The Social Psychology of Creativity

By B. Hennessey. Encyclopedia of Creativity, Invention, Innovation and Entrepreneurship, 2003

550 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Motivation plays a crucial role in the creative process. It is not enough to have unusually high levels of skill or a deep conceptual understanding. In order for students to reach their creative potential, they must approach a task with intrinsic motivation; they must engage in that task for the sheer pleasure and enjoyment of the activity itself rather than for some external goal. Researchers and theorists now understand that there is a direct relation between the motivational orientation brought to a task and the likelihood of creativity at that task. And it is particular features of the school environment and students' daily routine that in large part determine that motivation. The present paper outlines investigations revealing that the typical classroom is fraught with teaching practices and programme features that kill intrinsic motivation and creativity. Research designed to immunise students against the negative effects of these damaging classroom elements is reviewed. The argument is made that the undermining of intrinsic motivation and creativity of performance may be largely driven by an affective, rather than a cognitive, mechanism, and recent cross-cultural data gathered in a non-western educational setting are reviewed.

Subfields: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Social Psychology, Visual Arts and Performing Arts

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f513d9f4e91639de5523298754fb633503a01bd6

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

In Social Psychology

In Visual Arts and Performing Arts

Citations in the corpus

A Sociocultural Theory of Creativity: Bridging the Social, the Material, and the Psychological (2020, background): “The main social approaches to creativity from the 1970s and the 1980s—the historiometric studies of Dean Keith Simonton (1975), the social psychology of Teresa Amabile (1983), or the systems model of creativity (Csikszentmihalyi, 1988)—went a long way toward recontextualizing the creative process as”
When Putting Work Off Pays Off: The Curvilinear Relationship between Procrastination and Creativity (2020, unknown): “We informed them that creativity is defined by the production of novel and useful ideas (Amabile, 1983) but did not disclose the purpose of the experiment, the hypotheses, or the experimental conditions.”
Affective Commitment, Participative Leadership, and Employee Innovation: A Multilevel Investigation (2019, background): “Their motivation to focus on problems and ideas persistently and to take the risk of seeking creative approaches to performing tasks would hence be enhanced (Amabile, 1988; Zhang & Bartol, 2010).”
A Meta-Analysis of the Relation between Creative Self-Efficacy and Different Creativity Measurements (2018, background): “Several researchers have pointed out that DT is not creativity per se (Hennessey, 2003; Runco, 2010).”
A Dynamic Definition of Creativity (2019, background): “Knowledge of the domain plays a significant role in the process of creation (Amabile, 1983b; Vygotsky, 2004).”
From STEM to STEAM: How to Monitor Creativity (2018, background): “Discussions of creativity remain ambiguous or even contradictory (e.g., Amabile, 2012; Runco, 2004; Sternberg & Lubart, 1996).”