Theories of Creativity

Kai Hakkarainen

University of Helsinki, Dept. of Psychology

What is creativity?

How does creativity come about?

• Creativity is assumed “to bring something into being or form out of nothing.”
• Creative idea may be considered as a “novel combination of old ideas.”
• Creativity is part of how fundamentally new ideas emerge

Early romantic concepts

(Reichenbach, 1958)

Context of discovery

• How people create new ideas
• Was considered irrational, intuitive mystic processes that cannot be scientifically investigated

Context of justification

• How people validate or test new ideas
• Was seen as verifying a hypothesis empirically by analyzing its logical consequences (i.e. scientific)

Modern views on creativity

• New ideas do not emerge accidentally or randomly and creativity is not based on a spontaneous, unique and unanalyzable subjective processes
• New idea may arise as a sudden insight that is, however, preceded with a relative long period of working with a problem
• Creative processes and mechanism can be analyzed, explained, and understood scientifically!
• By learning to know processes involved in creative activity, we may learn to help people to become more creative.

Conceptual Spaces (theory)

(Boden, 1994)

• Creativity is a matter of mapping and exploring structured conceptual spaces that have various dimensions, limits, pathways, and levels
• Sometimes creative ideas emerge through in-depth exploration of an existing conceptual space
• Deeply creative ideas transform and sometimes profoundly alter conceptual spaces

• Example of conceptual spaces

• Body grammar - a computer program producing varieties of line drawing (humans with beach balls)
• Grammar of architectural style
• Jazz improviser
• Literary spaces

• Exploration through complex spaces  requires a great deal of effort
• Transformation of the space presuppose a metarepresentation of the lower-level constraints used

Klondyke spaces

(Perkins, 1994)

• Gold is rare
• Gold mines may be isolated
• Leaving the current (even if temporarily exhausted) source may be risky
• Gold may be absent across an entire plateau, so no one direction is obviously best
• You cannot directly go to the gold, but experience (knowing the terrain & your way around) helps

Two types of creativity

(Boden, 1994)

Psychological creativity

• creation of a novel idea that a person have not had before (even if other people may have considered it)

Historical creativity

• Personal creative ideas that no one else have had before

Accidental historical reasons, however,  may make us to attribute discovery of a certain idea to one particular person

Exploration & exploitation

(James March, 1999)

Exploration

• Searching, creating, exploring and discovering ideas and innovations

Exploitation

• Refining, applying, and using knowledge, and forming routines

Finding of a productive balance between exploration and exploitation needed both at an individual and communal level.

The role of expertise

• The concept of expertise refers to a well-organized body of accessible and useful domain-specific knowledge on which an expert relies when solving complex problems.
• Domain-specific knowledge allows identification of promising solutions among an infinite number of other alternatives.
• Creativity presupposes expertise: conceptual spaces cannot be effectively explored without knowing one’s way around in them!

Tacit Knowledge

(Nonaka & Taceuchi, 1996)

• Formal knowledge transmitted through education undergoes profound changes and becomes transformed to informal or tacit knowledge.
• Through using metaphors and analogies, various personal hunches and insights may be explicated and further elaborated and new ideas and innovations created.
• Tacit knowledge helps one to assess promisingness of new ideas

Practise and rigidity

(Feltovich, Spiro, & Coulson, 1997)

Schemata and routine formation

•  Schemata are data structures for representing stereotypical situations
• Abstractions that help to find uniformities across situations, and, as a consequence, easily ignore specific or unique aspects of each situation.

Automatization

• Emergence of procedural or practical skills and knowledge that enable effective action in appropriate conditions.
• Automatic and, therefore, difficult to change

Functional fixation

• Functional fixation refers to our propensity to interpret object according to their conventional or stereotypical functions, and, as a consequence, fail to see their potential novel functions.
• Certain way of seeing or conceptualizing an object makes it difficult to interpret it differently
• Fixation to only one interpretation, method, or perspective

Puzzle

• How to make four equilateral triangles out of six matchsticks?   
• One side of a triangle should correspond one matchstick

Incubation effect

In many cases, when we are unsuccessfully trying to solve a problem, happens that after interrupting  our problem-solving efforts for a while, the solutions emerges almost immediately when we start to work with the problem again.

Unsuccessful attempt may repeatedly activate wrong associative networks within our mind that does not lead to the correct solution and prevent advancement of problem solving.

When we return to work with the problem after doing something else for a while, these network have lost their activation and it could spread along different more promising associative links.

Confirmation bias

We have a tendency to overestimate the strength of evidence that supports of own conceptions

People are attending mainly confirming evidence and ignoring disconfirming evidence

Rather than being more “critical” thinkers, many “creative” person are characterized by stubbornness

Together with self-confidence and exceptional-ly hard work this helps them to come up with the new insight.

Wason’S 2 4 6 task

1. I have a rule in my mind that can be used to classify three whole numbers (a triple).
2. We know that a triple 2 4 6 confirms (fits in) the rule.
3. Your task is to discover the rule that I have in my mind by producing your own series of three whole numbers (triple).
4. You may propose series of three numbers, and in each case I will say whether it fits in the rule or not.
5. When you are sure what is the rule that is in my mind, please, speak up, and I will say whether it is correct of not.
6. You are asked to propose the rule only after you are pretty sure that it is the rule in question.

