INTELLIGENCE, THINKING, AND PERSONALITY

1
INTELLIGENCE, THINKING, AND PERSONALITY

• CREATIVITY

2
CREATIVITY THE FOUR P's

• Creative People
• Creative Processes
• Creative Products
• Creative Places (or the Persuasive Powers of
  Creative People)

3
A CRUCIAL QUESTION IN THE STUDY OF CREATIVITY

• Can there be a unified account of creativity in
  the arts and in mathematics and the sciences?

4
APPROACHES TO THE STUDY OF CREATIVITY

• Psychometric
• Psychometric Profiles of Creative People
• Tests for Creativity
• Biographic/Autobiographic
• Computational Modelling of Creative Processes
• Psychological Experiments

5
PSYCHOMETRIC PROFILES

• Roe (1952) - North American scientists
• The typical scientist was
• first-born son of WASP (white anglo-saxon
  protestant) parents, isolated at school
• married late, worked long hours - often seven
  days a week with few holidays, intelligent,
  introverted, self-sufficient.
• social scientists were more extrovert, more
  aggressive, and more prone to get divorced than
  physical and biological scientists.

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PSYCHOMETRIC PROFILES

• Drevdahl and Cattell (1958) - North American
  artists and writers
• similar profiles, though, not surprisingly, the
  artists were found to be more sensitive, and to
  have more inner tension, than the scientists.

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OTHER TRAITS IDENTIFIED IN CREATIVE PEOPLE

• The ability to find appropriate problems (Getzels
  Csikszentmihalyi,1976).
• The ability to defer judgement (MacKinnon, 1962).
  
• Desire for originality
• Failure to conform to social pressure (self
  sufficiency)
• Tolerance of ambiguity
• Legislative (rule creating), rather than an
  executive (rule following), or judicial (rule
  assessing),mental self-government (Sternberg,
  1988).
• Deep commitment (not least because it is needed
  to acquire sufficient domain specific knowledge).

8
TESTS FOR CREATIVITY?

• Guilford convergent vs. divergent thinking (e.g.
  uses of a brick test for divergent thinking)
• Tests either failed to correlate with creative
  achievement
• OR also correlated with IQ tests

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LATER TESTS THAT HAVE MET WITH MORE SUCCESS

• Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT,
  Torrance, 1966)
• correlations of 0.4 to 0.6 with later measures of
  creative achievement
• Symbol Equivalence test (F. Barron)
• people have to produce metaphors (symbolically
  equivalent images) for images described to them
  verbally (e.g. leaves being blown in the wind).
• responses are scored for both acceptability and
  originality.

10
WALLIS'S (1928) FOUR STAGE THEORY

• Based largely on autobiographic reports (e.g.
  Helmholtz Poincaré)
• Preparation
• Incubation
• Inspiration
• Verification

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WALLIS'S (1928) FOUR STAGE THEORY

• Some experimental evidence from the 1930s
  (Patrick) for stages apart from incubation
• Based on think aloud protocols
• Murray and Denny (1969) some evidence that low
  ability subjects helped by a distractor task
  (incubation)

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DOES INCUBATION INVOLVE UNCONSCIOUS PROBLEM
SOLVING

• Need to distinguish not working on a problem at
  a desk from an account of the mechanisms
  allegedly at work.
• Perkins suggests that people do think about
  problems when working at other things, and that
  incubation is merely physical refreshment,
  fruitful forgetting, losing commitment to an
  ineffective approach, and noticing clues in the
  environment (Perkins, 1981 57).
• Combination and recombination of ideas (which
  e.g. Poincaré believed happened unconsciously)
  is, nevertheless, important, though not every
  such recombination is useful. We need an account
  of which ones are.

13
ENVIRONMENTS FOR CREATIVITY

• Good working conditions helpful, but environment
  more generally is important.
• Csikszentmihalyi (1988) three main forces shape
  creative achievement
• The creative individual
• A social field - determines which new ideas are
  worth retaining
• A stable cultural domain - preserves ideas
  selected by the field.

