The Crisis in Creativity Research Stems From Too Little Fragmentation, Not Too Much

Abstract

Glăveanu is right that there is a crisis in creativity research, but his prescription would make things worse, not better. It is the attempt to build grand, domain-transcending, all-encompassing theories that has crippled creativity research and led to a field in which it is the norm for research results to contradict each other. Creativity is more like expertise (where every domain has its own definition and understanding of what constitutes expertise) than intelligence (where g reigns, albeit not without critics). The skills, traits, and motivations that lead to creative performance in physics, poetry, and painting are not fungible: one’s intrinsic motivation to write poetry cannot be transmuted into a love of painting, one’s openness to experience in art does not make one more open to new ideas in physics, and one’s physics-related divergent-thinking skill will not lead to more creative poems. Intrinsic motivation, openness to experience, and divergent thinking may promote creativity in many (but probably not all) domains, but they are different in each domain, as will be their effects. Treating them as domain-general skills or attributes invites confusion. We need more fragmentation, in the sense of more domain-specific theories, if we want to make progress in understanding creativity.