Identifying and developing creative giftedness

Educators as well as psychologists tend to view creativity as a gift from God, nature, genetic heritage, or some other source over which one has no control. An alternative view of creativity, however, is that it is, in large part, a decision (Sternberg, 1999c, 2000). According to an investment theory of creativity, people who are creative are those who decide to interact with ideas in the same way good investors interact with stocks: They buy low and sell high (Sternberg & Lubart, 1995). In other words, creative people generate ideas that are unusual and that defy the crowd and often are viewed as bizarre by their colleagues. This process is analogous to researching and then buying stocks selling at a low price-to-earnings ratio. The creative people then try to convince people of the value of their ideas. They then sell high, meaning that once some people have been convinced that the ideas do indeed have value. The creative people move on to their next unusual idea. They do not just stick with the same idea forever. This process is analogous to selling stock at a profit rather than holding on to it indefinitely.

There was a time when creativity might have been viewed as something of a luxury. People stayed in the same job for their entire career. Moreover, the nature of that job changed little over the course of their career. Much of what most people needed to know they learned in school and the rest could be learned on the job during the early years of employment.

That time is gone, probably forever, as the world changes at a staggering pace. Technology moves ahead in leaps and bounds. Countries that once were ruled by bad guys now are ruled by good guys, and vice versa. Social customs change rapidly, and what it is permissible to say in professional and personal interactions fluctuates continually. People change jobs frequently and, even if they stay in the same job, the nature of their work changes. Students who fail to acquire a flexible and creative attitude toward life are at risk for obsolescence, not only in their knowledge, but also in their skills for coping with life.

Students develop their creativity simply by learning the attitudes with which they need to approach their work and the decisions they need to make. They thus develop creative giftedness as a decision-making skill. Students can learn how to be creative by observing creativity at work in any field of endeavor. If we want to identify creative individuals, therefore, we are better off looking at the decisions they make rather than at the supposedly fixed abilities they possess. People can be viewed as possessing a rough level of creativity in a given domain at a given time, but this level is modifiable. Hence the function of identifications and assessments of creativity is not to give a reading of a fixed trait, but rather to show where a person stands at a given time in a given domain.

In this article, I describe 10 decisions people can make to be creative in their lives. Of course, the list is not exhaustive (see essays in Sternberg, 1999a). But it is a start. Teachers can show students how to make these decisions by: explaining each decision; describing examples of these decisions (as in the capsule teaching case studies below) of well-known individuals who have made these decisions successfully; and using teaching activities that encourage students to make these decisions. Many (but not all) of the examples I give are from my own field of psychology. The examples below show how anyone can decide for creativity. Creative giftedness is, in effect, a gift one can give to oneself.

From a theoretical standpoint, the view presented in this article is very different from the traditional notion of creativity as a fixed ability (Guilford, 1968; see also chapters in Sternberg, 1999a) that permeates thinking in psychology and education. But it is wholly consistent with a notion of creativity as a modifiable ability. In a set of recent articles, I have argued that abilities are actually forms of developing expertise (Sternberg, 1998, 1999b). In other words, abilities are like any other form of expertise: they represent an interaction between genes and environment. Anyone can develop their abilities, at least to some extent, within broad limits set by genetic endowment.

Thus, here are 10 decisions characteristic of people who decide for creativity. They can be the present view, the bases for identification, development, and assessment of creativity, rather than any allegedly fixed traits of abilities or even personality. They are what enable people to produce work that is novel, high in quality, and appropriate to the task at hand.

1. Redefine Problems. Redefining a problem means taking a problem that most people see in one way, and allowing and even prodding oneself to see it in another way. It means not simply accepting things because other people accept them.

Teaching example. A marvelous example of problem redefinition can be found in the thinking of Lev Vygotsky (1978). Vygotsky refused to accept the notion that a conventional test of abilities would tell a psychologist all or almost all the psychologist needed to know about a child's potential. Vygotsky pointed out that most virtually all extant testing was static testing: children are given a test and then given a score. Vygotsky broke out of the conventional testing box when he introduced what today has come to be called dynamic testing – the notion that one can teach children at the time of test to separate cognitive skills that are already developed from those that are still developing (see Grigorenko & Sternberg, 1998). The difference between the two formed the child's zone of proximal development.

There are many other examples as well. Impressionist artists such as Manet and Monet challenged traditional views about the function of artistic representation and how such representation should be realized. In music, Beethoven redefined what classical music could be by introducing more emotion and passion into music, a redefinition that became the basis for compositions of the romantic period. In physics, Einstein totally redefined the way the universe is perceived.

