Creativity vs. Intelligence
In North-American society, intelligence is often valued over creativity. Although I am no expert –an English major with a minor in psychology, it seems to me that intelligence has been a major domain of research in the field of psychology, whereas the study of creativity has been given much less attention. Never, in my three years at McGill, have I studied creativity in my psychology courses …never. The closest I got was studying “critical thinking” –where you are encouraged to think outside the box, mainly in order to solve a puzzle or a math problem. The term “critical thinking”, not creativity was used –although these two were practically synonymous. Creativity is not academic … it’s a hobby right? Or as Einstein says, it’s just “Intelligence having fun”. Intelligence, on the other hand, has figured a lot more in my textbooks, whether in cognition, or even social psychology courses. From Spearman’s development of the IQ to Gardner’s theory of Multiple Intelligences, intelligence has understandably been taken with utmost seriousness. Many theories have been found to measure this construct, but what about the measuring of creativity?
Curious to find out more about this subject, I googled “measuring creativity” and found an article from a scientific web-magazine titled “Four Ways to Measure Creativity” http://www.senseandsensation.com/2012/03/assessing-creativity.html .
This article provided four models based on research for assessing creativity. The first, the Guileford Measures, are used to test a person’s creativity (in contrast to the other models which focus on measuring the creativity of a work). These measures include fluency, flexibility, originality, and elaboration. Tested through circle prompts for drawing (where one could draw a smiling face or a bowling ball for instance), these measures are indicators of creativity –where flexibility for example, denotes variance in the type of drawings. These measures are interesting since they suggest the idea that creativity is multi-faceted. Perhaps, a theory of Multiple Creativities can be developed, paralleling the theory of Multiple Intelligences. And maybe creativity can also be measured more generally, like IQ. What about someone’s CQ (creativity quotient)? Perhaps it would be more prone to variability than IQ but it might still be a useful indicator of divergent thinking.
Although I have set these two concepts in contrast throughout this article, I am sure that there is much overlap between intelligence and creativity. After all, you need intelligence to be creative. But do you also need creativity to have intelligence? Where do these concepts intertwine? Perhaps our North-American culture is responsible for a separation between the two. I’d also be curious to explore how do other cultures make sense of these two concepts. Do some cultures value creativity above intelligence? Or do other cultures view these two as one and the same?
Especially in North-American society, has creativity been granted second place against intelligence? As our society places greater importance on science and neglects art, perhaps it is no wonder that research has favored the field of intelligence.
