Creativity, if you have it, is a wonderful gift. With the ability to find fresh solutions to old problems or generate artistic works that entertain and inspire, wealth and fame may await. It’s no wonder that many self-help books promise to tell us how to boost our creativity.
The problem is, despite many decades of searching, psychologists still struggle to explain what it is that makes some people more creative than others.
The traits that tend to get associated with it are: ‘openness to experience’ (one of the ‘Big Five’ personality dimensions at the core of modern psychology, alongside conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism), which is about how much you’re prepared to try new things and how sensitive you are to aesthetics; intelligence (pretty self-explanatory); and ‘divergent thinking’ (the ability to think freely and come up with various solutions to a specific problem).
But even taken all together, these factors only explain a small amount of the difference in people’s creativity (less than a fifth by some accounts).
Some of the remaining difference, according to Dr Marco Giancola, a psychologist at the University of L’Aquila in Italy, may come from the so-called ‘dark triad’ of personality traits.
In a study recently published in the journal Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts, he argues that we’ve neglected to look at the contribution that narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy make to creativity.
It’s a compelling idea and past research has suggested that these traits are linked with greater creativity, albeit weakly. And anecdotally we can probably all think of single-minded ‘maestros’ who won't let anyone get in the way of their success.
“There’s an old and rather seductive image of the creative individual: brilliant, difficult, unconventional, extremely driven and largely indifferent to what everybody else thinks,” says Giancola. “Like most successful stereotypes, it probably contains a fragment of truth surrounded by a considerable amount of mythology.”
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Prisoners of the picture
Giancola believes that exploring why the dark traits are associated with creativity could be revealing. He’s particularly interested in a concept that dates from the 1940s known as ‘field independence’.
First investigated by the US psychologists Prof Solomon Asch (of the classic ‘conformity experiments’ fame) and Dr Herman Witkin, field independence is about focusing on what matters without being too distracted by context.
“Imagine that I show you a very simple geometrical shape and then hide it inside a complicated drawing. Some people look at the drawing and almost immediately say, ‘There it is’,” Giancola explains. These people have high field independence.
“Others can stare at exactly the same picture for quite some time because the whole configuration dominates what they see,” he adds. “They are, so to speak, prisoners of the picture.” These people are high in field dependence.
To test the associations between the dark triad personality traits, field independence and creativity, Giancola gave a series of questionnaires to over 200 university students. These included questions about their personality and their creativity.
Crucially, he also tested their field independence via a perceptual task that involved repeatedly locating simple shapes camouflaged in a cluster of other shapes (faster performance was taken as a sign of higher field independence).
Giancola found that all three of the dark triad traits were correlated with high field independence and, in turn, that higher field independence was correlated with greater creativity.
The dark triad traits also correlated with creativity and a third of this association was channelled via field independence.
“Importantly, that pattern emerged while statistically accounting for several established correlates of creativity, including openness to experience, fluid and crystallised intelligence, divergent thinking and previous creative expertise,” says Giancola.
“I think the result encourages us to move away from asking whether a trait is simply ‘good’ or ‘bad’ for creativity. That’s probably too crude a question,” he says.
“A more interesting question is whether a personality disposition makes certain ways of processing information more likely, and whether those ways of processing information are useful in particular creative contexts. Field independence may be one part of that story.”
No care for convention
Although Giancola’s study measured field independence using a perceptual task, historically the concept was also considered to have a social dimension.
The idea is that the same person who’s able to ignore the irrelevant context in a perceptual task will also be the one who’s willing to shun convention.
“In the classical literature, field-dependent people tended to be described as more attentive to social cues and more interpersonally oriented, whereas field-independent people showed greater autonomy from external referents,” says Giancola.
Described this way, it doesn’t take a huge leap to see how field independence could be beneficial in situations that require creative or unconventional thinking.
“A certain resistance to external influence may make somebody rather difficult around a committee table,” Giancola explains. “[But] the same resistance may become useful when everybody around that table has accepted the wrong solution.”
Thinking about this social aspect of field independence, it also makes sense to see how people who score highly in the dark triad traits might be inclined towards this way of thinking, even if for slightly different reasons.
For instance, someone who scores highly for psychopathy might care less about being evaluated by others; the narcissist might have great faith in their own insights; and the Machiavellian could be singularly focused on what’s useful to them.
What Giancola doesn’t want us to take away from this is the idea that nurturing the darker sides of our personalities could help us be more creative.
“Dark traits are neither necessary nor sufficient for creativity,” he says. “The wider literature doesn’t support the simple idea that having a ‘darker’ personality gives somebody a general creative advantage.”
He does believe there could be mileage in training people to achieve greater field independence, however.
He points out that there is some older literature that suggests it might be possible for people to improve their field independence scores for perceptual tasks (those akin to locating shapes camouflaged in clusters of other shapes) with practice and spatial training.
Giancola’s study didn’t test the feasibility of training, but it’s something that he wants to explore next. “Until then, it’s a hypothesis,” he says. “A promising one, I think, but still a hypothesis.”
But before you ask AI to create a field independence training programme for you using a bunch of geometric puzzles, it’s worth mentioning a few notes of caution about the new research, many of which Giancola acknowledges himself.
To start with, the student sample he used displayed only modest scores on the dark triad traits and he relied on them to report their own creative achievements.
Also, there was only a perceptual measure of field independence (not a social one), and the entire study was cross-sectional, meaning any causal links weren’t established.
Furthermore, the dark triad traits were only weakly linked to the students’ track record of being more or less creative.
All in all, when it comes to the psychological holy grail of creativity, the hunt is very much still on.
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