Cognitive flexibility

(Feltovich, Spiro, & Coulson, 1997)

• Extended practice may produce rigidity and inflexibility and lead to mindless routines
• Novices are, however, more rigid and inflexible in complex problem solving situations than experts
• Some experts are able to quickly adapt to changes in conditions
• Knowledge-based flexibility (extremely rich knowledge of exceptional cases)
• Flexibility based on deeper thinking (early identification of anomalous cases)

Bounded Rationality

(Simon, 1969)

Human beings have only limited cognitive resources

As a consequence, the actual problem situations are too complex for us to handle

Therefore, we are forced to work with simplified version of real-world problems

Reductive bias

(Feltovich, Spiro, & Coulson, 1997)

Models and rules learned early with simple situations (world one) no longer apply in more complex situations, but still cause the observer to reduce the problems to more simple than they actually are (e.g. reductive bias).

Increasing Cognitive flexibility

• Overcoming tendency to reduce World Two to World One
• Enriching variety and diversity of tasks and problems encountered
• Acknowledging complexity, irregularity, and importance of anomalous cases
• Developing cognitive processes and methods that help to face complexity individually or together with others
• Overcoming rigidity by trying to see things differently, explaining them in many ways, using and combining knowledge in multiple ways.

Crystallized & fluid competence

• Crystallized competence represents partially automated patterns of problem solving developed in practical experience.
• Fluid competence refers to processes of deriving knowledge and skills needed for solving new problems from the expert’s knowledge base.
• The process of releasing intellectual resources through an interaction between fluid and crystallized competence is an essential aspect of human cognitive growth.

Types of expertise

(Hatano & Iganaki, 1991)

Routine expertise

• Quick and accurate solving of familiar problems
• Modest capacities of dealing with novel types of problems

Adaptive expertise

• Effective solving of new problems
• Generation of new procedures and practices from expert knowledge
• Deep conceptual understanding

Progressive problem solving

(Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1993)

Progressive problem solving is a process of generating expert knowledge through the continual reinvestment of mental resources into addressing problems at higher levels.

• Reinvestment in learning
• Seeking out more difficult and challenging problems
• Forming more complex representations of recurrent problems

A characteristic of progressive problem solving is to undertake more and more challenging problems and to work at the edge of one's competence.

Flow experience

(Csikszentmihalyi, 1993)

• A peak experience in which a person concentrates of some activity so deeply that he or she temporarily forgets all worries or uncertainties related to his or her competency or life situation.
• Flow represents enjoyment of activity that leads to human development and increased complexity of his or her activity.
• In order to experience flow, people need to work at the edge of their competence and surpass themselves.

Social dimensions of creativity

• Even if creative insight would take place within human mind, it is preceded with a long process of social interaction
• The conceptual spaces through which exploration and restructuring take place come from the culture
• The tools and goals involved in creative activity do not come from human mind
• Creation and discovery take place between people rather than only within people

Co-Creation

• “One of the great moment is science lies in the moment of shared discovery.  One person’s half-baked suggestion resonates in the mind of another and suddenly takes a definite shape.  
• An insightful critique of one way of thinking about a problem leads to another, better understanding.
• An incomprehensible simulation result suddenly makes sense as two people try to understand it together.” (Rumerhart et al., PDP)

Distributed cognition

• A process in which cognitive resources are shared socially in order to extend individual cognitive resources or to accomplish something that an individual person could not achieve alone.
• Individual and distributed cognitions are in interaction, co-evolve, and reciprocally affect each other.
• Exceptional competencies do not presuppose an exceptional mind but sustained interaction with cultural knowledge resources

Two metaphors of learning

(Sfard, 1998)

Communities of practise

(Lave & Wenger, 1991)

• A group of persons with particular skills or expertise who interact formally within an organization or informally--but routinely--in a type of network for shared pragmatic or knowledge-related goals.
• New ideas and know how emerge through communities of practices

Cognitive diversity

• Diversity and distribution of expertise promote knowledge advancement and cognitive growth.
• Distribution of cognitive efforts allows the community to be more flexible and achieve better results than otherwise would be possible.
• Groups that consist of members having different but partially overlapping expertise were more effective and innovative than groups with homogeneous expertise.

Knowledge exchange

Nature of ties

• Strong ties tend to mediate redundant information among small groups of actors in which everyone knows what the others know (sharing of in-depth expertise)
• New information is often received through weak links.
• Strong links are needed because the recipient may needs multiple opportunities to assimilate complex information.
• The strong ties that start as nonredundant contacts are likely to become redundant over time.
• Information gatekeepers mediate information between communities

Boundary crossing

• Creativity appear to require a conscious effort to cross boundaries between communities of practice
• Boundary crossing is, however, likely to be both intellectually and emotionally very demanding.
• Getting a contact and growing up into a new expert culture literally opens up a new conceptual (and social) space (bridging structural holes).

Knowledge-building community

(Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1993)

• Communities focused on creating new knowledge products (e.g., designs, theories, solutions).
• knowledge acquisition is integrated with knowledge creation
• knowledge use is integrated with knowledge improvement
• Collaborative effort to grasp and extend the implications of existing knowledge