Do you consider yourself a creative person? If not, you may be holding yourself back. Psychologist Zorana Ivcevic Pringle says creativity isn't a trait. Creativity is a choice. After studying creativity for more than 20 years, she has some suggestions for how anyone can stick with their creative ideas. Guest host and producer Berly McCoy talks to her about her new book The Creativity Choice. Curious about more psychology research? Let us know by emailing [email protected] to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
Chapter 1: What is the significance of public media support?
Support for NPR and the following message come from Jarl and Pamela Moan, thanking the people who make public radio great every day and also those who listen.
Hey everyone, it's Emily Kwong. Before we start the show, you may have heard that President Trump has issued an executive order seeking to block all federal funding to NPR. This is the latest in a series of threats to media organizations across the country. Millions of people, people like you, depend on the NPR network as a vital source of news, entertainment, information, and connection.
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Chapter 2: Who is Zorana Ivcevic Pringle?
Hi Short Wavers, Burleigh McCoy filling the host chair today, and I'd like you to meet psychologist Zorana Ivcevic-Pringle. When Zorana was an undergraduate, she was searching for a thesis topic. To spark ideas, she was reading everything she could get her hands on, and she stumbled across work from the 1960s, during the space age, about creativity.
She read that creative people often have personality traits that don't seem to go together.
Creative individuals at times can be extroverted, other times very introverted. They can be playful, but also very serious about their work, can seem naive and see things with fresh eyes, but also be very focused in their work.
Chapter 3: Why isn't creativity just a trait?
In the two decades Zorana's been studying creativity, she's realized that even though creative people are unique, it's not because they're born with it. But that idea that some people are creative and some people aren't, what scientists call a fixed mindset, can stop creativity in its tracks.
Oftentimes, just the fact that we don't think of ourselves as creative is going to prevent us from ever attempting it.
But this idea is pervasive. We can sometimes think it's only the Einsteins or Beyonces of the world who are creative.
Chapter 4: What are Big C and mini-C creativity?
Scientists call those people Big C creators. Big C as big, influential, creativity, eminent creators. But they are not the only ones. Creativity exists on a continuum for what we call mini-C, creativity in the process of learning.
One example of mini-C might be your unique way of learning times tables.
Little c in everyday interactions and activities. Like gifting your friend a unique present. And Pro-C, that is professional creativity in our work contexts.
Like designing new software, writing a novel, or making a science podcast. So even if you aren't big C-level like Beyonce, you and anyone can always start by opting in to being creative. Which Zorana learned the hard way, after years of limiting herself.
Chapter 5: How can you choose to be creative?
I concluded that I was not creative, but I also noticed somebody else, a best friend of mine, who was creative, and I wanted whatever she had. I wanted to understand how is she able to do things that I did not think that I could do at the time. In retrospect, I think I was able to do it, but that I was not willing to make that choice.
That has changed, and it culminated into a very creative thing, a book called The Creativity Choice, about how creative people can stick with an idea. So today on the show, the science of creativity. We talk about how psychologists study it and the choices people make to grow their creativity. You're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
Support for NPR and the following message come from Jarl and Pamela Moan, thanking the people who make public radio great every day and also those who listen.
Okay, Zorana, so now let's talk about how you go about studying and measuring something so vague and mysterious as creativity. How do scientists study it?
Scientists have lots of different tools to study creativity. So if we think of creativity in its most basic form of coming up with original and appropriate or effective ideas, scientists have developed tests, oftentimes called tests of creative thinking or tests of divergent thinking.
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Chapter 6: How do scientists study creativity?
And an example of this test, probably the most frequently asked question, is how do we use a simple everyday object in new and different ways? So how can you use a brick? The instruction simply asks for as many answers as you can think of. And then we can look at how many different ideas can you come up with. And then we can look at the originality of those ideas.
When we are first asked the question, our mind goes to the most obvious answer. Well, we could build something with it. But then, as you exhaust those more obvious answers, you get into the area of originality. There you can come up with things that are really interesting. So you can grind a brick and make pigments from it. You can use it for a miniature mural. And you can go on now with...
answers that are going to be rare.
So this is the brick test. That's one way scientists can study creativity. What if they want to ask more complicated questions? What are some of those complicated questions and then how would scientists go about measuring that?
One method we can use is called experience sampling method. And what that means is that we want to see what people's experience is at different times on working on their creative project.
Technically, how we do it these days, we use our smartphones and their apps that send notifications at random times during the day to complete a series of questions, depending on the research question and what we are interested in studying. And at the end of the process, we have the final product that we can then evaluate for how creative it was.
And it's a judgment on a scale of, well, this is not creative at all to this is very creative. And there is a continuum there. And when we have a group of people who are experts in some way, so if they are judging pieces of art, they are artists or art critics or art professors, for example, we find that people tend to agree. when we see creativity, we recognize it.
even independently looking at it. Of course, there are limits to this technique, but it is very, to me, quite surprisingly robust.
Interesting. And one of the ways you write that people can build their creative skills is by being aware of their emotions and working with them to problem solve and even regulate those emotions. So how does building your emotional intelligence muscles feed into creativity?
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