What is all the commotion about creativity? Whatever definition this vogue expression is dressed in, it has apparently captured the awareness of countless authorities for educational, economical, governmental and last but not least, scientific issues. Moreover, the media is filled with references to creativity or its synonyms. Ochse (1990), the author of a renowned book on the determinants of creative genius, contested that "our quality of life, perhaps our very survival as a species, depends on promoting creativity" (p. 33).

Within the discipline of psychology, research on creativity was initiated after an influential speech given by J.P. Guilford in 1950 to commence his election as president of the American Psychological Association (APA). Guilford (1950), until that time known for his work on psychometrics and intelligence, foretold the arrival of a "second industrial revolution" which would make humankind's "brains relatively useless" (p. 446). The economic value of our minds would be jeopardized, as he predicted, by the emergence of "remarkable new thinking machines" (ibid.).

During the same period, the American society began to search for ways to ease the “age of conformity” (Savelle, 1957) and concurrently, the Sputnik shock was interpreted by the authorities and the public alike as the price for not cultivating creativity in individuals from early in life onwards (Preisendörfer, 2007). In essence, creativity became something valuable to society as a whole and the question was how to go about producing more of it.

Today, we find ourselves in the initial decades of what Guilford (1950) implied. Our self-made information society is challenging the global workforce to find new ways to earn a living. Germany's federal chancellor Angela Merkel (2006) makes a similar call as Guilford did when she speaks of the country's need for a creative imperative. She explains that novel ideas and their implementation are the key to securing standards of living and prosperity in this globalized world.

Creativity B.C.R. (Before Creativity Research)

Of course, creativity was an acknowledged phenomenon before Guilford’s speech in 1950, but its interpretation has been subjected to various historical and societal movements. Studying how the word has been used in the past can help us understand why there are so many different perspectives on creativity today.

In ancient Greece, there was no word to describe the action of creating something. The verb “poiein” (to make) existed, but it was solely reserved for what poets did: They invented poetry and did so freely, i.e. with no limitations due to laws (of nature). All other crafts and technologies were interpreted as acts of imitation or discovery, because they were subdued to principles of some kind (Tatarkiewicz, 1980). Therefore, the verb “poiein” was semantically similar to what many today consider “to create” to mean. In ancient Rome, poets as well as painters were free “to make” as they pleased (ibid.). The Romans had two words to describe such action: (a) facere (e.g. to make, to perform, to bring about) and (b) creare (to create, to make).

In the Christian period, the act of creating became one solely attributed to God. This verb no longer designated the realm of human action, because only the divine could produce a “creation from nothing” (creatio ex nihilo). Yet later in the Renaissance, an air of freedom and independence characterized European societies and the act of creating became something inspired humans could do. It was from this period onwards that creativity became connected to science, eventually leading to the study of eminent scholars from all disciplines (Albert & Runco, 1999).

The Great Trait

Sir Francis Galton (1822-1911), a cousin of Charles Darwin and a jack-of-all-trades in the sciences, believed that the variation observed in human intellect was controlled by genetically-determined, biological processes. To test his hypothesis, he investigated men of distinguished talent and counted the number of eminent male relatives they had (Galton, 1865). Assuming “talent and character” are only passed on from fathers to sons, he proposed that if intellectual ability is indeed hereditary, such men must have more prominent relatives than found distributed in the general population. Although Galton did not speak ofcreativity, he used the synonym genius which stood for all intellectual capacities and perseverance.

About a century later and without hereditary reasoning, Guilford (1950) began working on a concept to describe intelligence as a multi-dimensional, non-hierarchical trait. The resulting structure of intellect (Guilford, 1956) encompasses three main dimensions describing the (a) input, (b) operations and (c) output of intellectual abilities. The operations include divergent production, the mental process of generating more than one solution to a given task. This mental process is similar to what many researchers call creativity. Guilford (1950) planned to test divergent production, or divergent thinking as it is often called, with paper-and-pencil tests. Although admitting this kind of behavior represents “lower degrees of distinction” (ibid., p. 445), it would be an opportunity to collect larger samples than the ones of eminent creators previously investigated.