In sum, creatively gifted persons do not allow themselves to become stuck with other people's definitions of problems, or even with their own past definitions. The creatively gifted individual is continually seeking to define problems in new ways.

Teaching Activity. The goal of this activity is to help students see an aspect of the world in a way that is different from the way it often has been seen. Through this exercise, students will realize that phenomena in the world often can be viewed in diverse ways.

Either present to students a well-known phenomenon or ask them to find such a phenomenon on their own. For example, young and sometimes not so young students in the United States tend to think of months such as June and July as warmer months and months such as December and January as colder months. But does it have to be so? Even many adults do not appreciate that, in the southern hemisphere, the hot and cold months are reversed from those in the northern hemisphere. The U. S. students also may not realize that, for much of the world, to go north means to go toward warmer climates, and to go south means to go toward colder ones. Thus, students can learn to redefine summer and winter not in terms of particular months, but in terms of particular months relative to the hemisphere one lives in. Scientifically, they can learn about the relation of the sun to the earth and its effect on seasons. Similarly, young students often do not realize that the time of day is relative to longitude in the same way that seasons are relative to latitude. Students can learn to reconceive the times of day for them as a function of the position of the sun relative to the sun in a given location of the earth rather than as somehow fixed in all the world. At a more advanced level, students can learn that time is not even a constant at all, and that as an object accelerates toward the speed of light, it moves more slowly through time.

2. Analyze Your Own Ideas. No one has only good ideas. Even the most imaginative individuals sometimes make mistakes. Students need to learn to critique their own ideas – to be the first to decide which of their ideas are really worth pursuing, and later, to admit when they have made a mistake. Everyone should retain a healthy degree of skepticism about any idea he or she has. No one is right all the time, and people who lose their skepticism about their own ideas may quickly reach dead ends in their thinking because they may believe they have all the answers.

Teaching example. One of my own undergraduate mentors was Robert Crowder, a famous memory psychologist at Yale University. Crowder became well known early on for his theory of precategorical acoustical storage (Crowder & Morton, 1969). Over time, evidence accumulated that was quite damning for his innovative idea. Crowder made the decision to retract his idea in print (see Greene & Crowder, 1984). Such a decision took a lot of guts. The creative person not only comes up with ideas, but also is willing to admit when the ideas need to be modified or dispensed with altogether.

Of course, there are many other examples. Carl Brigham, the inventor of the test now known as the SAT, started off with many racist beliefs, and later recanted these beliefs. He analyzed his views, realized he was wrong, and had the strength to admit it. Indeed, many of the founding fathers of the United States started off as royalists, analyzed their beliefs, and came to the conclusion that a democratic system would serve the country better than a royalist one would.

Teaching activity. The goal of this activity is to help students critique strengths and weaknesses of their ideas. Ask students to analyze the idea they have presented in the first activity above (e. g., regarding the seasons). What are the strengths of their alternative interpretation and what are the weaknesses? Can they improve upon their idea in order to make it stronger?

In sum, creatively gifted people do not just present the first idea that comes to mind. They are reflective about ideas and analyze them to make sure that they are the best of which they are capable at a given time.

3. Sell Your Ideas. When we are young, we may believe that creative ideas sell themselves. They don't. The creative process does not end with their generation or even with their being critiqued. Because creative ideas challenge existing ways of doing things, they must be sold to the public – whether scientific or lay.

Teaching example. B. F. Skinner, the famous behaviorist, recognized until his dying day the necessity of selling his ideas. He assertively did so, through talks, essays, experiments, and even a novel. He was selling his ideas right up to the last days of his life. Noam Chomsky, with a totally contrasting ideology, spent much of his early career trying to sell the field of linguistics and the general public on the idea that language is not wholly learned but is an expression of an innate competence. Students need to learn that good ideas don't sell themselves. Students need to take responsibility for persuading people and convincing them of the validity of their ideas.

Teaching activity. The goal of this activity is to teach students that the process of persuading others of the value of a creative idea is part of being creative. Ask students to write an essay or present an oral report explaining, defending, and trying to promote an idea in which they believe. Emphasize to the students the importance of their “selling” their idea by showing its strengths and by trying to defend it against possible critiques.

In sum, creatively gifted people develop skills in persuading others of the value of their ideas. They realize that people often will not recognize the value of these ideas, and so they devise ways to demonstrate such value to others.

