This blog is excerpted and revised (with permission) from a recent paper published by the author:
Green, A., Beaty, R., Kennet, Y., & Kaufman, J. The Process Definition of Creativity. (in press). Creativity Research Journal.
Creativity has perhaps never been more universally celebrated across wide-ranging sectors of education, arts, and industry than it is at the present moment. The science of creativity is receiving increased investment, and creativity researchers are developing exciting new methods for both observing and enhancing creative cognition. However, it is the most fundamental question about creativity – the definitional question – that has persistently clouded scientific progress. Both the timely and timeless importance of creativity make advancing the mechanistic understanding of creativity, especially as a process that can be taught and enhanced, a scientific priority. The answer to the question, ‘what is creativity?’ should provide a meaningful framework for research aimed at understanding how creativity works. In plain terms, if we hope to effectively research and understand creativity as a process, we need to first define it as a process.
Building on the rich history of theoretical development in creativity, Mark Runco and Garrett Jaeger presented, “A Standard Definition of Creativity,” twelve years ago in Creativity Research Journal. Highlighting the criteria of novelty and usefulness, this definition (henceforth referred to as “the product definition”) provides a concise description of the attributes that make for a successful creative product. Indeed, this definition has been extremely valuable for galvanizing the field around standards for assessing creative products. However, there remains a widely-appreciated need for greater theoretical specificity in operationalizing the construct of creativity. As my colleagues, James Kaufman, Roger Beaty, Yoed Kenett, and I have recently suggested, the lack of clarity may be due in large part to a linguistic ambiguity in the word, creativity, itself. A bit of linguistic bad luck has led to a general conflation of different constructs conveyed by different uses of the word that instead should be understood as having different definitions, including a conflation of creativity as the attribute of a product with creativity as a process. While creativity as the attribute of a product is defined by the product definition, there is an increasingly pressing need – particularly with the growth of process-focused creativity research – for a process definition of creativity.
In the decade plus since the publication of “A Standard Definition,” the neuroscience of creativity has come into its own, highlighted by the application of advanced brain-imaging and network analysis methods, as well as a range of noninvasive techniques that can modify the functions of the working brain. This work has helped to elucidate (and sometimes facilitate) the interplay of neural systems that give rise to creative thought. Notably, even Creativity Research Journal, the journal in which “A Standard Definition” was published, has moved into a new era under the auspices of The Society for the Neuroscience of Creativity – I currently serve as the journal’s Chief Editor. Thus, the time seems to be right for a process definition of creativity that can be directly related to the science of understanding creativity as a neurocognitive process.
To be clear, there is not just one creative process. Indeed, it is likely that no two creative processes are ever the same. There are many facets that vary with respect to objectives, external influences, specific neurocognitive implementation, etc. Considerable research has identified distinct categories and forms of creativity. Far from suggesting that all the many forms of creativity are the same, the goal that my colleagues and I have undertaken is to identify a minimal set of core process elements that are necessary and sufficient for creativity across its many forms.
Creativity or Creative-ness?
What has made the definition of creativity so elusive and unsatisfying? The cloudiness of creativity owes in part – likely in large part – to a generally unappreciated division in the usage of the word itself, an innocent but insidious linguistic duplicity. The word, creativity, has multiple usages that are importantly different in their meanings and implications. One usage of the word is adjectival; it describes something or someone that has creative attributes. For example, in the sentence, ‘The creativity of this invention is truly remarkable,’ creativity is used in the adjectival sense to refer to an attribute of an output (an invention). Perhaps the clearest way to explain this is that, in adjectival uses of creativity, the sense conveyed by the “-ity” word ending is the same as the sense conveyed by the more common word ending, “-ness,” as might be used to describe a person’s hopefulness, or an object’s heaviness. Thus, what is really meant by creativity in this usage is “creative-ness.” The other sense of the word is nominal; it is used to name the process(es) that constitute creativity, as in the sentence, “Keeping an open mind can help creativity happen.” The construct conveyed by this nominal sense of creativity (i.e., creativity as process) is the primary focus of the definitional account my colleagues and I have developed.
