Creating Through Deviancy or Adjustment? The Link between Personality Profile Normativeness and Creativity

Abstract

Does deviancy or adjustment predict creativity? To address this question, we tested the association between personality profile normativeness (similarity between one’s personality profile and the average profile—a proxy for the deviancy-adjustment continuum) and creativity across four different samples (total N = 348,768). We used a wide range of creativity measures, including self-reported, informant-reported, behavioral, and occupational creativity, as well as several essential statistical controls (i.e., demographics, socio-economic background, intelligence, and life satisfaction). Furthermore, we employed both cross-sectional and longitudinal designs, including samples of college students and representative adult populations. We found that people who had more normative personality profiles were more creative. However, this association only held within modality (i.e., when both personality and creativity were either self-reported or informant-reported). We did not find robust associations between personality profile normativeness and laboratory-based behavioral measures or creativity, occupational creativity, or creative achievements. We discuss alternative explanations for the observed adjustment-creativity link, specifically, implicit theories of creativity and person perception biases (halo effects). Notably, the findings did not support the idea that deviancy breeds creativity, suggesting that the famed “mad genius” hypothesis might not hold among the general population.

Negligible effects of birth order on selection into scientific and artistic careers, creativity, and status attainment

“…To measure occupational creativity, prior to any data analyses, the authors independently selected all relevant occupational abilities and thinking skills that (a) pertained to creativity following the above definitions and (b) were available in the O-NET database. Agreement rate was 85% and only three items appeared to be directly relevant to occupational creativity and were therefore included in the measure (for previous work using this measure, see Sutu et al, 2019): originality (defined in O-NET as "the ability to come up with unusual or clever ideas about a given topic or situation, or to develop creative ways to solve a problem"), fluency of ideas (defined in O-NET as "the ability to come up with a number of ideas about a topic"), and thinking creatively (defined in O-NET as "developing, designing, or creating new applications, ideas, relationships, systems, or products, including artistic contributions"). Although the two measures of originality and fluency might have sufficed to satisfy prior definitions of divergent thinking, we included "thinking creatively" (as defined in O-NET) in our measure of occupational creativity, because we wanted to capture an exhaustive list of the measures available and we thought this latter measure was not redundant with the former two as it reflected a more applied aspect, necessary in the occupational creativity context.…”