by SCOTT BARRY KAUFMAN
Consider a hot off the press study just published in Creativity Research Journal. Edward Necka and Teresa Hlawacz recruited 60 visual artists and 60 bank officers in Poland, and administered a variety of tests of temperament and divergent thinking (one component of creativity requiring the ability to generate many different possibilities). How did the artists differ from the bank officers?
Bank officers were about as good at divergent thinking as the general population, whereas artists were amazingly good at flexibly generating original pictures and words. In fact, they were almost at ceiling! What about temperament? This is where things get really interesting. On the whole, artists didn’t substantially differ from bank tellers in their temperament. To get to the bottom of this finding, the researchers looked at the relationships between the various measures within each group.
Surprisingly, consistent relationships between divergent thinking and temperament were found only in the sample of artists. Among bank tellers, temperament was not related to divergent thinking. But among the artists, those scoring higher on the tests of divergent thinking tended to display higher levels of the following:
Briskness (“quick responding to stimuli, high tempo of activity, and the ability to switch between actions”)
Endurance (“an ability to behave efficiently and appropriately in spite of intense external stimulation or regardless of the necessity to pay attention during prolonged periods of time”)
Activity (“the generalized tendency to initiate numerous activities that lead to, or provoke, rich external stimulation; it is conceived as the basic regulator of the need for stimulation”).
What’s more, artists who scored higher in divergent thinking also scored lower in emotional reactivity. This might not be surprising, considering the ability to do well on a decontextualized, timed test requires a cool head. When all of the temperamental factors were considered at the same time, activity remained the best positive predictor of divergent thinking, and emotional reactivity remained the best negative predictor of divergent thinking.
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What’s going on here? Why was temperament related to divergent thinking among the artists but not the bank officers? One possibility is that the bank officers were more intimidated by the demands of the divergent thinking tests than the artists, who might be more comfortable expressing their wacky ideas.
Another possibility is that the bank officers shun creativity. Indeed, as my colleague James C. Kaufman has pointed out repeatedly, creativity is not always such a good thing in every domain! Would you rather have an efficient accountant or a creative accountant? If you’d like to stay out of jail, I hope you chose efficient! So perhaps the diminished value bank officers place on creativity (at least, the kind of creativity artists embrace) may have influenced their tests scores on both the temperament measures as well as the divergent thinking measures.
Scientific American for more