4. Knowledge is a Double-Edged Sword. To be creative, one has to be knowledgeable: One cannot go beyond what is known without knowing it. But knowledge can also impede creativity (Frensch & Sternberg, 1989). Experts can become entrenched in ways of seeing things and lose sight of other perspectives. It becomes important, therefore, for teachers to impress upon students that students have as much to teach teachers as teachers have to teach students. The teachers have the advantage of knowledge, the students, of flexibility. Working together, they can accomplish more than either can on their own. Teachers have to be especially careful that they not dismiss students' views simply because the views happen not to fit into their own views of the world.

Teaching example. My own graduate advisor, Gordon Bower, a psychology professor at Stanford University, told me once that a key to his success was letting his students lead him. In this way, he was able to walk down many paths that otherwise would have been closed to him. He made a decision – the decision to use his knowledge to enhance rather than diminish his creativity. The best teachers always try to learn from their students as well as to teach their students. These teachers realize that learning is a life-long endeavor. They stay creative by constantly trying to expand upon the knowledge base they already have.

Teaching activity. The goal of this activity is to help students realize that theories apply only to limited ranges of behavior. Lead students to study a major idea. For example, Kohlberg (1963) proposed that there are universal stages of moral development – that people all over the world develop a sense of morality in the same way. Do they? What kinds of research might we do to find out whether people all over the world have the same sense of morality and develop it in the same way? Whether people do or do not have the same sense of morality, does the fact that people believe something to be moral mean that it necessarily is?

In sum, creatively gifted people do not let themselves become entrenched. They do not let knowledge and expertise interfere with their seeing things in new ways. They listen to other people with less expertise because they realize that people with less expertise may have flexible ways of perceiving problems or arriving at solutions that they, as experts, never would have thought of.

5. Surmount Obstacles. Because creative people defy the crowd, they inevitably confront obstacles. The question is not whether they will confront obstacles, but whether they will have the guts to surmount them.

Teaching example. John Garcia is a wonderful example of a scientist with the guts to surmount obstacles. When he proposed that a certain form of learning could occur in just one trial of learning, he was dismissed by many psychologists as a crackpot. He had great difficulty persuading many of his colleagues that he should be taken seriously, and was practically unable to get his work published. Years later, upon winning the APA Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award, Garcia (1981) wrote an essay recounting his travails. Creative people like Garcia make the decision to fight for their beliefs.

Many of the most creative people throughout history have had to fight for their beliefs. Galileo was tried for heresy as a result of his scientific claims. The great Norwegian artist, Edvard Munch, received such a bad reception from critics at his first art exhibition in Germany that the exhibition was closed the same day that it opened. One cannot assume that others will welcome creative ideas: Often they oppose them because these ideas go against current ways of thinking.

Teaching activity. The goal of this activity is to help students realize that good ideas do not gain immediate acceptance. Have students read Garcia (1981), or any account in the history of an intellectual discipline, of the difficulty creative individuals have in gaining acceptance for new ideas. Ask the students to reflect on ideas that they may have had for which they have had difficulty in gaining acceptance. Brainstorm strategies to win acceptance of ideas that initially seem peculiar to other people. Such strategies include presenting the ideas so that they relate to ideas the people already have; presenting the ideas very clearly; and showing people the benefits of accepting the new and unusual idea.

In sum, creatively gifted people realize that they can expect opposition to their ideas. Indeed, they realize that they should welcome opposition, because opposition helps them develop and refine their ideas. Moreover, if a person's ideas are always accepted right away, the chances are that these ideas are not very creative or may not be the best ideas of which they are capable of.

6. Take Sensible Risks. Our educational system often encourages students to play it safe. On tests, students often prefer to give safe answers. When they write papers, they try to second-guess what their teachers want to hear. But creative people must be willing to risk something, and in the process, to fail some of the time in order to succeed other times. Teachers need to encourage such risk-taking.

Teaching example. Elaine Hatfield, a psychologist, decided to expose herself to enormous risk when she started her studies of love. Today, the study of love is a well-accepted and growing field. But when Hatfield started studying love, many psychologists viewed the work as out of acceptable bounds. So did a United States Senator. William Proxmire, of Hatfield's own state of Wisconsin, bestowed upon Hatfield his Golden Fleece Award for wasting taxpayer money. Proxmire publicly ridiculed Hatfield, saying that love was best left to the poets. The risk paid off, however, and today Hatfield and her colleague Ellen Berscheid are viewed by many psychologists as the founders of the scientific study of love. Had they been unwilling to risk as much as they did, who knows when or if this field would have come into being? They knew that nothing ventured, nothing gained.

