1. society

THOMAS
WOLBERS
Professor, Ageing & Cognition, German Centre for Neuro­
degenerative Diseases, Magdeburg, Germany
THREE PATHWAYS BY WHICH CULTURE CAN
INFLUENCE CREATIVITY
Three pathways by which culture
can influence creativity
Thomas Wolbers
Creativity is often defined as an idea / a solution / a product
that is both novel and useful. But what determines whether a
person produces something that others perceive as creative?
Most people tend to think that the key factor that determines
whether someone is creative is some kind of innate personality
trait. For example, Van Gogh was given the ability to produce
ingenious paintings, Dostojewski was immensely talented at
writing grippling stories, and Einstein’s scientific creativity led
to groundbreaking discoveries. Similar mechanisms, of course,
are thought to be at play in less famous cases (i.e. the sister
who makes beautiful jewellery).
This individualistic view, however, overlooks the fact that our
behaviour is also shaped by the culture we live in, largely
through social norms, contexts that cue them, and motives
that drive us to follow, reject or invert those norms. This
influence of culture extends to the domain of creativity, where
its impact is thought to occur at multiple stages (Figure 1):
culture can influence a person’s cognitive abilities and pre­
ferences, it can affect the process of being creative, and it
can have an influence on how the output of a creative process
is being judged.
CREATIVE PROCESS
CREATIVE OUTPUT
Cognitive Processing
Flexibility
Novelty
Areas of creative pursuit
Persistence
Usefullness
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Preferred Style
CREATIVE POTENTIAL
CULTURAL INFLUENCE
Figure 1:
Cultural influences on the creative potential of an individual (left column), on the way creative processes
unfold (middle column), and on the evaluation of the creative output (right column)
Cultures of Creativities
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CREATIVE POTENTIAL
– CULTURAL INFLUENCES ON COGNITIVE PROCESSING
AND THE AREAS OF CREATIVE PURSUITS
explained in terms of culture norms and values, i.e. East Asians
define the self in terms of social obligations and networks in
an interdependent manner, while Westerners see the self as
unique and separate from others in an independent manner.
As shown in the left column of Figure 1, an individual’s creative
potential is largely dependent on his/her cognitive abilities
and on how these relate to the area in which one chooses to
be creative. Put simply, Van Gogh was a gifted painter, but had
he tried to make a career in science, we might not know him
today. Current research on the origins of intellectual abilities
suggests that about 50 % of our intellectual abilities can be
explained by genetic variations (Davies et al., 2011), leaving
another 50 % open to external influence.
In addition to shaping cognitive processes, individuals may be
highly creative in domains that ‘fit’ their cultural values. For
example, Korea with its strong cultural valuation of status and
interdependence is the world leader in the industry of massively
multiplayer simulation games, which involve accruing and using
status and maintaining coalitions (The Economist, 2003).
Further, at lower levels of analysis (e.g. in work teams), one
may see greater creativity in preserving smooth interpersonal
relations among individuals from cultures valuing harmony and
group cohesion. In contrast, among individuals from Western
cultures, more creative ideas about acquiring and maintaining
independence and individual freedom may be seen. Put differ­
ently, cultural differences may not only appear in the extent
to which individuals or groups are creative, but also in the
specific areas in which their creativity emerges. Individuals
may be more creative in some domains than in others because
their cultural background values those domains and focuses
the individual’s cognitive and motivational resources.
There is good evidence that culture can shape basic perceptual
processing and that it can influence how people deploy atten­
tional focus. For example, people in Western cultures tend to
focus on salient objects and use rules and categorization to
organise the environment, whereas people from Eastern cul­
tures focus more holistically on relationships and similarities.
These findings have been backed up by eye tracking data,
which show that when viewing complex scenes, people from
Western cultures mainly explore salient local objects, where­
as people from Eastern cultures explore the background more
(Chua, Boland & Nisbett, 2005). Similarly, another study
(Hedden et al., 2008) asked subjects to simply judge the length
of a vertical line either in absolute terms or relative to a
surrounding frame. For Chinese subjects, the relative task was
easier, but this advantage was smaller for those that were more
acculturated to the US. Such behavioural findings are generally
Cultures of Creativities
CREATIVE PROCESS
– CULTURAL INFLUENCES ON CREATIVE STYLE
As shown in the middle column of Figure 1, creativity usually
involves two types of processes: the flexibility pathway and
the persistence pathway (Nijstad et al., 2010). Cognitive
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flexibility refers to the ease with which people can switch to
a different approach or consider a different perspective, and
cognitive persistence represents the degree of sustained and
focused task-directed cognitive effort. Importantly, persistence
is generally thought to manifest itself in the generation of
many ideas in a few categories only – however, when given
sufficient time, an individual may eventually move from com­
bining old elements into mundane ideas to producing increa­
singly novel yet appropriate ideas → in other words, the same
level of creativity may be reached through both pathways!
another culture. A famous example is the reception of Ang Lee’s
movie Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which was acclaimed by
Western film critics for its stylistic innovations, whereas
Chinese critics judged it as Ang Lee’s weakest movie,
presumably because they had seen many similar movies before
(Hempel & Sue-Chan, 2010).
