hypnagogue said:
You're right that trying to quantify creativity is problematic. But the same could be said of quantifying any mental attribute. A given kind of scale may not measure exactly what we want it to, it may miss certain things or mischaracterize others. No scale is going to capture perfectly the thing it intends to measure. The question though is whether a scale can offer a quantification that is on some level useful and faithful to reality, not whether it is perfect.
If the scale isn't measuring exactly what you want it to and missing certain things, then you have to treat the result very tentatively and without confidence. Any list of questions might reveal something "useful" and "faithful to reality" without necessarily being what you intended to uncover. The initial task is to question and define what is meant by the term, and I really doubt they've satisfactorily done that.
In a couple of the studies I linked to they measured creativity using the Barron Welsh Art Scale (BWAS). A description of the scale:
Quote:
The scoring of this test is based on "like" and "dislike" responses to figures of varying complexity and symmetry that provide a comparison with preferences indicated by artists. Thirty-eight simple and/or symmetrical figures disliked by artists and 24 more complex and/or asymmetrical figures liked by artists comprise the BWAS's Dislike and Like subscales, respectively; total scores combine responses to these subscales. People whose scores are more in accord with the likes and dislikes of artists are considered as having greater creativity.
I think this scale is clearly a measure of a certain kind of aesthetic taste, but not creativity. I can like what Dali likes without being able to generate anything Dali-like myself, or anything Dali would enjoy, for that matter. The average art collector ought to score high on this scale as should the average art appreciator, neither of whom might also exhibit any creativity in practice. At most this scale seems to imply that if you like Michelangelo you can be assumed to be as creative as Michelangelo, which would be an outrageous claim. At least it seems to imply that if you like art you are automatically capable of producing art.
Of course a scale like this is not going to exhaustively and perfectly characterize the varieties of things we might mean when we say "creativity." But is the information it provides us useful for assessing something like what we mean by "creativity" in a quantitative way?
It might constitute a start, if nothing else: a very preliminary way to filter people out.
"Existing research suggests that it does.
Quote:
Whatever the ultimate nature of the configuration or style of personality captured in scores on the BWAS—and the search for such an absolute may be as futile and meaningless as a search for the philosopher’s stone—there is no doubt about the convergence of our own studies as well as those cited in the appended bibliography in showing that the measures do identify creative talent, and that they do this independently of intelligence, personal soundness, gender, age, and other powerful determinants that all too often limit the utility of our assessment tools.
This, to me, reads as gobbeldy-gook. After first asserting they're not sure what they've identified they suddenly assert certainty about the very subjective concept: "creative talent": very vague assertions being made in a confident tone, someone doing their best to put a positive spin on their research paper.
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One big problem in trying to quantify anything about artists is that, upon close examination it often turns out that any two given artists are up to two very different things despite the fact they're expressing these impulses in the same medium. In the same way The US and England are characterized as two countries separated by a common language, Picasso and Norman Rockwell would have to be acknowledged as being two artists separated by a common medium: up to two extremely different things despite the commonality of canvass and oil paint.
The other problem is that creativity isn't limited to art. What makes Einstein and Feynman stand out could be convincingly characterized as their creativity, and often has been. Would they get a high score on this creativity test. They well might, I don't know, but non-artistically expressed creativity should also be taken into consideration when attempting to quantify creativity.
I see, also, a possibility for false positives for the reason I mentioned before: manic and hypomanic people sometimes indulge in shocking, unexpected behavior because they get a kick out of getting a rise out of people and for the high feeling of not being bound by convention and rules. Most bipolar people go off their meds, when they do, because they very much miss the exiting, invulnerable feeling of social freedom they have when manic. I think that kind of state of mind could easily masquerade as creativity on the kind of creativity test described here without such a person being also being able to produce any interesting artwork.