Teaching activity. The goal of this activity is to help students realize that doing creative work requires people to take some degree of risk. Ask students to go through their class notes carefully and to write a brief essay critiquing an interpretation you (the teacher) gave in class. Tell the students that it is essential that they support their belief and that their tone be constructive. Tell them also, however, that as a scientist, you welcome alternative interpretations. Then evaluate the essay and show that you are willing to react in a constructive and non-defensive way to their critique. You might also help them improve their critique and their tone. The important thing is to show them that they can take sensible risks and be rewarded, not punished.

In sum, creatively gifted people are willing and even eager to take sensible risks. They have an attitude of nothing ventured, nothing gained. But they do not take foolish risks that endanger their own or others' well-being without any likelihood of a creative benefit.

7. Willingness to Grow. Many people have one creative idea early in their career, and then spend the rest of their life unfolding that idea. They become unwilling or even afraid to go beyond that idea. Perhaps early on they fought the scientific or other establishment to win acceptance of that idea. Later, they become that establishment, fighting against the new ideas that threaten their own self-perceived monopoly on truth.

Teaching example. When I was a graduate student, William Estes, then a psychology professor at Harvard, gave a colloquium at Stanford. He started it off by noting that the research he was going to discuss that day he had funded himself. People gasped. Estes explained that, previously, he had had no trouble gaining funding. But then, he submitted to his funding agency a proposal to study perception rather than the usual proposal to study memory. The reaction of the grant panel was that if Estes wanted to study memory, the field in which he had established his reputation, that decision was fine. But they were unwilling to fund him to study perception. They said that they did not know whether he could succeed in an entirely different field. Estes therefore funded himself, succeeded, and later gained fame – as well as funding – in his new area of endeavor. Only through his willingness to grow and escape pigeonholing was he able to turn to a whole new field of creative endeavor.

Teaching activity. The goal of this activity is to encourage students to grow by having them challenge their own beliefs. Ask students to take a belief they have regarding human nature (or anything else) of which they are really quite convinced. It might be a belief regarding how people learn, why people become angry, why abortion is acceptable (or unacceptable), or whatever. Ask them to commit this belief to writing. Then ask them to write a brief essay arguing persuasively for the opposite point of view. At the end of the essay, they should indicate whether writing this essay has helped them better understand the point of view of people who disagree with them.

In sum, creatively gifted people are eager to grow. They do not get stuck on a creative idea when they are young and then never let it go. Rather they are constantly looking for new problems and new solutions to challenge themselves in their thinking and in their creative production.

8. Believe in Yourself. Creative people often find that their ideas are receiving a poor reception. I suspect that all truly creative people come to believe, at some time or another, that they have lost most or all their external sources of intellectual and even emotional support. At these times, in particular, it is particularly important that they maintain their belief in themselves. If they lose this belief, they will find themselves with nothing.

Teaching example. Dean Simonton, a premier researcher in the field of creativity, has described to me (personal communication, February 9, 2000) how, in graduate school, he was roundly criticized by some of his professors for the kind of historiometric work he was starting to do in his studies of creativity. Such work uses available historical records to understand the antecedents of creativity. One professor told Simonton that he never would achieve even one publication in a respectable scientific journal. Had Simonton lost belief in himself, he never would have continued with the research that has landed him numerous publications in first-line journals and made him one of the most widely cited psychologists in the field of creativity, or in any field.

Teaching activity. The goal of this activity is to show students that they can do tasks that they may have thought themselves unable to do, if only they believe in the possibility that they can do it. Tell students that research shows that, with serious and deliberately reflective practice, people can do many tasks that neither they nor others have thought they would be able to do (Ericsson, Chase, & Faloon, 1980; Ericsson & Lehmann, 1996). In other words, the greatest obstacle to becoming a great musician or athlete is often not lack of talent, but the amount of deliberate practice an individual is willing to invest to develop excellence. Then ask students to find a task that they thought would be very difficult to do, and describe how they could set up a plan in order to accomplish that task. The task might be to play a difficult piece of music successfully, to lose a certain amount of weight, to reach an athletic goal, or whatever. You may wish also to have them actually follow through on their plan and report on their follow-through.

In sum, creatively gifted people believe in their ability to do creative work. They do not necessarily believe that every idea they ever have will be a good one, but rather, that they are capable of producing creative ideas, and that even if at a given time they are not doing so, they can expect that in the future they will.

