Creativity, Culture and Society

The Oxford Dictionary (2016) defines creativity as ‘The use of imagination or original ideas to create something; inventiveness’ and a quick search on Google for ‘creativity definition’, gives 62,300,000 answers - this illustrates the complexity of the subject. Indeed, academic definitions range from intrinsic to external scenarios, from abstract, such as ‘It’s a natural gift which when cultivated properly can enable us to achieve the most extraordinary things’ (Gompertz, 2015) to the business-related ‘Creativity is therefore often defined as the development of original ideas that are useful or influential’ (Paulus & Nijstad, 2003). Some authors support Rhodes (1961) division of creativity into following four categories: person, product, press, or process (Runco 2004, Thompson & Choi, 2003). Although all definitions can be considered representative to some extent, they are incomplete in the general sense. As a broad topic, this article will present some views in the impact of Culture and Society in the Creative process.

Creativity is present throughout the context of our lives and used to solve daily problems. Even though many of us consider ourselves as a ‘non-creative person’ creativity shows its traces in most of (I would even risk saying all) our activities, from a simple decision making to an unexpected occurrence to a ‘white lie’ to a neighbour. The common belief on the lack of creativity on everyday processes comes from the relevance of the idea, as it must be accepted as useful or influential. However, in cases which the connection of the idea/problem is not apparent, relevance would be questioned; and therefore, to be recognised as relevant, some studies argue that the idea must have both familiar and novel elements (Ward, 2004). Therein, ideas can be new to a group of people but still ‘attached’ to the initial concept, while others can cause a profound impact in the society. But how does culture and society impact on the ability to produce creative ‘novel’ ideas?

Work environment, family background, network context or – nowadays – even where you are located in the world, could stimulate individuals to generate new ideas in an incremental way, either adding elements to own work or to another’s works. The exposure to different pieces of information allows individuals to develop their ideas based on the other’s development instead of a completely ‘blank canvas’. The sum of the little increments – some just adding volume of work and some redirecting the development – could potentially result in a masterpiece.

Indeed, this process of using the surrounding work has been extensively used, and it is as old as Socrates, Plato and Aristotle (app. 500 years b.C.). After conducting interviews with internationally recognized individuals, Bloom and Sosniak (1981) reported a ‘strong evidence that most of the talented individuals had at least one model of achievement in the domain during childhood’. Moreover, Paul Samuelson (1972), when awarded with the Nobel Prize, pointed to the importance of teachers on his process to the great achievement.

Another positive impact of the society, is the ‘competitive instinct’, described by Triplett (1898) as serving as ‘an inspiration to greater effort’. Comparing tasks performed alone and in competition with others, individuals performed better in the second case. Furthermore, Allport (1924) indicated two factors for the performance enhancement: facilitation (related to the improvement of one’s own movement based on the observation of others) and rivalry (the ‘desire to win’).

The social environment could be favourable to ideas development; however, it can also have a strong negative impact in other cases. For instance, women have an unusually low record of creative masterpieces on a spontaneous thought of genius. In the historical context, only recently women started to have access to education, and in a noticeable lower proportion than men (Eldred, 2013). In fact, this can also be noticed when comparing the number of Nobel prizes given from 1901 to 2016. Whilst women were awarded 48 times, men received 822 Nobel Prizes.

Creativity is present on everyone’s lives; however, to reach a disruptive creative element, culture, society and family have a fundamental participation. In this way, it is highly important to have a model, a mentor or a leader to facilitate the learning styles of thinking and working for achieving the individual’s full capacity, hence a successful development. There are, of course, other levels of creativity analysis and, in the next column, I will be discussing the impact of cognition and training, i.e., individual, intellectual abilities and how different process could improve such skills.

? 2018 Flavia Villarroel. All Rights Reserved.