Question

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2-4 sentences summarizing the article

4 interesting quotes from the article and 4 points explaning for each quote

The Nature of Creativity Robert J. Sternberg

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- search Journal to Torrance because of his seminal con- tributions to thinking about creativity. To this day, the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (Torrance, 1974) remain the most widely used assessments of creative talent.

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 concep- tions were much more expansive than the operationalizations of these conceptions through their tests. Both concentrated on divergent thinking as the basis of creativity and devised tests that emphasized the assessment 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 impressed 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 I (e.g., Sternberg, Kaufman, & Pretz, 2002; Sternberg & Lubart, 1995, 1996) have chosen to use 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. These 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 those who are willing and able to “buy low and sell high” in the realm of ideas (see also Rubenson & Runco, 1992, for the use of con- cepts from economic theory). Buying low means pur- suing ideas that are unknown or out of favor but that have growth potential. Often, when these ideas are first presented, they encounter resistance. The creative indi- vidual persists in the face of this resistance and eventu- ally sells 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 these resources are sources of indi- vidual differences, often the decision to use a resource is a more important source of individual differences. In the following sections, 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 see 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 sell other people on—the value of one’s ideas. The confluence of these three skills is also important. Analytic skills used in the absence of the other two skills results in power- ful critical, but not creative, thinking. Synthetic skill used in the absence 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 absence of the other two skills may result in societal acceptance of ideas not because the ideas are good, but rather, because the ideas have been well and powerfully presented.

We tested the role of creative intelligence in creativ- ity in several studies. In one study, we presented 80 peo- ple with novel kinds of reasoning problems that had a single best answer. For example, they might be told that some objects are green and others blue; but still other ob- jects might be grue, meaning green until the year 2000 and blue thereafter, or bleen, meaning blue until the year 2000 and 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 prosses, 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 set of studies, 60 people were given more conventional kinds of inductive reasoning problems, such as analogies, series completions, and classifications, but were told to solve them. However, the problems had premises 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).

In these 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 abilities (e.g., that of Cattell & Cattell, 1973) than with tests of crystallized abilities. We also found that when re- sponse 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- ses 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, conversely, 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.

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 closed and entrenched perspective, re- sulting in a person’s not moving beyond the way in which he or she has seen 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 game, 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 use 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 use one’s past knowledge.

Thinking styles. Thinking styles are preferred ways of using one’s skills. In essence, 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 research (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 worse students. Students also were found to receive higher grades from teachers whose own styles of think- ing matched their own.

1991, 1995) have supported the importance of certain personality attributes for creative functioning. These attributes include, but are not limited to, willingness to overcome obstacles, willingness to take sensible risks, willingness to tolerate ambiguity, and self-efficacy. In particular, buying low and selling 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 seek 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 sensible 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-focused motivation is also essential to creativity. The research 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.

Answer 1

The article is about creativity and begins with the most contributors in the subject - Guilford and Torrance. It also puts forward, a theory of creativity by one of the colleagues of Torrance. The theory is "The Investment theory of Creativity" by Sternberg and Lubart. As per the theory, creativity requires the confluence of 6 distinct yet inter related resources - Knowledge, intellectual abilities, personality, motivation, environment and styles of thinking.

Intellectual ability -

"a) the syn- thetic skill to see 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 sell other people on—the value of one’s ideas".

As per the theory, the confluence of the above three intellectual skills is important, the presence of only one can hinder creativity.

Knowledge -

"Knowl- edge thus can help, or it can hinder creativity"

One must have knowledge to think creatively in a field, but sometimes this knowledge can limit one's thinking.

Styles of thinking -

"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."

Creative people should have an inclination to thinking and to think in new ways.

Motivation -  

"Intrinsic, task-focused motivation is also essential to creativity."

Creative people, do not get motivation from outside, they have to get it from themselves and focus it on the task.