Scholars began serious study into the social psychology of creativity about 25 years after the field of creativity research had taken root. Over the past 35 years, examination of social and environment influences on creativity has become increasingly vigorous, with broad implications for the psychology of human performance, and with applications to education, business, and beyond. In this article, we revisit the origins of the social psychology of creativity, trace its arc, and suggest directions for its future.
3Many laypersons still view creativity as purely a product of individual talents and traits. For a long while, most creativity researchers seemed to hold the same view. Even though J. P. Guilford's landmark address to the American Psychological Association in 1950 (Guilford, 1950) exhorted researchers to seriously dig into creativity as a cognitive and social process as well as a personality trait, the field stayed rather narrow for many years. In the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s, the predominant impression that a reader of the literature would glean was something like this: creativity is a quality of the person; most people lack that quality; people who possess the quality -geniuses -are different from everyone else, in talent and personality; we must identify, nurture, appreciate, and protect the creatives among us -but, aside from that, there isn't much we can do.That, at least, is the impression that the first author of this paper, Teresa Amabile, formed when, in her Stanford psychology graduate program in the mid-1970s, she explored the literature out of a long-standing curiosity about creativity. The most prominent creativity research of the time involved deep psychological study of widelyrecognized creators in fields such as architecture, mathematics, and creative writing, comparing them to less-accomplished peers. These landmark studies by Donald MacKinnon, Frank Barron, and their colleagues at the Institute for Personality Assessment and Research at Berkeley were fascinating (e.g., Barron, 1961;MacKinnon, 1965). They identified some clear differences in backgrounds, abilities, and -especiallypersonalities between the more-and the less-creative groups.Another giant in the field, E. Paul Torrance, had been busy putting these insights to practical use. By the early 1960s, the field seemed to converge around a definition of creativity as the production of novel, appropriate ideas or works. Leveraging this solid 4 conceptualization, and the growing body of work on the psychological assessment of human potential and performance, Torrance created the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT) (Torrance 1966). With that work, he unleashed a torrent of instruments devised by other researchers to detect various aspects of creative ability, creative personality, or both. Although many of these, along with Guilford's own tests of creative ability (Guilford, 1963), gained considerable currency among researchers (e.g., Speller & Schumacher, 1975, Manske & Davis, 1968), the TTCT remained (and, for man...
