Zorana Ivcevic Pringle, Ph.D., is a Senior Research Scientist at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence. She studies the role of emotion, emotional intelligence, and self-regulation in creativity and well-being. Zorana has edited the Cambridge Handbook of Creativity and Emotions and is co-editor of the forthcoming Crisis, Creativity, and Innovation. She has served as Associate Editor of Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, International Journal of Creativity and Problem Solving, and Creativity Research Journal. Zorana is currently working on her first book bringing the science of creativity to the general public.
A post by Zorana Ivcevic Pringle
I do not remember when the word “creativity” entered my vocabulary. Growing up in 1980s Eastern Europe, it was not at the forefront of discussions in education or culture beyond the world of art. But my favorite cartoon was about Professor Balthazar, an inventor who creates whimsical solutions to problems brought to him by the citizens of his town. He would listen to their stories, learn about trouble they were facing, and start to think. Professor Balthazar would pace up and down, looking serious. Then, all at once, he would jump with joy of discovery, run into a room with a giant colorful contraption, turn on a faucet, and out of a drop, a fully-formed invention would materialize. My question kept being – But how?
It turns out, creativity studies – an interdisciplinary research area in psychology, education, design, and organizational behavior – struggled to answer the same question. Much research since the early days of the 20th century’s space race between the two superpowers focused on the idea generation portion of the creative process. It asked how we imagine something new and original. Scientists studied this process by devising tests that asked research participants to think of different and unusual uses for common everyday objects (e.g., a brick or a tin can) or imagine potential consequences for hypothetical scenarios (e.g., what would happen if people could become invisible at will or suddenly able to speak to animals).
And we have learned a lot about idea generation. Although a recent study has shown that 70% of people believe that first ideas are most creative (Benedek et al., 2021), decades of research show that the exact opposite is the case. The first ideas that come to mind are the lowest hanging fruit and therefore rather commonplace. The more time we spent on a creative task, the more we think of original ideas (Lucas & Nordgren, 2020). We also know that creative ideas are related to properties of our memory, especially semantic memory which encompasses knowledge accumulated in the course of one’s life (Gerver et al., 2023). When we think of new ideas, we (consciously or not) recombine pieces of knowledge from memory. Because of this, original ideas are more likely to be devised by people with broad interests and those who are curious and open to new experiences (Puryear et al., 2017).
Just like scientists started with idea generation, when we hear in everyday discourse about an invention, a new gadget, or product that makes life better, more convenient, or something that delights, we tend to ask how people came up with the idea. This question is certainly important; without ideas, those inventions, gadgets, or works of art would not have been created. However, focus on this question about ideas assumes that they come into the world fully formed. Creators then have to work to implement what they imagined in a ‘just do it’ manner. As popular belief would have it, once people have the idea, it becomes a matter of grit.
Alas, when this hypothesis is put to test, we find no support for it. Grit – defined as a combination of sticking with a course of action (idea or interest) and perseverance – does not predict creative achievement, whether we study high school and college students (Grohman et al., 2017) or professional adults (Lin et al., 2024).
This is the case because initial ideas are usually rather vague, regardless of what people do – whether they are scientists, designers, artists, composers, writers, or entrepreneurs (Glaveanu et al., 2013). The initial ideas as a rule change. They are developed and taken into new directions, often abandoned, and reimagined. This is the opposite of consistency. Instead of the creative process being described as a process of idea actualization, which implies idea primacy, it is better conceived of as a process of identifying problems, constructing, deconstructing, and reconstructing them (Csikszentmihalyi, 1988).
In a now classic study, Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi and Jacob Getzels (1971) observed art students from the Art Institute of Chicago as they worked on a still life drawing. They brought students into the lab and asked them to create a drawing using any of the dozens of objects provided. Then, the final drawings were judged independently by five accomplished artists and art critics.
The most general problem was given to the students – create a still life. But this problem is too general to be useful in providing direction. Students faced the question of what would be a part of their still lives. Flowers and fruit? If so, which? Or perhaps something different altogether?
The results showed that the drawings deemed most creative were made by those students who engaged in prolonged problem finding. They spent most of the time exploring available objects, touching them, weighing them, comparing different pieces. They would arrange and rearrange different items, start a sketch, and return to the objects.
This process of problem exploration is not limited to the artistic creativity process. A recent study showed that this is the case also for business creation and success. Lee and Kim (2024) examined data for more than 1.2 million companies in the United States and found that scaling quickly (in the first six to twelve months) made it twenty to forty percent more likely that the companies would fail than if they scaled two years after being founded. Moreover, successful business creation was not related just to time, but also to the use of tools that enable testing of different aspects of the business or features of products.
What the ‘just do it’ mindset to bringing creative products and performances to life misses or ignores is also the emotional aspect of the process. By definition, creativity involves something that is original and therefore something that diverges from the usual ways of approaching problems. This means that the experts and audiences who judge these products or performances can react negatively – from derision to anger. Creators have to contend with potential criticism and risks to one’s reputation, as well as self-consciousness and anxiety associated with these risks (Ivcevic & Hoffmann, 2021).
Furthermore, creating something original means that there is no roadmap to creative work. Creators make it up as they go. When we asked creators in diverse fields, from painters and sculptors, composers and choreographers, to designers and writers, about emotion in the daily process of developing and building creative work, a complex picture emerged. Excitement and joy of creation is mixed with a big portion of frustration (Ivcevic, 2022).
Making imagination visible in creative products and performances requires managing frustrations and anxieties. There are individual differences in the level of disquiet people experience in the course of ups and downs of the creative process. Rather than the exact level of comfort or discomfort, creativity is boosted by the ability to regulate emotions so that the edge is taken off difficult emotions (Hoffmann et al., 2022). Successful creators are willing to accept the discomfort, tolerate it, and have strategies to take away its power over them. These strategies do not necessarily make creators into enthusiastic risk-takers or comfortable in their skin and work, but they enable them to take action. They make it possible for people to maintain their interests and passions and persist in the face of obstacles (Ivcevic & Brackett, 2015). In the words of Georgia O’Keeffe, one of the greatest artists of the 20th century, “I've been absolutely terrified every moment of my life and I've never let it keep me from a single thing that I wanted to do.”
Instead of a conclusion. Creativity is social even when it does not seem to be. I have recently completed writing a book. Writing itself is a rather solitary process. However, the book could not have happened without mentors who have influenced my thinking, collaborators who I have worked with, or many colleagues whose research I learned about and discussed at conferences. Our social networks contribute to our creativity in ways direct and indirect. Research suggests that a social network that ideally facilitates creativity would be large and diverse enough to be able to expand our perspectives, but also include strong relationships with family, friends, coworkers and others who can provide support on which to draw in times of frustration and doubt (Carmeli et al., 2015; Perry-Smith & Mannucci, 2017). This ideal is not equally attainable for everyone. In my lab at Yale we found that women get less support for creativity at work than men and that this in part explains lower levels of creative accomplishment in their jobs (Taylor et al., 2020). And this is certainly not the end to biases that advantage some and disadvantage others. Any attempt to develop societal creativity will require addressing systemic inequities in access to social capital.
References
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Ivcevic, Z. (2022). Emotions ignite and fuel creativity. In Z. Ivcevic (Ed.), Creativity, Emotion, and the Arts: Research, Application, and Impact (pp. 34-42). Santander, Spain: Fundacion Botin.
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