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Creativity is a sought-after trait across different cultures, industries, and contexts, enhancing individuals’ learning and education, providing businesses with a competitive advantage, and improving the prosperity and quality of life of societies. Every impactful innovation in science, art, business, and politics started life as a creative idea: this includes the machine you are using to read this, the words I’m using to write this, and every object you see around you now.
Although most people would enjoy being more creative, creativity is a complex, multifaceted phenomenon, lending itself to misinterpretations and myths, which hinder people’s and organizations’ ability to harness it. Moreover, there is often a gap between leaders’ proclivity to praise creativity on the one hand, and their actual willingness to reward or tolerate it on the other.
Fortunately, there is a well-established science of human creativity, with consensus on how to define it: “a person’s capacity to produce new or original ideas, insights, restructuring, inventions, or artistic objects, which are accepted by experts as being of scientific, aesthetic, social, or technological value”. In other words, creativity can be understood as the ability to think and solve problems in novel and useful ways.
The science of creativity also provides a much-needed antidote for some of the common misconceptions about creative people, the creative process, and creative outputs, not to mention innovation (the practical implementation of creative ideas, transformed into impactful products, solutions, services, and so on). Indeed, here are eight popular myths about creativity that have been debunked by science:
1) Creative people are weird: Although creative dispositions and achievements over-index among individuals with bipolar and schizotypal tendencies, as well as mild schizophrenic symptoms, the overwhelming majority of people with strong creative inclinations, talents, and accomplishments are rather normal and well-adjusted. They tend to be open to new experiences, curious, and intellectually inclined; more extraverted, agreeable, and conscientious than average; and socially networked. The only major dark side trait that is often associated with creativity is narcissism, though, as one would predict, it is mostly related to self-perceived rather than actual creative talent.
2) Creative people are smart: While decades of research suggested that IQ (the best single indicator of someone’s intelligence, thinking, and learning ability) is a positive enabler of creativity, recent meta-analytic studies suggest that the link between IQ and creativity is negligible, though verbal creativity (e.g., creative writing, brainstorming, word associations, etc.) is significantly dependent on verbal intelligence and language command. Unlike IQ, which is about finding the only correct answer to a well-defined question or problem, creativity is about coming up with multiple answers or ideas to ill-defined questions or problems. In fact, with IQ the focus tends to be on problem-solving, whereas a critical part of creativity is problem-identification. In any event, if you want to predict whether someone will do anything creative, you are better off knowing their personality (back to point 1) than their IQ.
3) Expertise is not important: A common misconception is that if you study, learn, or know a lot about a topic, you will find it impossible to be creative, since you will inevitably come to the conclusion that there’s not much else to say or do - it has all been done. However, expertise is one of the most critical enablers of creativity: you need to master the rules of the game before you can break them, and the only way you will produce something creative if you don’t know them is by accident, luck, or chance. As Picasso famously noted “It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.” Importantly, expertise is more malleable than creative thinking skills or personality, so if you actually want to boost your creative potential, there is no better formula than to develop domain-specific expertise. Study hard, learn voraciously, get pass the stage of despair from feeling that none of your ideas are original, and you will reach a point in which creative ideas will start to flow.
4) It’s about nurture rather than nature: Contrary to popular belief, behavioral genetic studies show that creative achievements are largely predicted by genetic relatedness, with heritabilities ranging from 43-67% (for comparison, adult height is 80-90% heritable, IQ around 60%, and anxiety disorders 30-60%). This does not negate environmental influences on creativity, which are well-documented; or the fact that upbringing, education, and motivation can all impact creative potential and performance. However, it does indicate that most of what determines someone’s creative proclivity and ability is set pre-birth. In other words, creative people are more born than made.
5) You know how creative you are: While it is perfectly plausible that you are aware of your creative talents (and limitations), the overall correlation between self-perceived and actual creativity is generally low, suggesting around 9% overlap between the two. In fact, your self-perceived creative talents are more influenced by your personality than your actual creative talents, and many studies warn against taking self-reports of creativity seriously. In that sense, creativity is a bit like sense of humor: the percentage of people who profess to having it far exceeds the percentage of people who actually display it. You can probably trust someone who tells you they are not creative - and commend them on their rare self-awareness - but if you truly believed everybody who says they are creative, you should prepare yourself for many disappointments.
6) Creativity is the essence of innovation: It isn’t - execution is. Although every innovation started life as a creative idea (within someone’s imagination), for every 100 creative ideas there are perhaps 2 or 3 which become successful or impactful innovations. Innovation, the practical implementation or application of creative ideas, is the result of team effort - people working together to achieve something they would not be able to achieve on their own. This requires leadership, which is a psychological resource to help groups turn into high-performing teams and succeed. A typical team capable of turning creative ideas into innovations will not have more than one or two creative individuals. In fact, too many creatives will result in disputes and fights over whose idea is best, not to mention a lack of discipline, follow-through, and passion for execution. So, you are as likely to contribute to innovation if you have attention to detail, are able to manage projects, respect deadlines, and understand how to translate a vision into actionable execution, than if you are an “ideas person”.
7) Creative people are always creative: Not quite. In fact, irrespective of whether you are generally creative or not, there are big situational influences on your creativity, notably related to your emotional states or mood. In line, studies show that enhancing positive mood via music, competent leadership, time and freedom from pressures and constraints, meditation, and exercise, significantly increases the production of creative ideas. Positive mood is particularly impactful when it comes to helping people restructure problems, brainstorm, engage in free associations, and incubate new ideas. Conversely, when you are stressed or anxious you will find it very hard to create.
8) Men are more creative than women: Given the historical underrepresentation of women among eminent creative achievers, relative to men, you’d be forgiven to think that this is true. However, meta-analytic studies show that women outperform men on measures of creative potential, like the divergent thinking test or alternative uses tests, suggesting that any male superiority in creative success is more likely due to privilege, nepotism, and sexism (just like in other areas of achievement).
