Creativity, Originality, and Appropriateness: What do Explicit Instructions Tell Us About Their Relationships?

Abstract

Originality is a necessary part of creativity, but creative things are more than just original. They also solve a problem, or more generally are somehow fitting or appropriate. Yet previous research found an inverse relationship between ratings of originality and ratings of appropriateness. The present investigation employed a different methodology — it focused on the generation of ideas instead of judgments about them — to reexamine the relationships between originality, appropriateness, and creativity. Undergraduate students (N = 170) from two large universities received either realistic or unrealistic divergent thinking tasks. These were given with one of four types of instructions. These asked them to give (a) as many ideas as possible (which is the standard type of instruction for these kinds of tests), (b) only original ideas, (c) only appropriate ideas, or (d) only creative ideas. Brief definitions of originality, appropriateness, or creativity were also provided. Comparisons of the four groups indicated that there were significant differences between the different kinds of tasks, with the realistic set eliciting more appropriate ideas than the unrealistic, but the unrealistic tasks eliciting more original and varied (flexible) ideas. There was an interaction indicating that the magnitude of the impact of the instructions varied across tasks. Correlational analyses indicated that the correlation between the originality and appropriateness scores was the lowest among all possible inter‐index relationships (only 7% shared variance). Future research and practical implications are explored.

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“…For both measures the results showed that instructions lead to different results based on the two tasks that participants were instructed to complete. These results indicate that instructions play a significant role in the way different images are interpreted, a claim that is supported by previous research on the influence of instructions on divergent production (Runco, Illies, & Eisenman, 2005). The role of instructions for perceptual switching needs to be addressed more thoroughly by future research.…”

Assessing creativity with divergent thinking tasks: Exploring the reliability and validity of new subjective scoring methods.

“…So today people will work on a few different creativity tasks, which look at how people think creatively.‖ We think that it is essential to instruct people to try to be creative, for three reasons. First, instructing people to be creative increases the creativity of their responses (e.g., Christensen et al, 1957;Runco, Illies, & Eisenman, 2005), which will raise the ceiling of creativity in the sample and hopefully expand the variance in creativity scores. Second, instructing people to be creative makes the scores more valid indicators of individual differences.…”

Creativity, intelligence and anxiety of students with different academic achievements

“…Определили смо се да укључимо овај тест зато што је оригиналност саставни део креативности (Runco et al, 2005). Тест се састоји од 38 тврдњи.…”