Are We Creative?

Very few humans are creative, but almost all humans are good at imitating. Imitation is a special skill that has allowed humans to reproduce rapidly and dominate the planet. We can imitate other humans, but we can also imitate animals as well. However, sometimes imitation is mistaken for creativity and this can lead to us overestimating the creativity level of an average person and underestimating the creativity of the most creative people.

Our success as a species has come from the technological advancements created by a tiny fraction of the population. The rest of us (99%+) would likely still be picking fruit off of trees and throwing rocks at animals to try to kill them if it weren’t for this tiny fraction of one percent of people that were outliers and created almost all innovation that drives our society and human success.

Innovation has increased in recent times and a larger percent of people innovate compared to the past. This is not because we are smarter or more creative than 1000s of years ago, but because we have more access to other people’s ideas and inventions to change slightly and then claim that we are very smart and creative for inventing something new.

If all humans lived in hunter gatherer tribes isolated from most other humans in the world, then creativity would almost completely cease to exist because what we call creativity is almost always imitation. Without seeing lots of inventions and ideas, without reading books, without listening to other people’s music etc, then many of the people we perceive to be creative and intelligent would not be able to create anything original at all.