Am I creative?

Creativity Series Part II:

In this part of our series, we take a look at the role of the individual and their creative potential in the creative process. We recommend reading Part 1 beforehand.

Every person has creative potential. You don’t have to be a code sorcerer making colorful pixel animals jump out of your computer screen in order to be considered creative. There are no creative and uncreative people; however, different creative abilities can vary in their levels of development. Creative abilities include:

• Asking questions: thinking deeply and critically and questioning.
• Investigating causes: forming hypotheses and thinking analytically.
• Anticipating consequences and imagining various outcomes of scenarios.
• The ability to recognize potential and improve products.
• Visual imagination and telling imaginative stories.

A well-known test for assessing the extent of these abilities is the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking developed by Ellis Paul Torrance.¹ The Torrance Test measures proficiency across more than ten scales, including humor, the synthesis of lines and circles, and narrative expression. Arguing that multiple senses are involved in the exercise of creative abilities, the test consists of verbal tasks with verbal stimuli, verbal tasks with nonverbal stimuli, and nonverbal tasks.

In Part 1, we already learned that the creative process involves several steps and thus requires various skills. The Torrance Test mainly measures problem-solving skills and divergent thinking. Both are particularly relevant for generating ideas, answers, and solutions in response to our task.

Divergent thinking is a thought process aimed at generating as many ideas as possible without focusing on a single idea. Generating as many ideas as possible in response to a prompt is a real challenge and can lead us to a creative, i.e., original and useful, product. Divergent thinking is not easy, which is why in everyday life we often use creative methods like brainwriting to stimulate the generation of ideas. In 1967, J.P. Guilford developed the Alternative Use Test to measure our ability to think divergently.² You can try this test yourself spontaneously. Grab a piece of paper and a pen and set a timer for three minutes. Start the timer and generate as many ideas as you can for the following question:

• What can you do with a cardboard box?

Afterward, evaluate how well you did based on the following four criteria:

• Fluency: Number of alternatives mentioned.
• Originality: How unusual are your ideas?
• Flexibility: Breadth of ideas (areas and categories).
• Elaboration: Level of detail and degree of elaboration: how concretely was the idea described?

ChatGPT-3 was able to give me more than twenty application ideas (e.g., moving box, dollhouse, small shelf) in four different domains (e.g., education and learning, upcycling) divided into various subcategories in under ten seconds. Each idea also included an additional hint or instruction. Some researches state that GenAI has risen to a human-level creativity already.³ Trying this definitely felt like it. Feel free to try it yourself with different objects, various text-based generative AI tools (ChatGPT-3, Google Gemini, Jasper.ai), and your colleagues. Ideas for you: What can you do with a…ping pong ball, paperclip, or bottle cap?

Regarding a person’s creative potential, a broad range of personality traits and characteristics have been proposed that are associated with divergent thinking. Among these traits are tolerance of ambiguity, the ability to delay immediate reward and gratification, an attraction to complexity, wide-ranging interests, ambition, and openness to new experiences. Caution: divergent thinking is often equated with creativity in science, but it does not reflect creativity in its entirety; it is one of the most commonly used indicators of creative potential. Divergent thinking has been shown to be a good predictor of creativity in everyday life.

It should also be considered that possessing these traits alone does not guarantee creative results. The person’s intrinsic motivation is at least as important. There is also the question of whether these personality traits are directly related to creativity as an ability or more to the motivation to become creative.⁴

However, generating ideas alone does not necessarily get us further. Selecting and implementing the best idea remains up to us. While divergent thinking helps us to generate many possible ideas, we must select a few suitable ideas to continue with and invest resources in. We can only bring a few ideas to life. The ability to make the right choice and implement it is called convergent thinking. This ability is just as important for creating a creative product. We need to consolidate ideas, filter them, analyze them rationally and logically, and critically examine them.

Intelligence and Creativity

The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination. – Albert Einstein

Whether it’s Taylor Swift, Frida Kahlo, or Ada Lovelace, we are often fascinated by individuals who produce, develop, or market incredibly creative products. We often call them geniuses, exceptional talents, or intelligent people. But what does intelligence have to do with creativity? Science views both concepts from the following perspectives:⁵

• Intelligence as a subset of creativity.
• Creativity as a subset of intelligence.
• Both as separate concepts with some overlap.
• As equivalent.

Many well-known intelligence theorists include the necessary abilities for creativity in their theories. If you are interested in theories on intelligence we recommend this article.

Robert Sternberg defines intelligence as the ability to achieve success based on one’s own standards and the socio-cultural environment. He splits intelligence into three essential aspects:

• Analytical intelligence: the ability to evaluate information and solve problems.
• Creative intelligence: the ability to develop new ideas.
• Practical intelligence: adaptability to new environments in daily life.

One of the most well-known intelligence theories often associated with creativity is by Raymond Cattell. According to him, there is crystallized intelligence, which is the ability to use learned skills and factual knowledge acquired so far. Interestingly, there is also fluid intelligence. It describes the ability to abstract information, solve complex problems, and recognize patterns, exactly what we need in the creative process to create creative products.

The correlation between measured IQ and measured creativity (often through the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking) is controversial. The results reflect the threshold hypothesis, which suggests that up to an IQ score of 120, measured creativity also increases.⁶ As the IQ score continues to rise, no further increase in measured creativity is observed. Both the existence of a threshold and the exact boundary continue to be questioned in studies.⁷

Thanks to their super skill, creativity, humans have solved complex problems, ensured their survival, and improved their quality of life. Creativity: a skill possessed only by humans? Now that we know more about humans as a species with creative potential, in Part 3, we will delve deeper into generative artificial agents and their creative potential.

Sources

1. Torrance, E. P. (No year specified.). Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT). APA PsycTests. ↩︎
2. Guilford, J. P., Christensen, P. R., Merrifield, P. R., & Wilson, R. C. (1960). Alternate Uses (ALTUS). APA PsycTests. ↩︎
3. Jennifer Haase, Paul H.P. Hanel, Artificial muses: Generative artificial intelligence chatbots have risen to human-level creativity, Journal of Creativity, Volume 33, Issue 3, 2023, 100066, ISSN 2713-3745, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.yjoc.2023.100066. ↩︎
4. Said-Metwaly,S.,Noortgate,W. & Kyndt,E.(2017). Approaches to Measuring Creativity: A Systematic Literature Review. Creativity. Theories – Research – Applications,4(2) 238-275. https://doi.org/10.1515/ctra-2017-0013 ↩︎
5. https://kwalifikacje.gov.pl/images/Publikacje/Artificial-Intelligence_AI_as-a-Megatrend-Shaping-Education.pdf ↩︎
6. London, Matt. (2020). Intelligence, Creativity, and the Threshold Hypothesis. ↩︎
7. Shi B, Wang L, Yang J, Zhang M, Xu L. Relationship between Divergent Thinking and Intelligence: An Empirical Study of the Threshold Hypothesis with Chinese Children. Front Psychol. 2017 Feb 22;8:254. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00254. PMID: 28275361; PMCID: PMC5319977. ↩︎