Creativity : Children’s development and individual differences
Todd I. Lubart
University of Paris V, France
The capacity for creative thinking—the capacity to generate ideas that both original and
adaptive to situational constraints—develops during childhood. This presentation will
examine how the nature of creativity evolves with age and the cognitive, conative and
environmental factors that are most relevant. Drawing on results from a series of
cross-sectional and longitudinal studies of 6- to 16-year olds, several key issues will be
discussed. We will look, for example, at the extent to which creativity is a general
ability at each age or a set of specific abilities; do children tend to be creative to the same
extent in a set of diverse tasks? Our findings suggest that the generality of creative ability
varies with development. Next, the role of certain cognitive abilities will be examined.
For example, results on the relationship between children’s creative thought and their
ability for logical thought suggests that at some moments the development of these two
capacities may be linked. In terms of conative factors the development of
creativity-relevant traits such as risk taking will be discussed. Next, the importance of the
environment for creative development will be highlighted. In particular, the extent to
which the way that rules govern family life influence creativity will be addressed, with
analyses contrasting families that have rigid, flexible or loose systems of rules for children.
Finally, implications of this work promoting creativity through educational programs will
be suggested.
The evolving nature of creativity during childhood
According to some authors, creativity is a gift, predetermined for each individual
according to his or her genetic endowment. For others, creativity may have some genetic
bases but is in large part due to environmental circumstances, with family and school
playing an important role of catalyst. In any case, it seems that young children are not
ready from day 1 to be creative in the same way as adults. For example, very young
children, such as 2 year olds who are just learning to speak, may produce unusual
utterances without really understanding the sense of the words that they have put together.
Adults may interpret these children’s utterances in creative ways; however, is this
creativity in the same sense as an adult who purposively breaks with linguistic tradition to
express a new idea through modern poetry?
In fact, one of the key capacities that
develops, I would argue around 4 years old, is an understanding!! of constraints that must
be respected when solving a problem or completing a task. Children thus begin at a
certain moment to be able to generate behaviors that fit with implicit or explicit rules.
We may potentially discuss creativity only when novel thinking can be “controlled” to fit
within some boundaries, some constraints. Another important development that seems to
occur for children is a shift in the way that ideas, including novel ones, are sought. Up until
approximately 10 years of age, although this varies across individuals, associative thinking
seems to be the main mechanism for seeking ideas. Indeed, sometimes this associative
mechanism makes it difficult to follow “logically” the sequence of thoughts that children
produce when trying to solve problems. However, with cognitive development, certain
logical thinking capacities are put in place, as has been shown in the extensive literature on
cognitive development. Around 10- to 12-years old, a more logically!!-oriented strategy
for ideas becomes available to most children and provides a powerful alternative way to
seek new ideas. This is another key developmental step in the evolution of creative
thinking. Some specific data concerning this idea will be presented a little later. In fact,
all throughout its development, creative thinking is linked to cognitive and social
development. Some authors postulate, for example, that many adolescents experience a
decline in creativity (which is temporary for some and permanent for others). This
decline is attributed to the emergence of strong peer pressures around 13 to 16 years old to
fit with one’s peers.
To illustrate the basic idea that creative thinking unfolds during childhood and
slowly reaches its adult form, consider some studies that Christophe Mouchiroud and I
conducted on the generality and specificity of creative capacity for children from 6 to 16
years old (Mouchiroud & Lubart, in press). We were interested in whether children tend to
show a general creative capacity or rather a set of specific creative capacities. Studies
with adults show that the correlations between creative thinking tasks, such as writing an
original short story and making a creative drawing, tend to be positive but weak, often near
r = .30 . This correlation, a measure of concordance between performance on two tasks for
a sample of individuals indicates that task performance is not completely independent but
is not highly linked either. It is interesting to examine whether children show the same
partial task specificity or if they have a generalized creative capacity that, with increasing
life experiences, becomes more and more specialized.
We explored these ideas in a cross-sectional study in which 90 children aged 6- to
11-years old completed a set of creative divergent thinking tasks. These tasks included
certain parts of the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking, such as generating many unusual
uses for a cardboard box, a storytelling task, and a set of tasks that we created concerning
creative thinking in social situations. An example of these social creativity tasks is
having children generate as many original ideas as possible in order to join a group of
children who are already playing a game, or ideas to convince one’s parents to give their
permission to let the child watch television later than usual.
We found that the social creativity tasks correlated rather well between themselves
for each age group but for 6- to 7-year olds these tasks showed very weak correlations with
object-oriented creative tasks, such as the box task, and with the story task. This suggests
that at an early age, there are specific kinds of creativity and children may show different
levels of performance for each kind. Concerning the results for 7-8 year olds, the pattern
of correlations distinguishing different kinds of tasks was less clear. Finally for the 11- to
12-year olds, there were relatively strong correlations between all the various
creative-thinking tasks (social, object-oriented, short story). Thus for this age group we
may refer to a general capacity for creative thinking.
