Judging Popular Novels as Creative Products: Which Creative Attributes Contribute to their Success?

Abstract

The purpose of the present study was threefold. First, to explore whether a German version of the Creative Product Semantic Scale can be applied to novels, a hitherto poorly investigated creative product. Second, to determine which of the emerging attributes might affect the potential for success of a novel. Third, to check whether the novels judged are distinguishable in terms of their creative attributes. In an online study, participants judged four popular novels from recollection: Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, The Hobbit, Twilight, and Inkheart. A factor analysis of items based on the Harry Potter subsample indicated four major dimensions: Resolution, Novelty, Style and Complexity. Among the dimensions, Resolution was the only dimension predicting potential for commercial success in a multiple regression. Novels were not distinguishable on the basis of the dimensions judged, indicating that the present CPSS did not have enough discriminatory power to detect differences among novels from the same genre. Additional measures indicated judgments had been relatively stable since the reading experience. Furthermore, a large proportion of participants was presumably biased in their memory, due to having watched the respective movie adaptation. This was suggested by a false memory check. Surprisingly however, there were no detectable differences in judgment between those who passed and those who failed the false memory check.

The Creativity of Conspiracy Theories

“…If the field of creativity considered other productions involving narratives (poems, stories, movies; e.g., Baer & McKool, 2009; Form et al., 2019; Hennessey, & Amabile, 1988; Plucker et al., 2008), conspiracy narratives have not been studied as creative products so far.…”

“…First, the value of conspiracy narratives can be conceptualized in the same way as that of other fictitious stories (novels, stories). For instance, Form et al., (2019) asked participants to judge the creativity of four popular novels (i.e., Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, The Hobbit, Twilight, and Inkheart) on four dimensions: style (form, presentation, and aesthetic aspects), complexity (simplicity, straightforwardness), originality (novelty), and resolution (relevance, importance). This last dimension refers to the value criterion of the standard definition of creativity (Form et al., 2019).…”

“…Following this procedure, a first possibility consists in asking judges to assess the two criteria of creativity (originality and value) separately. As a reminder, Form et al., (2019) asked participants to judge the creativity of popular novels using various items referring to four dimensions, among which originality and value of the novel. The same procedure could be used with CTs as material.…”

“…Conspiracy theories are, talking generally, narratives, telling mostly fictional stories (Bessi et al., 2015; Douglas et al., 2019; Tangherlini, Shahsavari, Shahbazi, Ebrahimzadeh, & Roychowdhury, 2020) such as “a U.S. President fights powerful Satan‐worshipping paedophiles.” In that sense, CTs are creative productions similar to those studied in the field of creativity, just like poems, films, or stories (e.g., Baer & McKool, 2009; Form, Aue, & Kaernbach, 2019; Hennessey, & Amabile, 1988; Plucker, Holden, & Neustadter, 2008). Moreover, contemporary cultures have widely used CTs as main theme of many popular products, because of their originality and their storytelling qualities, X‐files series having been the most notorious first success (Aupers, & Harambam, 2018).…”

“…Numerous contributions highlighted the fact that CTs have a strong fictitious narrative foundation (Ellis, 2000;Fenster, 1999;Raab, Ortlieb, Auer, Guthmann, & Carbon, 2013;Tangherlini et al, 2020). Indeed, the overwhelming majority of CTs are incorrect and unfounded (Pipes, 1999;van Prooijen & Douglas, 2017).…”