Creative Individuals are Social Risk-takers: Relationships between Creativity, Social Risk-Taking and Fear of Negative Evaluations

Abstract

If the importance of social psychological factors in creativity has been widely emphasized, research across the social sciences mainly focused on identifying contextual factors that increase or decrease individuals’ creative behaviors. Few studies have investigated the relationships between creativity and individual characteristics related to interpersonal and social interactions. The present contribution aimed to consider such characteristics, namely social risk-taking (i.e., willingness to challenge norms) and fear of negative evaluation (i.e., apprehension about receiving negative judgments of others). Two correlational studies were therefore implemented in order to clarify previous research suggesting that creativity would be positively associated with social risk-taking and to extend them by testing potential associations between creativity and fear of negative evaluation. Using self-ratings of creativity, but also creative self-beliefs and creative achievement, we hypothesized that creativity would correlate positively with social risk likelihood and negatively with fear of negative evaluation. As predicted, and replicating previous results, all our measures of creativity correlated positively with social risk-taking. Our results also consistently highlighted a negative association between beliefs in one’s creative capacities (creative self-efficacy) and one’s level of fear of negative evaluation. These findings corroborate the idea according to which creative individuals would be (social) risk-takers. In addition, individuals who are confident in their ability to generate creative productions would be less afraid of negative judgments from others. Several perspectives are proposed, in particular in terms of the intervention designed in order to enhance individuals’ creativity.