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Social Psychology and Creativity

Explore how creativity has shaped social psychology

Muses, distant locations, and even wars and social upheavals have all been said to inspire some of the greatest creative artworks of all time.

Pablo Picasso’s muse, Marie-Thérèse Walter, inspired some of his most renowned artworks. Ernest Hemingway said he preferred to write stories while living in Paris with other influential writers of the early 20th century. His service in World War I also provided an essential backdrop for some of Hemingway’s most powerful writing.

Photographers Alfred Stieglitz and Robert Mapplethorpe used their lovers – Georgia O’Keefe and Patti Smith, respectively - for some of their most iconic photographs. And Mapplethorpe also gained notoriety by photographing New York’s gay and S&M culture of the 1970s.

Understanding how certain individuals, locations, culture, and war contribute to the originality and novelty of artistic and scientific creations provides the material for some of today’s psychology researchers. These scientists place creativity at the center of their studies, trying to interpret how and what influences it; many apply these interests in the specialized area of social psychology and creativity.

The field of Social Psychology comes under the American Psychological Association’s (APA) Division 8, or the Society for Personality and Social Psychology. The APA states that social psychology concerns itself with how individuals are affected by other people and their social and physical environments.

Adding the creativity specialty to the field of Social Psychology simply means deciphering the creative processes within sociocultural contexts. Or, for instance, trying to understand how New York’s culture of the 1970s played a role in Mapplethorpe’s creative output. Or why Paris in the early 20th century produced so many outstanding, creative minds.

A context for creativity

In her seminal book “Creativity in Context,” Theresa M. Amabile of Harvard University, summarizes of the work of creativity within the social psychology field.

First published in 1983 when the field was in its infancy, and then revised in 1996, “Creativity in Context” provides the groundwork for this field that many researchers today cite when researching the intersection of environment and creativity.

From the book’s 1983 edition to its revision in 1996, Amabile shows the progression of research that took place for those 12 years, and her prolific research since that time has continued to add to her scholarship.

The first studies in social psychology and creativity, Amabile states, were not experimental in nature, but more biographical studies:

“The most active area of creativity research, then, has been the description of the peculiar characteristics of famous or widely recognized creative people, living and dead, or the description of differences in personality and intellect between people who do well on creativity tests and people who do not.”

Because artists and their lives make intriguing stories, their eccentricities and nontraditional lifestyles often far outside of life’s mainstream, researchers at first targeted personality traits as a major creativity component. However, such a narrow focus soon became problematic. (see Identifying Creative Personalities).

Creativity is complex, and while some individuals like Picasso or Hemingway had larger-than-life personalities, other eminent creative individuals had less extreme personalities. It soon became apparent that creativity is idiosyncratic, and difficult to explain based exclusively on traits.

From 1983 to 1996, studies began to look more at creative situations and circumstances. Researchers didn’t completely discount the personality dimension of creativity, but soon hypothesized that social situations and environments also significantly impacted creativity. Others saw personality and environment intricately linked.

“Whatever an individual’s talents, domain expertise, and creative thinking skills, that individual’s social environment - the conditions under which he or she works - can significantly increase or decrease the level of creativity produced,” Amabile states in “Creativity in Context”.

Much of Amabile’s research focuses on her hypothesis that intrinsic motivation plays one of the most essential roles in creativity. She admits that many researchers differ on how they define intrinsic motivation, but as a general rule, she means the internal drive to create for its own inherent rewards rather than extrinsically earned rewards, such as incentives, rewards, grades or highly controlling environments.

For a more thorough discussion of Amabile’s work on intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, see the section entitled "Motivation" in Creativity in Childhood, and "How managers unknowingly drain meaning from a worker’s job" in Creativity in Business.

A growing field

Since 1996, researchers have expanded on Amabile’s motivational theory, as well as moved the research into many other areas, such as how parents, teachers, home and classroom environments, and peers affect creativity.

For example, in the study “Revisiting the Birth Order-Creativity Connection: The Role of Sibling Constellation” published in the Creativity Research Journal, researchers examined the effect of birth order on creativity.

Examining sibling age, sex differences, and the number of siblings, Markus Baer and colleagues from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign showed that “growing up with a large group of opposite-sex siblings or with a large group of siblings relatively close in age seems to positively affect the creativity of firstborns.”

However, as siblings were separated by larger gaps in age, the creativity of firstborns suffered.

Another article “Solitude Experiences: Varieties, Settings, and Individual Differences” published in the Creativity Research Journal explored the positive and negative aspects of solitude.

Psychologist Christopher R. Long and colleagues noted that rarely do psychologists look scientifically at how solitude benefits individuals.

In the study of 320 university students, the researchers asked the participants to describe two recent experiences of solitude, one negative and one positive. Most of the negative experiences identified a particular instance of solitude as relating to feelings of loneliness. But the positive experiences of solitude identified several beneficial aspects, including self-understanding, self-renewal, and creativity.

The researchers defined solitude as being alone, either around others such as in an eating establishment, or in their dorm rooms, or alone in nature or the wilderness.

For those who described their solitude positively in terms of creativity, they defined their experience as stimulating novel ideas or innovative ways of expression, whether in art, poetry, or intellectual pursuits, or whimsically daydreaming with a purpose. (The definition of creativity centers on novelty and innovation – or original forms of expression. See Definition of Creativity).

Bohemian Paris

On the flipside, many artists, writers, and scientists who are well known for their eminent creativity describe the camaraderie of other creative individuals as contributing to their creative output.

Paris of the early 20th century is an environment well known for its bohemian culture that produced many of the most influential artists of the century. They met in cafés, bars, and restaurants of Montmartre, the Left Bank, and Montparnasse, talking of their work, debating, pushing the boundaries of what society, other artists, and critics considered respectable and appropriate. They supported and championed a new era of open-minded – and often controversial – ideas, lifestyles, and forms of expression.

This environment attracted the leading creative individuals from all over the world, including writers like Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and James Joyce, painters such as Picasso and Georges Braque, and composers such as Erik Satie and Igor Stravinsky.

Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has studied creativity for 40 years, and teaches at Claremont Graduate University. He has explored the lives of more than 90 of the world's most creative people, such as author Madeline L'Engle and scientist Jonas Salk, to find out how creativity has been a force in their lives.

He discusses the importance of “place” in his book “Creativity, Flow And The Psychology of Discovery And Invention,” stating that inspiring, scenic environments often attract the creative inspiration. Yet place means much more than scenery.

Those who seek creativity also seek novelty, and novelty means the unconventional, an atmosphere that provides excitement, a stimulating interchange of ideas. Those who want to breakaway from the conventional are drawn to those areas of experimentation and pushing the boundaries.

“The young artists who were drawn to Paris from all over the world at the end of the last century lived in a heady atmosphere where new ideas, new expressions, and new ways of living constantly jostled one another and called forth further novelty,” Csikszentmihalyi states.

And it’s exactly these types of environments that intrigue social psychologists wanting to pursue the idea that place, individuals, culture, and society dramatically affect and contribute to creativity.

If you are interested in how people, places and cultures affect creativity, contact schools offering degrees in psychology or social psychology. Some schools also offer degrees or certificates in creativity and psychology, and those interested in social psychology can specialize their studies and research in this area.