The noteworthy contributions made by Galton and Guilford are exemplary for two kinds of individual, or trait, perspectives oncreativity, “big C” and “small c” creativity (cf. Amabile, 1996; Sawyer, 2006). The term “big C” is used to describe eminent creators. These are people who have literally gone down in history for their achievements, such as Nobel Prize winners and renowned musicians. However, the world is full of people who do creative work without large-scale public recognition, and the term “small c” is reserved for describing such creators. Boden (2004) makes a similar distinction when she defines historical and individual creativity. A historical creative act is one which has never occurred before to humankind’s knowledge, and individual creativity is reserved for acts which are new to the person creating, but not necessarily new to humankind in general.

Apart from intellectual abilities, certain personality characteristics have been consistently related to creative performance, such as openness to experience, impulsivity, ambition, nonconformity, flexibility and autonomy (Feist, 1999). Openness to experience is one of five major personality traits (McCrae & John, 1992) and it correlates with performance in divergent thinking tests (McCrae, 1987). Individuals open to experience are, for example, intellectually curious, imaginative, sensitive to their inner feelings, aesthetically oriented and flexible in thought.

From the Great Trait to More Individuality

Before the turn of the century, Feldhusen and Goh (1995) remarked, “...those who search for the essence of creativity in current theory and research are apt to be overwhelmed by both the current breadth of conceptions of the field as well as the relative uncertainty of its fundamental components” (p. 232). After the era of personality psychology approaches to creativity, a cognitive psychology wave advanced (Sawyer, 2006), and creativity research was no longer restricted to unraveling the creative personality. The scientific focus turned from the creative person to the creative process. Creating individuals were still central in studies, but now the way they created was investigated. The process is commonly divided into four stages (cf. Csikszentmihalyi & Sawyer, 1995; Finke, Ward, & Smith, 1996): (a) preparation (b) incubation (c) insight or illumination and (d) verification. This stage model of creativity is still quite popular in pragmatic approaches (Nöllke, 2006) and much research has been conducted on incubation and insight. Contemporarily, it is viewed as a heuristic model characterized by overlapping and iterative stages (Sawyer, 2006).

In the relay to unravel creativity, cognitive psychology passed the stick to neurological approaches to creativity (Martindale, 2004;Sawyer, 2006). This research trend did not only evolve due to technological advancements in medical imaging, but also because psychological methods were unable to clearly account for what actually happens during incubation, the phase right before insight, i.e. the moment a creator perceives the outcome of this mental process. The neurological approach has lead to attempts to localize the so-called “creative drive” (Flaherty, 2005) and the realm of creativity and innovation production (Vandervert, Schimpf, & Liu, 2007).

Creativity scholars started with the individual and moved on to examining the process. Other scientists have made attempts to describe the outcomes, or products, of creative behavior (Amabile, 1996; Gruber & Wallace, 1999). Although only a fraction ofcreativity definitions have been mentioned here, they have one thing in common: their trait or individual character. Creativity is interpreted as a potential outcome of either a) intellectual, personality and/or neurological attributes or b) individual cognitive skills. Although the latter skills are not inherent and may be trained to improve creative performance, they are particular to the individual. This implies creativity is either attributed to a stable trait (Meyer, 1999) or individual skills. However, such attributions result from others observing and evaluating individual behavior, be it on personality or performance tests. Yet who is responsible for this decision?

The Relation

Think of a creative person you admire. What makes you believe this person is creative? An educated guess is that you have seen something he or she has made, e.g. an art performance, a new recipe or an organizational change at your workplace. This thought experiment introduces the first necessity in the relational definition of creativity: the product (Amabile, 1996; Westmeyer, 2001). Before deeming someone creative, we must recognize what type of behavior this person exhibited to be considered so, and behavior is manifested in an observable outcome. This is the basis of numerous approaches to creativity, including the ones by Galton (1865) and Guilford (1950) sketched earlier. Yet in deeming someone or something creative, we are not, as often assumed, only recognizing their traits or skills. Instead, we are observing a behavioral outcome and adopting a position on it (Amabile, 1996; Nicholls, 1972; Westmeyer, 2001). This postulate is not as novel as it may sound; the same thing occurs when psychologists assess creativity with psychometric tests (Hocevar & Bachelor, 1989; Csikszentmihalyi, 1999).

Csikszentmihalyi (1999) developed a model to describe how this observation and judgment process proceeds. Instead of viewing creativity as an objective property of a person, process or product, he sees it as the effect something is able to produce on others. Similar to an audience’s fanatic reaction to a concert band, creativity is the judgmental outcome of people witnessing and implicitly or explicitly evaluating a particular focal output. According to Csikszentmihalyi (1999), this relational approach is based on the interaction between three social systems: the individual, the field and the domain (see Figure 1).

