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Openness to experience, plasticity, and creativity: e xploring lower-order to higher-order, and interactive effects (Silvia et al., 2009). November 24, 2009. Personality and Creativity. ‘What are creative people like?’ Big Five Factors Openness is the best predictor
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Openness to experience, plasticity, and creativity: exploring lower-order to higher-order, and interactive effects (Silvia et al., 2009) November 24, 2009
Personality and Creativity • ‘What are creative people like?’ • Big Five Factors • Openness is the best predictor • Other factors often show negative (e.g. Conscientiousness) or positive (e.g. extraversion) correlations (not consistently enough)
The Huge Two (Silvia et al., 2008) • Plasticity: Openness to experience + Extraversion • tendency to ‘explore and engage flexibly with novelty, in both behaviour and cognition’ (DeYoung, 2006, p.1138) • Stability: Conscientiousness + agreeableness + emotional stability • tendency to ‘maintain a stability and avoid disruption in emotional, social and motivational domains’ (p.1138)
Huge Two Predictions • Concerned with impulsivity, behavioural variability and control • High stability: • lower in externalising behaviours (DeYoung, Peterson, Séguin & Tremblay, 2008) • higher in conformity (DeYoung, Peterson, and Higgins, 2002) • higher in morningness (DeYoung, Hasher, Djikic, Criger & Peterson, 2007) • lower in divergent thinking (Silvia et al., 2008).
High plasticity: • higher externalising behaviour (DeYoung et al. 2008) • lower in conformity (DeYoung et al., 2002) • lower in morningness (DeYoung et al., 2007) • higher in divergent thinking (Silvia et al., 2008).
The Huge Two and Creativity • Feist (1998) meta-analysis: • Creative people have high levels of plasticity traits and low levels of stability traits • Different combinations of plasticity and stability levels? • Lack of study on interaction of latent predictors • Difficult to measure • LMS (Latent Moderated Structural) equation has fared well in simulation
Participants • 189 General Psychology Students • University of North Carolina • (150 women, 39 men) • Predominantly Caucasian and African-American
Procedure • Participant groups of 2-10 • Three divergent thinking tasks • Questionnaire assessing demographics and individual differences • Everyday creative activities • Creative Achievement • Creative Self-Reports
Scales to measure the Big Five • Four Scales • 60-item Five Factor Inventory (Costa & McCrae, 1992) • 50-item scale from International Personality Item Pool • Two 10-item scales (Gosling, Rentfrow & Swann, 2003; Rammstedt & John, 2007) • Response in 1-5 format
Divergent Thinking • Create uses for a ‘brick’, ‘knife’, and ‘box’ • circle the two most creative • Scores • fluency (the number of responses) • creativity (the quality of responses) • as scored by four raters independently scoring each response on a scale of 1-5)
Everyday Creativity • 28-item Creative Behaviour Inventory (CBI; Dollinger, 2007) • “How often do you…” • write a short story, • design and make a costume • “Never did this”, “Did this once or twice”, “3-5 times”, “more than five times” • Course or academic requirements did not count
Creative Achievement • Creative Achievement Questionnaire (CAQ) • 10-domain self-report scale (Carson et al., 2005)
Creative Self-Reports • 9-item Creativity Scale for Different Domains 9CSDD; Kaufman & Baer, 2004) • “How creative are you?” • “How creative in the area of interpersonal communication?” • Responses on a 1-5 scale • Three domains: math-science factor, empathy-interpersonal factor, hands-on creativity factor • Plus a global self-concept question e.g. ‘how creative would you say you are in general?’ • Analysed as a multivariate model with four outcomes
Results – Model Specification • The two components of divergent thinking were modeled using confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), with three indicators each. • The Big Five and Huge Two were also modeled with CFA. Model fit was fairly weak due to a cross-loading of extraversion with agreeableness.
Overall Results (No interaction effect of Stability with Plasticity was found)
Discussion • Openness is the only factor of the Big Five to have a strong effect on creativity. • Stability and Plasticity influence creativity, but they do not interact in doing so. • Going below the factor level is necessary for future research.