9. Tolerance of Ambiguity. When we try creative things, we often find that in their early or even sometimes late stages, they do not work out the way they seemingly should. We go through prolonged, uncomfortable stages of ambiguity where things just do not quite fall into place. Yet, in order to be creative, we need to tolerate ambiguity long enough to get our ideas right.

Teaching example. One of the more famous studies in the history of memory research was the set of studies that led to the development of the encoding-specificity principle (Tulving & Thomson, 1973). In this research, my mentor Endel Tulving and his colleague Donald Thomson showed that, given the right retrieval conditions, recall memory could be greater than recognition memory. At the time, this was an astonishing fact. But the research leading up to this finding did not appear magically one day and work out right the very first time. Tulving had to find the situations in which recall would be better than recognition (Tulving, personal communication, February 9, 2000). He was willing to tolerate ambiguity long enough in order to get things right and thereby make an outstanding creative contribution to the field of memory. Similarly, Watson and Crick were able to discover the structure of DNA because they were willing to tolerate ambiguity and many false leads for a long enough period of time so that they eventually could come to the correct conclusion.

Teaching activity. The goal of this activity is to encourage students to recognize and appreciate the ambiguity inherent in much thinking in academic disciplines. Ask students to read a piece that appears to present a highly persuasive theory or analysis. For example, they might read a section of Herrnstein and Murray's (1994) book, The Bell Curve. Ask them whether they found the analysis convincing. Then have the students read a critique of what they have read (e. g., there are many critiques of Herrnstein & Murray, such as Sternberg [1995]). Ask the students whether the original analysis still seems as persuasive, and why or why not. The particular topic is not so important. The original piece could be on communism followed by a critique by an adherent of capitalism, or vice versa. Or the original piece could be on one interpretation of the Civil War in the United States, followed by another. The important thing is for students to realize that attaining understanding often is not a sudden process. One must tolerate ambiguity for long periods of time in order to build a comprehensive understanding of the world.

In sum, creatively gifted people are willing to tolerate the discomfort of ambiguity long enough to develop, refine, and present their ideas. They realize that creative work often involves periods of uncertainty – sometimes long periods of uncertainty – that are uncomfortable and sometimes even demoralizing. The creative people are willing to wait out these periods for the benefit of the creative ideas to come.

10. Find What You Love to Do and Do It. If research about creativity shows anything, it is that people are at their most creative when they are doing what they love to do (see, e. g., Amabile, 1996). As teachers, therefore, we need to encourage students to find their own niche – their own love in school or in anything else – and not to try to turn them into disciples who will do “our thing” rather than their own.

Teaching example. My own interest in intelligence was able to evolve in large part because, in junior high school, when the head school psychologist threatened to burn my copy of Measuring Intelligence if I ever brought it into school again, my seventh-grade science teacher, William Adams, supported my interest and encouraged me to pursue it. Later, my undergraduate and graduate mentors, few of whom were much interested in intelligence, allowed and encouraged me to pursue my own interests rather than forcing me to pursue theirs. Many musicians and artists grew up in families in which their parents much would have preferred that their children follow a safer career path.

Teaching activity. The goal of this activity is to show students how any field of endeavor can accommodate an astonishing array of outside interests. Ask students to reflect on an interest they have that is outside a given field of study and to give a brief oral presentation or write a brief paper that relates this interest to something in the field being studied. For example, they might show how art or music reflects certain historical or religious beliefs, or how literature reflects certain scientific beliefs as to what is physically or biologically possible and what is not. Students might do a psychological analysis of a literary character, or a literary analysis of a psychological principle. For example, Tom Sawyer used powerful persuasive principles taught in courses on psychology to persuade his friends to whitewash Aunt Polly's fence. Be sure to have students share their projects and a summary of their findings with others. In this way, students can see how they can pursue a diversity of interests through the window of the study of a discipline.

In sum, creatively gifted people find what they love to do and do it. Sometimes they need to do it as an avocation, as is the case for most poets and many aspiring actors. These people do not give up because the road to creative success can be long and challenging.

Conclusion

To conclude, anyone can make the decision to be creative. The ten decisions described above are not matters of fixed abilities. Nor are they matters of fixed personality traits. Rather, they are attitudes toward work and toward life – decisions to be made. Teachers and students alike can decide for creativity. But students probably will not do so unless they are encouraged to do so. It is our responsibility as teachers to provide such encouragement and to reward students who decide for creativity. We need to teach students not only to learn the facts, and not only to think critically about them. To become the people they are capable of being, we need to teach students to decide for creativity.

(By Robert J. Sternberg // Roeper Review, Dec 2000 v23 i2 p60.)

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