Researchers (and the U.S. patent office!) often conceptualize creativity as involving an idea or solution that is original, useful, and surprising. Very creative people often have intense knowledge about something, work on it for years, look at novel solutions, seek out the advice and help of other experts, and take risks. Although creativity is often associated with the arts, it is actually a vital form of intelligence that drives people in many disciplines to discover something new. Creativity can be found in every area of life, from the way you decorate your residence to a new way of understanding how a cell works.

Divergent Thinking

The term divergent thinking describes a way of thinking that does not lead to one goal, but is open-ended. Problems that are solved this way can have a large number of potential ‘solutions’ of which none is exactly ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, though some might be more suitable than others.

Solving a problem like this involves indirect and productive thinking and is helpful when somebody faces an ill-defined problem, i.e. when either initial state or goal state cannot be stated clearly and operators or either insufficient or not given at all.

The process of divergent thinking is often associated with creativity, and it undoubtedly leads to many creative ideas. It was found that in processes resulting in original and practical inventions, things like searching for solutions, being aware of structures, and looking for analogies are heavily involved, too.

Brainstorming (as a cognitive process) can be utilized to foster divergent thinking. It can aid in the retrieval and assessment of new information by altering the context in which ideas are considered, and it can also help with release from cognitive barriers like those discussed in this chapter (e.g. mental sets and functional fixedness).

Measuring “Creativity”

Cognitive scientists have long been interested in the thinking processes that lead to creative ideas (Simonton & Damian, 2013). Indeed, many so-called “creativity tests” are actually measures of the thought processes believed to underlie the creative act, like divergent thinking (Simonton, 2003). The following two measures are among the best-known tests of divergent thinking as a cognitive aspect of creativity.

The first test of divergent thinking is the Remote Associates Test, or RAT (Mednick, 1962). Mednick believed that the creative process requires the ability to associate ideas that are considered very far apart conceptually. The RAT consists of items that require the respondent to identify a word that can be associated to three rather distinct stimulus words. For example, what word can be associated with the words “widow, bite, monkey”? The answer is spider (black widow spider, spider bite, spider monkey). This particular question is relatively easy; others are much more difficult, but this gives you the basic idea.

The second test measure of divergent thinking is the Unusual Uses Task (Guilford, 1967; Torrance, 1974). Here, the participant is asked to generate alternative uses for a common object, such as a brick (seen in the image below). The responses can be scored on four dimensions: (a) fluency, the total number of appropriate uses generated; (b) originality, the statistical rarity of the uses given; (c) flexibility, the number of distinct conceptual categories implied by the various uses; and (d) elaboration, the amount of detail given for the generated uses. For example, using a brick as a paperweight represents a different conceptual category that using its volume to conserve water in a toilet tank.

Cognitive Factors Associated with Creativity

Many personal and contextual factors are likely to influence creativity on a problem or task. A few such factors are discussed here.

Intrinsic Motivation

Theresa Amabile (2012) suggests several necessary “components” of creativity. Among them, Amabile indicates that an individual’s motivation to engage in a task out of enjoyment or personal challenge is a vital ingredient of creativity.

“Intrinsic task motivation is passion: the motivation to undertake a task or solve a problem because it is interesting, involving, personally challenging, or satisfying – rather than undertaking it out of the extrinsic motivation arising from contracted-for rewards, surveillance, competition, evaluation, or requirements to do something in a certain way. A central tenet of the componential theory is the intrinsic motivation principle of creativity: People are most creative when they feel motivated primarily by the interest, enjoyment, satisfaction, and challenge of the work itself – and not by extrinsic motivators. Because, as research has shown, salient extrinsic motivators can undermine intrinsic motivation, their presence or absence in the social environment is critically important. So, too, is the presence or absence of forces that can support intrinsic motivation (Amabile, 2012).”

Personality

While measures of creativity are, one again, often measuring underlying cognitive processes we feel contribute to one’s creative ability, it does appear that creativity correlates with scores on standard personality measures (Feist, 1998). Most notably, the creative person is more likely to score higher on the openness-to-experience factor of the Big Five Factor Model (Carson, Peterson, & Higgins, 2005; Harris, 2004; McCrae, 1987). This factor concerns whether a person has a strong intellectual curiosity, preference for variety, and an active imagination and is aesthetically sensitive, attentive to inner feelings, as well as receptive to new ideas and values. It would seem obvious that persons high on this factor would behave differently than those scoring low. For instance, we would expect such persons to be less conventional, to have a wider range of leisure activities, and to be more versatile. Yet, it is equally important to note that people high in openness also think differently. Besides scoring higher in divergent thinking (Carson, Peterson, & Higgins, 2005), openness is also associated with the diminished capacity to filter out extraneous information, a tendency often called cognitive disinhibition or reduced latent inhibition (Peterson & Carson, 2000). This “defocused attention” enables the creative person to make observations that others would overlook—such as what happens in serendipitous discovery.

Incubation

Incubation is the concept of “sleeping on a problem,” or disengaging from actively and consciously trying to solve a problem, in order to allow, as the theory goes, the unconscious processes to work on the problem. Incubation can take a variety of forms, such as taking a break, sleeping, or working on another kind of problem either more difficult or less challenging.

Findings suggest that incubation can, sometimes, have a positive impact on problem-solving outcomes. Educators have also found that taking breaks can increase creativity and problem-solving abilities in the classroom.