The field and the domain constitute an individual’s environment. The field represents a part of society, i.e. a social group in the position to decide how much impact individual creative output will have. The domain represents a part of the individual’s and thefield’s culture. It is a symbolic system including ideas, behaviors, styles, etc. Csikszentmihalyi (1999) uses the term “meme” to describe these symbols. Furthermore, a society can have many fields just as a culture can be composed of more than onedomain. To illustrate the model in Figure 1, think of schoolchildren (individuals with specific backgrounds and experiences) participating in an art contest to decorate the walls of their otherwise dismal school hallways. The school art teachers (a field) will select the most creative pictures to put on display, so their vote will decide which types of art will go down in this school’s history (domain). Even though parents or the children themselves (other fields) could disagree with the art teachers’ selection, the latter social group is the relevant field for deciding on which art types (memes, e.g. motifs, color choice, material) are deemed creative enough for the school’s hallways. In representing different fields, parents and art teachers can use varying judgment criteria for deciding on the creativity of schoolchildren’s artwork, and their decisions affect how long and where a creative product spends its life (domains, culture). For example, even if a particular artwork does not make school (hallway) history, it could very easily make it on the family’s refrigerator door. Several researchers, such as Hargreaves, Galton, and Robinson (1996) as well as Hennessey (2003), have investigated the evaluation of schoolchildren’s artwork from different social group perspectives.

In Csikszentmihalyi’s (1999) view, creativity occurs when a change in the domain is made. For this to happen, an individual must first produce something new, and this is done on the basis of the existing memes in the domain. A child participating in the art contest, for example, could study the existing pictures in the school’s hallways and decide to deviate from all the landscape pieces by painting a space scene. Once an individual produces a new meme, it is judged by the field and either rejected or accepted into the domain, e.g. the school’s art teachers may find the space scene totally revolutionary compared to the previous pictures.

In returning to the relational definition of creativity, this means behavioral outcomes must be socially validated in order to be deemed creative. However, this does not mean to say individuals are only productive when the outcome is creative. Their behavioral outcomes may be numerous as well as original, but if they are to be considered creative, i.e. novel and useful or valuable to the social environment, these products must be accepted by the field (cf. Amabile, 1996; Sternberg & Lubart, 1999). This is what makes up the relational definition of creativity. It refers to social evaluation processes after an individual has produced some behavioral outcome, and these are made on the basis of what already exists in the referential domain. Once deemed creative by a respective field, a behavioral outcome turns into cultural input, because it is accepted into the pool of memes existing in a particular domain. In our example, the space scene will make school hallway history and it could influence future artists in next year’s contest.

In defining creativity relationally, the scientific focus moves from solely assessing individual, process, product or environmental properties to a higher, more dynamic level of observation. We define creativity as the variable outcome of an evaluative process conducted by a relevant social group or field. Reducing creativity to a trait or skill, i.e. an individual quality existent or not, means overlooking what this phenomenon could be for social scientists: a research topic undoubtedly modeled by socio-environmental parameters. Furthermore, the influence of social variables is spiral. In resuming the children’s artwork example, the art teacher jury (relevant field) decides which kinds of pictures are creative enough for the school’s hallways. In doing so, they are using judgmental criteria based on information already available in their domain, e.g. the quality of children’s artwork they have seen before. Yet at the same time, they are reshaping the domain by making their present selection. If, for instance, the teachers find pictures with abstract motifs to be the most creative, this socially-produced information will shape the way children design their pictures in the future, thereby influencing the personal background of those creating individuals. In the artwork example, the relevant domain is children’s art culture at a particular school. Domains could also be represented by existing cultures, such as the Eastern and Western described in an earlier In-Mind article by Chiu and Leung (2007), and just as the evaluations of school art teachers may differ, so may those of differing cultures when it comes to tasting innovative food.

Social groups play an integral part in establishing creativity. Their perception and evaluation processes may be hard to decipher in an increasingly networked world, but ignoring this complexity does not necessarily facilitate scientific comprehension ofcreativity. This notion implies adopting a relational approach to investigating it. And taking the phenomenon for what we make of it: a dynamical construct based on social stimulation and judgment processes.

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