The Impact of Social Culture on Creativity: A Comparative Study Between the United States and China

Abstract

Social culture can either foster or inhibit students' creativity and individuality. When the social culture is open and supportive of individual growth, it will create a nurturing environment for students to think freely, critically and creatively. This study was designed to compare the impact of the Chinese and American social culture on students' creativity and to identify possible factors that hinder Chinese students' creativity. Preliminary findings showed that the Chinese social culture in general inhibited students' creativity by repressing Chinese students' sense of "self" in areas like social standards, cultural rules, parents' expectations, instructional methods, and practical life/career goals. It is hypothesized that these social culture and beliefs are deeply rooted in China's historical philosophies such as Confucianism.Descriptors: Social culture, Confucianism, philosophy and education, creativity, comparative education Theoretical FrameworkCreativity was traditionally considered as a personality trait or a general fixed ability that cannot be changed. However, more recent psychologists have addressed the effects of environmental factors on creativity. For example, Amabile (1982,1983,1996); Amabile & Conti (1997) stated that creativity should be understood as a behavior resulting from the interactions among personal characteristics, cognitive abilities and social environments, and that all social and environmental factors including the social context, culture and environment have a cumulative effect on one's creativity. Simonton (1984Simonton ( , 1994 also suggested that historic time and social environment play an important role on fostering creativity. Beyond that, Csikszentmihalyi (1997) suggested that societies and schools not only nurture creativity, but also provide a selective social context to decide what or who is judged as creative. According to the investment theory of creativity (Sternberg & Lubart, 1991, 1995, development of creativity requires six resources: intelligence, knowledge, style of thinking, personality, motivation, and learning social context. In other words, creativity is not just determined by nature such as one's natural potentials but also by nurture such as how the individual interacts with the environment and the context.