. We argue that this disagreement might be partly driven by the fact that the pace of change in a knowledge domain shapes the relative return from being a specialist or a generalist. We show that generalist scientists performed best when the pace of change was slower and their ability to draw from diverse knowledge domains was an advantage in the field, but specialists gained advantage when the pace of change increased and their deeper expertise allowed them to use new knowledge created at the knowledge frontier. We discuss and test the roles of cognitive mechanisms and of competition for scarce resources. Specifically, we show that specialists became more desirable collaborators when the pace of change was faster, but when the pace of change was slower, generalists were more sought after as collaborators. Overall, our results highlight trade-offs associated with specialization for creative performance.
Las necesidades de la sociedad moderna han reinventado la creatividad como una de las fortalezas clave del ser humano, asociándola con rasgos de personalidad positivos (López Martínez et al. 2006). ...La Unión Europea declaró el año 2009 como Año Europeo de la Creatividad y la Innovación, señalando la creatividad como concepto clave en la economía y educación (Corbalán Berna 2010). La didáctica de la traducción tampoco ha escapado a los encantos de esta fortaleza. A comienzos del siglo xxi se sitúan los primeros trabajos basados en la observación de datos empíricos en el aula de traducción (Kussmaul 2000, 2004, 2007) que estudian el papel de la creatividad en la práctica y didáctica de la traducción. Sin embargo, hasta el momento no se han diseñado cursos específicos para potenciar la creatividad del alumnado de traducción. El objetivo del presente trabajo es precisamente el de diseñar una serie de actividades dirigidas a fomentar la creatividad como competencia básica en el proceso de traducción. Las actividades se integran en el programa de la asignatura Metodología y Práctica de la Traducción (UMU) y sus objetivos se dirigen a potenciar los cuatro rasgos medulares de la creatividad según Bayer-Hohenwarter (2010): fluidez, adecuación, flexibilidad y originalidad.
Summary
Researchers have examined the effects of individual job‐related anxiety on employee attitudes and behaviors but have yet to examine whether team job‐related anxiety would have similar or ...different effects. Building on prior research on negative group affective tone and creativity, we propose that team job‐related anxiety has an inverted U‐shaped curvilinear relationship with both team and individual creativity. Furthermore, we posit that team cooperativeness moderates those curvilinear relationships. Using a two‐wave research design and matched employee‐supervisor data from 290 employees nested in 65 teams, we found support for the proposed inverted U‐shaped relationships. Moreover, the intermediate level of team job‐related anxiety was associated with higher individual creativity in teams with higher cooperativeness. We conclude the study with a discussion of the theoretical and practical implications of our findings.
The paper by Kaufman (2018) calls for more research on the consequences of creativity. While we typically think about the positive consequences of creativity, it is important to understand that ...creativity can have negative, both intended and unintended consequences. In this commentary, I review the nascent literature on negative and malevolent creativity, and specifically discuss concerns regarding measurement. Having a consistent way to evaluate and measure negative creativity is critical to our understanding and future research.
The present study describes the association between Intelligence and Creativity, considered from Cattell's approach and divergent thinking respectively, and by means of two empirical studies. The ...first study (S1), analyzed the relationship between fluid intelligence (gf) and figural creativity in 359 children from 8 to 14 years old, finding an association between gf and every creativity indicator except for elaboration. The second study (S2), evaluated the correlation between crystallized intelligence (gc) and gf and verbal creativity in a sample consisted of 120 adolescents between ages 15 and 18 years, showing a positive association between intelligence and verbal creativity and asserting gc as the trait of the intelligence which predicts verbal creativity. Results from both studies support the hypothesis that assumes that creativity and intelligence are separated constructs which overlap in some aspects, and suggest that intellectual skills (gc vs. gf) are selectively associated with the different types of creativity (verbal vs. figural) and their indicators.
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