Both the nominal and adjectival senses are correct and widely accepted uses of the word, creativity, but their meanings should not be conflated. Transcending this earthly discourse for a moment, we can consider the case yet of another “-ity” word, divinity, which, like creativity, has come to have a distribution of meanings that spans the nominal and the adjectival. It is possible to use the word, divinity, in the nominal sense to name a thing (i.e., a god). It is also possible to use divinity in the adjectival sense, i.e., to describe the “divine-ness” of a person, place, experience, etc. As above, both are correct uses of the word, but the two senses refer to two constructs that are quite different in meaning.
Because the different senses of the word, creativity, refer to different constructs, they require different definitions. The frustration our field has experienced in defining creativity has not come from lack of thought or imagination, but because, without distinguishing the different senses of the word, we’ve been trying to accomplish an inherently impossible task: fitting a single definition to fundamentally distinct constructs. Indeed, we think that our field has suffered a somewhat unlucky fate. If only the noun form of the adjective, creative, happened to end in “-ness” rather than “-ity” (if only creative-ness was an accepted word), then the nominal noun form of creativity would have to be more overtly/orthographically distinct from the noun form of the adjective. With better luck, we would have distinct words where instead we only have one. If we had distinct words instead of one shared word, then much handwringing over operationalization and confuddling of theory might have been avoided.
But it is not so, and here we are, and the use of the word, creativity, in the common parlance is unlikely to change. This does not, however, mean that creativity research needs to be perpetually hamstrung by this ambiguity. With a bit of linguistic awareness, my colleagues and I have argued that it is possible to develop a clearer and more maturely structured science of creativity. In particular, we recommend that researchers specify whether they are studying the nominal construct of creativity as process or the adjectival construct of creativity as attribute (“creative-ness”), and that process-focused assessments should be collected in conjunction with more familiar product-based assessments to advance construct validity in the measurement of creativity.
Product or Process?
As described above, the product definition is an excellent standard for assessing products. Assessing products has a great deal of pragmatic value, and the novel and useful criteria are particularly well-suited for relative assessments of product attributes (e.g., which of these products is more novel? Which is more useful?) because judgements of novelty and usefulness are generally relative rather than absolute or binary. But is a description of the attributes of creative products suitable as the basis for the scientific study of creativity?
Frequently – and problematically in my view – the product definition is phrased as a process definition; in particular, creativity is frequently defined as “a process that results in products that are novel and useful.” Comparison to other domains of psychological science suggests that this product-based framing is an ill fit. For example, defining human development as “a process that results in adult humans” might be accurate in some oblique way, but it does very little to inform the research of developmental psychologists or biologists to understand how development works. Such a description does not specify the constituent process elements of development, and indeed the process of development need not reach adulthood/maturity in order to qualify as development.
The criteria of novelty and usefulness present additional challenges to the advancement of creativity research because they are largely based on external evaluation rather than inherent to a process (or even inherent to a product). There is considerable ambiguity about what should constitute novelty or utility (e.g., Who should decide whether a product is novel or useful? How novel or useful should it be relative to other products in order to be creative? In what context? Plentiful examples from history and from everyday life illustrate the ambiguity of these judgements. Alfred Russel Wallace’s development of a theory of evolution very similar to Darwin’s theory is a well-known historical case. Should elements of Darwin’s theory that overlap with Wallace’s be considered less creative because one of these men conceived of the ideas just after the other one did? Analogous situations are common in everyday circumstances. If you are a math teacher and you have a student who finds a valid way to solve a problem that you did not teach them, this might rightly be considered creative. But is the solution less creative if another student generated that solution in an earlier class period? Or perhaps in a class you taught 10 years earlier?