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ENVIRONMENTS FOR CREATIVITY (cont.)

• In the arts, ideas about what is (or, rather was,
  creative) can be revised long after the artist is
  dead. Botticelli's late 15th century paintings
  have been more highly valued since their
  reassessment by Ruskin and other mid 19th century
  art critics.
• Social field/cultural domain likened to natural
  selection in the theory of evolution.
• Thus, problem finding is important. Problem
  finding produces more, and more extreme,
  variations from current norms for the field to
  operate on.

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JOHNSON-LAIRD'S WORKING DEFINITION OF CREATIVITY

• Johnson-Laird suggests the following working
  definition of creativity
• The results of a creative process must be new, at
  least for the creative person, though they are
  produced from existing elements.
• The results must not be produced by recall from
  memory, rote computation, or any other simple
  deterministic process.
• The results must satisfy a set of criteria.

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POSSIBLE SOURCES OF INDETERMINISM ACCORDING TO
JOHNSON-LAIRD

• According to Johnson-Laird, it is possible to
  remain agnostic about the source of
  nondeterminism in creative thinking.
• Nevertheless, he does suggest some possibilities.

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POSSIBLE SOURCES OF INDETERMINISM ACCORDING TO
JOHNSON-LAIRD

• One possibility is that creative processes appear
  nondeterministic at the level of analysis
  appropriate to a theory of creativity merely
  because of our ignorance of what causes people to
  make the choices they do.
• Another is that the human mind has a facility for
  making genuinely arbitrary choices.
• A third, rather far-fetched, possibility is that
  the nondeterminism arises from quantum-level
  processes (an idea first suggested by the English
  physicist Arthur Eddington, 1882-1944, and
  recently revisited by Roger Penrose, 1989, 1994).

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POSSIBLE ALGORITHMS FOR CREATIVITY ACCORDING TO
JOHNSON-LAIRD

• (1) Neo-Darwinian
• combines old elements in a random way, thus
  introducing the element of indeterminism. The
  results of the combinations are then subjected to
  a selection process in which only the viable (or
  promising) combinations are retained. As in
  natural selection, many iterations of this
  procedure may be needed before a combination that
  is really creative emerges.

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POSSIBLE ALGORITHMS FOR CREATIVITY ACCORDING TO
JOHNSON-LAIRD

• (2) Neo-Lamarckian
• old elements are initially combined not at
  random, but subject to appropriate constraints.
  If several viable combinations emerge, there may
  be a random process of selection among them at a
  second stage to introduce an element of
  indeterminism. If the constraints at the first
  stage are strong enough, no iteration is
  required.

20
POSSIBLE ALGORITHMS FOR CREATIVITY ACCORDING TO
JOHNSON-LAIRD

• (3) Mixed
• combines neo-Darwinian and neo-Lamarckian
  aspects.

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APPLICATION TO JAZZ

• (A) Jazz chord sequences
• Neo-Darwinian algorithm - creates many
  possibilities outside the context of performance
  and selects between them.
• (B) Jazz bass lines
• Neo-Lamarkian algorithm - creates just one
  possibility (possibly with arbitrary choices in
  context of improvisation)

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PROBLEMS FOR JOHNSON-LAIRD

• Doesn't account for the creation of new genres,
  but only for creativity within a genre (e.g.
  12-bar blues)
• Doesn't account for what makes one chord
  sequences or bass line better (or more
  creative) than another.

23
BODEN'S IMPOSSIBILITY THEORY

• Boden (1990) suggests that an idea is creative
  (for a particular person) if that person could
  not have had that idea before.
• The could not is defined in terms of what the
  person's mental representations and processes
  allow.

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BODEN'S IMPOSSIBILITY THEORY (cont.)

• Thus, unlike Johnson-Laird, she explicitly deals
  with the creation of new genres.
• However, her ideas apply better to science and
  mathematics than to the arts.
• In science/maths the creation of the new
  conceptual framework is all important.
• But in the arts work within a genre/style can be
  equally creative.