In a second study with children aged 11- to 16 years old, we replicated the initial
results for the 11- to 12-year old group and observed that the correlations between tasks
were lower and decreased for the older age groups. The 15-16 year old group was rather
similar to adults, showing a high degree of task specificity in their creative performance.
Thus, there seems to be developmental periods when creativity is more general and other
periods when it is more domain or task specific. We have proposed, based on other
findings, that these developmental trends are linked to concurrent development, of general
verbal intelligence, and of domain specific expertise through life experience. In any case,
this research illustrates that the nature of creativity seems to vary with age and develop in
children.
A multivariate approach to creativity and its development
Recently, a number of authors have developed a multivariate approach to creativity
in which an individual’s creative potential is viewed as the result of a set of cognitive
abilities and task-relevant knowledge, personality traits and motivations, and
environmental factors that may facilitate or inhibit creative thinking (Amabile, 1996;
Lubart, 1999; Sternberg & Lubart, 1995). For example, important cognitive abilities
include the insight relevant capacities of selectively encoding, comparing and combining
information, divergent thinking, and evaluation of one’s emerging ideas. Relevant
personality traits are risk taking, individuality, openness, perseverance and tolerance of
ambiguity. The environment involves a person’s family, school or work situation, and the
broader cultural context. Environments may be physically rich (full of stimuli that are
sources of ideas), socially rich (full of interesting people for exchanging ideas and
challenging one’s thoughts), or emotionally rich (e.g., providing support against the
rejection of new ideas). When these components combine interactively it is possible to
understand the wide range of individual differences observed in children and adults. It is,
in particular, possible (but statistically rare) that all of the components are optimized for a
given individual and exceptional levels of creativity result. Consider now some
developmental work concerning these cognitive, conative and environmental factors.
Cognition
As mentioned, a range of intellectual capacities have been found to be important for
creativity. In our recent work, we have devised specific measures of some of these
capacities. For example, we constructed a test of sensitivity to cognitive change using
visual stimuli, which relates to selective encoding capacity. In this test, a child sees a
series of images that change slightly each time (e.g., the face of a lion that becomes a face
of a monkey). The child must indicate what is portrayed and we score when the child
notes that the initial object or animal displayed has become something different. This
particular test correlates with creativity in a drawing task in children.
In another line of work on the cognitive basis of creativity, we conducted
semi-longitudinal research with 8- to 12-year-old children. We examined how
performance changes with age on the verbal subtests of the Torrance Tests of Creative
Thinking and storytelling tasks. We found that the mean developmental patterns vary
according to the task, with a temporary slump in performance for certain tasks around 9- to
10-years old. These tasks concerned finding unusual uses for well-known objects (a box
and a string). Close examination of children’s responses suggested that there was a
reorganization around 9- to 10-years old concerning the way that children search their
knowledge base for new ideas. Younger children engaged in a primarily free associative
search, whereas from 10 year old many children employed more systematic search patterns
based on logical category structures. Interestingly, certain modes of logical thinking
become fully operational after 9 years o!!ld according to post-piagetian studies. Thus, it
seems that creative development and cognitive development are closely connected.
Conation
In terms of the role of personality traits and motivation in children’s creativity and
development, a number of studies have begun to look at how traits such as risk taking
develop and play a role in creativity or how intrinsic and extrinsic motivators influence
children’s creative performance. In particular, Amabile, Hennessey and their
collaborators have worked on this latter topic. I would like to mention briefly a study that
I find interesting for thinking about personality, creativity and the potential impact of
schools on its development. Clifford (1988) examined children’s risk taking in academic
situations. She asked children at various grade levels (10- to 12-year olds) to solve
problems of their own choice in verbal, mathematics, and other academic domains. The
problems were clearly labeled as being appropriate for average children of various ages
(age 6 to 14 years old). The results were somewhat surprising and disturbing. Children
aged 10-years old selected problems designed for their age group, 11-year olds tended to
chose problems geared towards 10 year olds, and for the oldest children the difference was
even larger between real age and the age-level of the problems selected. This shows that
children were increasingly risk averse with age, which is smart for getting good grades in
school. This result, which we replicated with somewhat different tasks in France, can be
considered disturbing, however, in terms of creativity because creative thinking involves
taking risks, going against standard ideas, exposing oneself to failure and negative
comments from peers, teachers, or parents. In research with adults, we have found that
people who respond to hypothetical domain-specific situation scenarios in a way that
shows willingness to take risk tend to produce more creative work in tasks in the domain
examined (Lubart & Sternberg, 1995). These considerations among others led to the
development of what we call the investment approach to creativity (Sternberg & Lubart,
1995). In this view, many people are not creative because they are unwilling to pursue
unknown or little valued ideas, they don’t “buy low.” Being creative is, in part, a
philosophy of life, which is acquired through childhood experiences.
