Openness to experience, plasticity, and creativity: exploring lower-order to higher- order, and interactive effects (Silvia et al., 2009) November 24, 2009

Personality and Creativity ‘What are creative people like?’ Big Five Factors ▫Openness is the best predictor  Other factors often show negative (e.g. Conscientiousness) or positive (e.g. extraversion) correlations (not consistently enough)

The Huge Two (Silvia et al., 2008) Plasticity: Openness to experience + Extraversion ▫tendency to ‘explore and engage flexibly with novelty, in both behaviour and cognition’ (DeYoung, 2006, p.1138) Stability: Conscientiousness + agreeableness + emotional stability ▫tendency to ‘maintain a stability and avoid disruption in emotional, social and motivational domains’ (p.1138)

Huge Two Predictions Concerned with impulsivity, behavioural variability and control ▫High stability:  lower in externalising behaviours (DeYoung, Peterson, Séguin & Tremblay, 2008)  higher in conformity (DeYoung, Peterson, and Higgins, 2002)  higher in morningness (DeYoung, Hasher, Djikic, Criger & Peterson, 2007)  lower in divergent thinking (Silvia et al., 2008).

▫High plasticity:  higher externalising behaviour (DeYoung et al. 2008)  lower in conformity (DeYoung et al., 2002)  lower in morningness (DeYoung et al., 2007)  higher in divergent thinking (Silvia et al., 2008).

The Huge Two and Creativity Feist (1998) meta-analysis: ▫Creative people have high levels of plasticity traits and low levels of stability traits ▫Different combinations of plasticity and stability levels? Lack of study on interaction of latent predictors ▫Difficult to measure ▫LMS (Latent Moderated Structural) equation has fared well in simulation

Participants 189 General Psychology Students ▫University of North Carolina ▫(150 women, 39 men) Predominantly Caucasian and African-American

Procedure Participant groups of 2-10 Three divergent thinking tasks Questionnaire assessing demographics and individual differences ▫Everyday creative activities ▫Creative Achievement ▫Creative Self-Reports

Scales to measure the Big Five Four Scales ▫60-item Five Factor Inventory (Costa & McCrae, 1992) ▫50-item scale from International Personality Item Pool ▫Two 10-item scales (Gosling, Rentfrow & Swann, 2003; Rammstedt & John, 2007) ▫Response in 1-5 format

Divergent Thinking Create uses for a ‘brick’, ‘knife’, and ‘box’ ▫circle the two most creative Scores ▫ fluency (the number of responses) ▫creativity (the quality of responses)  as scored by four raters independently scoring each response on a scale of 1-5)

Everyday Creativity 28-item Creative Behaviour Inventory (CBI; Dollinger, 2007) “How often do you…” ▫ write a short story, ▫design and make a costume “Never did this”, “Did this once or twice”, “3-5 times”, “more than five times” Course or academic requirements did not count

Creative Achievement Creative Achievement Questionnaire (CAQ) 10-domain self-report scale (Carson et al., 2005)

Creative Self-Reports 9-item Creativity Scale for Different Domains 9CSDD; Kaufman & Baer, 2004) ▫“How creative are you?” ▫“How creative in the area of interpersonal communication?” Responses on a 1-5 scale Three domains: math-science factor, empathy- interpersonal factor, hands-on creativity factor ▫Plus a global self-concept question e.g. ‘how creative would you say you are in general?’ ▫Analysed as a multivariate model with four outcomes

Results – Model Specification The two components of divergent thinking were modeled using confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), with three indicators each. The Big Five and Huge Two were also modeled with CFA. Model fit was fairly weak due to a cross-loading of extraversion with agreeableness.

Overall Results (No interaction effect of Stability with Plasticity was found)

Discussion Openness is the only factor of the Big Five to have a strong effect on creativity. Stability and Plasticity influence creativity, but they do not interact in doing so. Going below the factor level is necessary for future research.