Finally, culture can determine the weights people assign to
usefulness and novelty – so even if two cultures were to assign
the same usefulness and novelty values to a given creative out­
put, they might judge it very differently in terms of how crea­
tive it is. For example, as Morris and Leung (2010) note, there
is quite some evidence that Chinese culture values usefulness
more than novelty, whereas Western culture values novelty
more than usefulness (Morris & Leung, 2010). To the extent
that culturally divergent social norms are salient, individuals
with an Eastern background may be more concerned with
usefulness than originality and engage different implicit or
explicit standards to downplay or elaborate ideas and insights
than their counterparts with a Western background.
Cultural values, beliefs, and norms surrounding the individual
may predispose him or her to engage in flexible, loose proces­
sing, to take risks and explore the unknown without fearing to
be ridiculed for coming up with distracting and bizarre ideas
and insights. Other cultural values, beliefs, and norms may,
however, predispose individuals to engage in more incremental,
cautious, and analytical processing, to avoid excessive risk and
trying to be incremental and cumulative. Specifically, Western
cultural norms, with their emphasis on individual freedom and
independence, have been shown to steer individuals towards
the flexibility pathway whereas Eastern cultural norms, with
their emphasis on social connectedness and interdependence,
nudge individuals towards the persistence pathway. In other
words, cultural norms may actively bias people towards flexibi­
lity or persistence, i.e. in the way they promote risk-taking vs.
cautiousness, being radical vs. incremental etc. In an economi­
cal context, such differences can have direct consequences for
the success of an organisation – for example, “inventions result
more frequently from projects with incremental objectives
in Japan (66 percent) than the U.S. (48 percent), and less
frequently from projects with breakthrough objectives in
Japan (8 percent) than the U.S. (24 percent).”(Morris & Leung,
2010)
REFERENCES
Chua, H.F., Boland, J.E. & Nisbett, R.E. (2005), ‘Cultural variation in eye move­
ments during scene perception’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
of the United States of America, vol. 102, no. 35, pp. 12629-33.
Csikszentimihalyi, M. (1997), Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and
Intervention, New York: Harper Collins.
Davies, G., Tenesa, A., Payton, A., Yang, J., Harris, S.E., Liewald, D., Ke, X., Le
Hellard, S., Christoforou, A., Luciano, M., McGhee, K., Lopez, L., Gow, A.J., Corley,
J., Redmond, P., Fox, H.C., Haggarty, P., Whalley, L.J., McNeill, G., Goddard, M.E.,
Espeseth, T., Lundervold, A.J., Reinvang, I., Pickles, A., Steen, V.M., Ollier, W.,
Porteous, D.J., Horan, M., Starr, J.M., Pendleton, N., Visscher, P.M. & Deary, I.J.
(2011), ‘Genome-wide association studies establish that human intelligence is highly
heritable and polygenic’, Molecular psychiatry, vol. 16, no. 10, pp. 996-1005.
CREATIVE OUTPUT – CULTURAL INFLUENCES ON
HOW THE END PRODUCT IS JUDGED: WHEN IS AN
IDEA CREATIVE? AND HOW CREATIVE IS IT?
Hedden, T., Ketay, S., Aron, A., Markus, H.R. & Gabrieli, J.D. (2008), ‘Cultural
influences on neural substrates of attentional control’, Psychological science, vol.
19, no. 1, pp. 12-7.
A third pathway for cultural influences on creativity is the
evaluation of the result. As noted by (Csikszentimihalyi, 1997),
creativity lies in the eye of the beholder – it is commonly
assessed by a community of experts in a field (i.e. a profession,
craft etc.), relative to what is already established in this field.
As a consequence, given that there are often large differences
in the prevailing ideas and practices between different
cultures, a product/idea etc. judged as being very crea­
tive in one culture might be perceived very differently in
Cultures of Creativities
Hempel, P.S. & Sue-Chan, C. (2010), ‘Culture and the Assessment of Creativity’,
Management and Organization Review, vol. 6, no. 3, pp. 415-35.
Morris, M.W. & Leung, K. (2010), ‘Creativity East and West: Perspectives and
Parallels’, Management and Organization Review, vol. 6, no. 3, pp. 313-27.
Nijstad, B.A., De Dreu, C.K.W., Rietzschel, E.F. & Baas, M. (2010), ‘The dual
pathway to creativity model: Creative ideation as a function of flexibility and
persistence’, European Review of Social Psychology, vol. 21, no. 1, pp. 34-77.
The Economist (2003), ‘Invaders from the land of broadband’, December 11.
Available from: www.economist.com/node/2287063.
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