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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
- 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
- I have a rule in my mind that can be used to classify three whole
numbers (a triple).
- We know that a triple 2 4 6 confirms (fits in) the rule.
- Your task is to discover the rule that I have in my mind by
producing your own series of three whole numbers (triple).
- You may propose series of three numbers, and in each case I will
say whether it fits in the rule or not.
- 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.
- 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).
World One
|
World Two
|
Discontinuous |
Continuous
|
Static |
Dynamic
|
Sequential |
Sumultaneous
|
Mechanistic |
Organic
|
Separable |
Interactive
|
Universal |
Contextual
|
Homogeneous |
Heterogenous
|
Regular |
Irregular
|
Linear |
Nonlinear
|
Surface |
Deep
|
Single |
Multiple
|
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)
|
Acquisition
metaphor
|
Participation
metaphor
|
Goal
|
Individual enrichment
|
Community building
|
Learning
aim
|
Acquisition of some (knowledge)
|
Becoming a participant of
community
|
Learning
role
|
Recipient or consumer of
information
|
Perhipheral researcher,
apprentice
|
Tutoring
role
|
Facilitator, provider, mediator
|
Expert participant, support of
discourse
|
Knowledge
seen as
|
Property, possession, commodity
|
Aspect of practice, discourse or
activity
|
Knowing
(understanding) seen as
|
Having or possessing (in the
head)
|
Practising, communicating,
belonging (in the communit of practise)
|
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
Level of knowledge exchange is
(weak or strong):
|
Weak
|
Strong
|
Information
becomes
|
non-redundant
often asymmetrically exchanged
|
redundant
reciprocal
|
Knowledge
is
|
simplified
often codified
|
usually complex
mostly non-codified
|
Communication
is
|
thin
easy to understand
|
thick
expert discourse & script
|
Resources
are
|
only a few
|
many and overlapping
|
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