In addition to the theoretical challenges of a product-based definition, conceptualizing creativity in terms of products may also limit the useful application of creativity research in both real-world and laboratory contexts. Put another way, focusing on the process of creativity (rather than defining creativity in terms of products) has several advantages, especially when considering the goal of fostering and enabling creativity. A focus on process, rather than product, is far better suited to educational contexts. You can teach the “how” of a process, but you cannot teach the “how” of a product. Math teachers don’t focus on the answers to solved problems, they teach students the processes by which the problems can be solved – the particular numerical answer is useful for external evaluation purposes, but somewhat incidental to the actual learning of mathematics. Relatedly, in any learning context (educational, professional, or otherwise) a specification of process is crucial for effective practice. You can practice a process, but you cannot practice a product. The development of more direct interventions to support creative performance also relies on understanding the processes and subprocesses of creativity. This is the case for cognitive interventions that seek to scaffold elements of the creative process, and is perhaps most clearly the case for brain-based interventions. Intriguing advances have been made in the application of neuromodulation techniques, including transcranial electrical stimulation and transcranial magnetic stimulation, to support creative cognition. By its nature, this work relies on first observing a creativity-related process in the brain and then leveraging the observations to target and titrate the intervention.
In view of the above considerations, while novel and useful appear to be apt descriptions of creative products, they do not suffice to characterize the process of creativity in a way that can effectively advance empirical creativity research. Extending this product-level description to define creativity as a process that results in products that are novel and useful leaves the actual process as essentially a black box. My colleagues and I have thus argued for a distinct definition of creativity as a process, which can be used in the context of scientific inquiry separately from, or in conjunction with, the definition of creative products. Such a process definition can help to address several interpretative issues associated with the product-based definition, and would bring creativity research more closely in line with other areas of psychology and neuroscience in which process-based definitions have underlain advancements. Focusing on process also provides a stronger foundation for the useful application of creativity research toward improving creative performance.
Aligning Theory with Data: The Process Definition of Creativity
Observing how the brain carries out cognitive operations can empirically inform and constrain theory about those cognitive operations. This is among the most valuable contributions of cognitive neuroscience to the psychological sciences, and the inferences that neural observations allow have become increasingly meaningful as cognitive neuroscience has matured both in methodological sophistication and in scale of aggregation across studies. The above-reviewed insights into the function and connectivity of neural systems during creative thinking point to ways in which fundamental elements of creativity theory can be translated to specific neural processes that implement creativity.
Informed by these data, but starting from a priori premises, my colleagues and I have proposed a process definition of creativity as internal attention constrained by a generative goal. This definition combines three core elements of evidence-aligned theory: 1) that attention is directed internally (i.e., toward mental representations in memory; as distinct from external/perceptual attention); 2) that attentional operations (e.g., search, manipulation of representations in memory) are constrained to fit parameters of a to-be-achieved goal state (whether or not a goal is actually achieved); and 3) that the goal state of the creative process is generative (a representation not already precisely held in memory; as distinct from rote retrieval of representations that a person already carries in their memory). This is intended as a general definition of creativity. The aim is to provide a general process-based standard for what creativity is, distinct from but relatable to more specific models of how creative processes work. In other words, my colleagues and I posit that meeting these three criteria is necessary and sufficient for creativity. In our paper, “The Process Definition of Creativity,” published in Creativity Research Journal, we lay out the theoretical considerations underlying each of these criteria. We also describe how these criteria align with the insights that neuroscience research conducted in our labs and others has revealed into the creative workings of the brain. As discussed in our paper, creativity can manifest in a wide variety of ways, and many forms of creativity involve other processes elements in addition to the minimal definitive criterion elements we delineate. Thus, the process definition can be more completely worded as follows: creativity is any process that includes internal attention constrained by a generative goal, often involving other cognitive, perceptual, emotional, or motoric operations.
Why does the definition matter? As a field, creativity research has long acknowledged that we need greater theoretical specificity in order to make more meaningful empirical advances. Indeed, this call for greater theoretical clarity has become a nearly ubiquitous refrain in our journals and at our conferences. The Creativity Ontology Initiative, led by the Society for the Neuroscience of Creativity, is an effort to address this need, including the development of the process definition that my colleagues and I have proposed. To the extent that creativity theory is currently unclear, clarifying the boundaries/distinctions of our theoretical understanding will necessarily require some revisions of common narratives regarding how we define creativity. Whereas the “standard” definition of creativity as “novel and useful” describes creative products that can be evaluated externally, creativity is constituted by processes. If creativity is defined solely in product terms, then we will continue to struggle with the confusions of theoretical muddling (e.g., attempting to define processes using terms that describe products) Instead, the evidence that neuroscience has provided points inward to a definition aligned with components of brain function that constitute the creative process itself.