Environment
Several authors have proposed that one of the key influences on creative development is
the physical and social environment of the child. The family environment, for example,
may provide cognitive (e.g., intellectual stimulation) and affective (e.g., emotional
security) support for creativity as well as providing the physical setting in which a child
grows (Harrington, Block & Block, 1987).
Research by Lautrey (1980) and others has explored a social-cognitive dimension of the
family environment, the “structure of family rules” for daily life, which has been found to
influence intellectual development. In particular, families that have some structured rules
to guide children but modify occasionally these rules provide both the structure and the
perturbations of this structure that foster cognitive development. The families with
“flexible” rules can be contrasted with those having “rigid” rules and those that lack rules
in general.
In a series of studies with Parisian children (7 to 12 years old), we examined how these
variations in family rule systems are related to creativity. Children completed creativity
tasks from the Torrance battery (which focus on divergent thinking) and parents responded
to a questionnaire on family life. This parental questionnaire contained 20 items that
measured whether each family’s system of rules for children was rigid, flexible, or
unstructured. The questionnaire also assessed demographic and socioeconomic status. A
sample question is :
When your child plays at home :
a) Your child can play only in certain places that you specified. (rigid rule)
b) You have specified places for playing games but your child can play outside of these
areas under certain circumstances. (flexible rule)
c) Your child plays wherever he/she wants. (lack of rule)
To characterize the family environment, we use two types of scores : (a) The number of
questionnaire responses indicating a flexible rule structure (a continuous variable). (b) A
categorization of each family as either predominantly flexible in its rule structure or
predominantly rigid (a categorical variable). We found that the number of “ flexible ”
rule responses (by parents) correlated positively with creative performance (Fluency) of
children (correlations ranging from .12 to .4- depending on the sample, and the creativity
task). The analysis of contrasted groups confirmed the correlational trends and showed
that children from families with mainly “rigid” parental rules were, on average, less
creative than families characterized mainly by “flexible” rules. Analyses concerning
socioeconomic status show three results. First, creative task performance is related to
SES (high SES, greater fluency). Second, family rule structure is rel!!ated to SES (high
SES associated with flexible rules and low SES associated with rigid rules). Third, and
most importantly, the positive relationship between flexible family rules and creative task
performance occurs at each level of SES.
Thus, our research studies indicate that there is a positive relationship between the
flexibility of family rules and creative task performance in children (measured by the
number of ideas produced). This result seems to hold across socioeconomic levels and
remains after intelligence-related variables (such as factor g) are controlled statistically.
In summary, the results suggest that family rule structure shows a small but consistent
relationship to creative task performance. Family rule structure may be one of the
components of the environment that influences creativity in children
Implications for Educational settings
The different points highlighted in this presentation lead to several
recommendations for developing children’s creativity through educational programs.
These programs may be school-based or family-based. First, knowledge of how
creativity develops and its links with general cognitive and social development will help
educators to devise programs that fit with the capacities and zone of proximal development
for children at each age. In other words, what we may propose to foster creativity for 6
year olds will not be the same as what we would propose to 12 year olds. Second, most
existing creativity enhancement programs focus on training children to think divergently.
This is a valuable but limited intervention because there are other relevant cognitive
abilities that also can be trained. In addition, following the logic of the multivariate
approach to creativity presented earlier, we need to provide exercises that foster relevant
conative aspects of creativity, such as practicing taking risks, and seeing that failure is not
to be avoided at all costs. Finally, in terms of the environment, we need to understand that
schools and family settings provide role models for children. Research suggests that
many teachers and parents do not really value creativity and consider an ideal child to be
one who sits quietly, asks questions of clarification and does not rock the boat. Thus, if
we want really to foster creativity we may need programs that try to educate parents and
teachers as well as to promote creative thinking directly in children.
References
Amabile, T. M. (1996). Creativity in context. Boulder, CO: Westview.
Clifford, M. M. (1988). Failure tolerance and academic risk taking in ten- to twelve-year
old students. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 58(1), 15-27.
Harrington, D. M., Block, J. H., & Block, J. (1987). Testing aspects of Carl Roger’s
theory of creative environments: Child-rearing antecedents of creative potential in
young adolescents. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 52(4), 851-856.
Lautrey, J. (1980). Classe Sociale, Milieu Familial, Intelligence. [Social Class, Family
Environment, and Intelligence]. Paris : Presses Universitaires de France.
Lubart, T. I. (1999). Componential models of creativity. In M. A. Runco & S. Pritzer
(Eds.) Encyclopedia of creativity (pp. 295-300). New York : Academic Press.
Lubart, T. I., & Sternberg, R. J. (1995). An investment approach to creativity: Theory
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approach (pp. 271-302). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Mouchiroud, C. & Lubart, T. I. (in press). Social creativity: A cross-sectional study of 6to 11-year old children. International Journal of Behavioral Development.
Sternberg, R. J., & Lubart, T. I. (1995). Defying the crowd: Cultivating creativity in a
culture of conformity. New York: Free Press.