5.3.2 Creative Persons

Descriptions of the creative person typically fall into three general categories: cognitive characteristics; personality and motivational qualities; special events or experiences during one's development. We shall discuss each category in turn.

It is generally acknowledged that people are creative within particular domains of endeavor, even though people who are creative in different domains may share common traits. Thus, one may be a creative biologist, but a very uncreative novelist, or vice versa. This is a curious statement, given that when the issue of domain specificity occurs in discussions of creative processes, much less agreement ensues. Nonetheless, domain specificity is a major consideration when describing creative persons, and it goes along with other characteristics such as using one's existing knowledge in the domain as a base to create new ideas, being alert to novelty, and finding gaps in domain knowledge. Although, it is generally agreed that creative individuals are creative within limited domains, various explanations have been offered for why individuals differ in their propensities toward and abilities in their domains of specialty. Csikszentinitialyi, Gardner, Perkins, and Walberg, for instance, attribute such specificities to inborn sensitivities to particular types of information or modes of operation. Gardner and Gruber and Davis, however, discuss unique combinations of intelligences, whereas Walberg emphasizes highly practiced skills as a factor.

A list of cognitive characteristics that are shared by creative people, regardless of domain, can be grouped into three sets: traits, abilities, and processing styles that creative individuals use and possess.

First, there are the four traits that are commonly said to be associated with creative individuals: relatively high intelligence, originality, articulateness and verbal fluency, and a good imagination. The next set of characteristics that have been used by creative persons includes the following cognitive abilities: the ability to think metaphorically, flexibility and skill in making decisions, independence of judgment, coping well with novelty, logical thinking skills, internal visualization, the ability to escape perceptual sets and entrenchment in particular ways of thinking, and finding order in chaos. Finally, creative people may also be characterized by the way in which they approach problems (i.e., style); some of the most commonly mentioned processing styles include using wide categories and images of wide scope, a preference for nonverbal communication, building new structures rather than using existing structures, questioning norms and assumptions in their domain (asking “Why?”), being alert to novelty and gaps in knowledge, and using their existing knowledge as a base for new ideas.

The one characteristic that seems to prevail among creative people, however, is what seems almost to be an aesthetic ability that allows such individuals to recognize “good” problems in their field and apply themselves to these problems while ignoring others (Perkins; Stemberg; Walberg). What accounts for this sense of aesthetic taste and judgment? Perhaps it is some combination of the foregoing characteristics, perhaps it is better explained by the personality or motivational characteristics to be presented next, or maybe it is a separate factor altogether. Whatever the particular explanation, this aesthetic sense is clearly a pervasive feature of creative persons and one that is worthy of greater study, not just in the arts, in which we think of aesthetics as being of primary importance, but in a variety of domains, including scientific areas, in which we do not usually think of aesthetics as playing an important role, at least when investigated superficially.

As with the cognitive characteristics, there is no one personality or motivational characteristic that is useful for attaching the label ‑creative‑ to a particular person. Rather, creative personalities are composed of a constellation of many characteristics, some of which may be present in one creative individual, but not in another, and thus mentioned by some authors, but not others. The most commonly mentioned characteristics include a willingness to confront hostility and take intellectual risks, perseverance, a proclivity to curiosity and inquisitiveness, being open to new experiences and growth, a driving absorption, discipline and commitment to one's work, high intrinsic motivation, being task‑focused, a certain freedom of spirit that rejects limits imposed by others, a high degree of self‑organization such that these individuals set their own rules rather than follow those set by others, and a need for competence in meeting optimal challenges; though often withdrawn, reflective, and internally preoccupied, creative individuals are also said to have impact on the people who surround them.