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7: Creativity

Cognitive Psychology · LibreTexts

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    From LibreTexts, under CC BY 4.0, as the source states it; its equations are written in TeX, which the PDF shows typeset. This page at LibreTexts.

    What do the following have in common: the drug penicillin, the Eiffel Tower, the film Lord of the Rings, the General Theory of Relativity, the hymn Amazing Grace, the iPhone, the novel Don Quixote, the painting The Mona Lisa, a recipe for chocolate fudge, the soft drink Coca-Cola, the video game Wii Sports, the West Coast offense in football, and the zipper? You guessed right!

    All of the named items were products of the creative mind. Not one of them existed until somebody came up with the idea. Creativity is not something that you just pick like apples from a tree. Because creative ideas are so special, creators who come up with the best ideas are often highly rewarded with fame, fortune, or both. Nobel Prizes, Oscars, Pulitzers, and other honors bring fame, and big sales and box office bring fortune. Yet what is creativity in the first place?

    Picture1.png
    Figure 1. People often have difficulty describing where their creative ideas came from. When you think of something creative, how do you typically come up with it?

    • 7.1: Creativity - What Is It?
      Creativity involves generating novel ideas and solutions, often linked to arts but crucial across various fields. Definitions by psychologists highlight originality, usefulness, and surprise as key criteria differentiating creative ideas. Creativity can emerge through divergent thinking, which explores multiple solutions, or convergent thinking, which seeks specific answers.
    • 7.2: Insight
      The text discusses two approaches to goal-oriented problem-solving: reproductive thinking, which relies on past experiences, and productive thinking, which requires new, insightful solutions. Insight problems often involve sudden realizations, known as "AHA-experiences," and are difficult to predict. These problems often necessitate restructuring of thought and can sometimes be solved with hints. In contrast, non-insight problems, like arithmetic, use step-by-step schemas for solutions.

    This page titled 7: Creativity was last modified on Tue, 01 Sep 2026 19:09:00 GMT and is shared under a CC BY 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Mehgan Andrade and Neil Walker.