Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-dzt6s Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-01-03T13:18:30.772Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

9 - Processes, Strategies, and Knowledge in Creative Thought: Multiple Interacting Systems

from SECTION TWO - CREATIVITY AND REASON IN COGNITION AND NEUROSCIENCE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2016

By
Michael D. Mumford ,
Tristan McIntosh ,
Tyler Mulhearn ,
Logan Steele  and
Logan Watts
Edited by
James C. Kaufman  and
John Baer
Michael D. Mumford
Affiliation:
The University of Oklahoma
Tristan McIntosh
Affiliation:
The University of Oklahoma
Tyler Mulhearn
Affiliation:
The University of Oklahoma
Logan Steele
Affiliation:
The University of Oklahoma
Logan Watts
Affiliation:
The University of Oklahoma
James C. Kaufman
Affiliation:
University of Connecticut
John Baer
Affiliation:
Rider University, New Jersey
Get access

Summary

To a naïve person, creativity looks to be a lot of fun. You get to make up something new – something that might, in fact, change the world. However, the evidence we have gathered in recent years suggests that for those actually doing creative work, although it may be fun, it is also challenging. Most creative efforts fail (Huber, 1998). Creative people look to the past and, potentially, past failures (Antes & Mumford, 2009). Criticism, including self-criticism, appears critical to the success of creative efforts (Cropley, 2006; Gibson & Mumford, 2013). Creative people must worry about constraints on their solutions (Medeiros, Partlow, & Mumford, 2015) and the acceptance of their ideas by others (Rubenson & Runco, 1992).

Although many factors contribute to the difficulty of creative work, the fundamental nature of creative thought may also play an important role. Ultimately, creativity is a complex form of performance involving the production of solutions of high quality, originality, and elegance (Besemer & O'Quin, 1993; Christiaans, 2002) to problems that are complex, novel, ill defined, and poorly structured (Mumford & Gustafson, 1988, 2012). It is commonly held that the production of these problem solutions depends on three key cognitive capacities: (1) knowledge, (2) strategies used in working with this knowledge, and (3) the processes these strategies are being used to execute. Each of these components of creative thought has been studied in isolation. For example, Finke, Ward, and Smith (1992) have studied the impact of knowledge on creative problem solving. Mumford et al. (1997) have studied the impact of processing activities on creative problem-solving. The impact of both cross-process strategies, such as divergent thinking, and process-specific strategies, such as feature search and mapping, on creative problem solving has been examined in studies by Acar and Runco (2012) and Baughman and Mumford (1995).

This research has begun to provide us with a sounder and stronger understanding of the nature of creative thought. By the same token, the difficulty of creative work may lie not only in the difficulty of executing each of these discrete cognitive operations, but also in the nature of the interactions observed among these cognitive capacities as people seek to generate creative problem solutions. In this chapter, we examine some of the interactions likely to be observed among knowledge, processes, and strategies as people seek to generate creative problem solutions.

Type
Chapter
Information
Creativity and Reason in Cognitive Development , pp. 164 - 186
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2016

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Acar, S., & Runco, M. A. (2012). Psychoticism and creativity: A meta-analytic review. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 6, 341–350.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Antes, A. L., & Mumford, M. D. (2009). Effects of time frame on creative thought: Process versus problem-solving effects. Creativity Research Journal, 21, 166–182.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barrett, J. D., Peterson, D. R., Hester, K. S., Robledo, I. C., Day, E. A., Hougen, D. P., & Mumford, M. D. (2013). Thinking about applications: Effects on mental models and creative problem-solving. Creativity Research Journal, 25, 199–212.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Baughman, W. A., & Mumford, M. D. (1995). Process analytic models of creative capacities: Operations involved in the combination and reorganization process. Creativity Research Journal, 8, 37–62.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Besemer, S. P., & O'Quin, K. (1993). Assessing creative products: Progress and potentials. In Isaksen, S. G., Murdock, M. C., Firestien, R. L., & Trefiinger, D. J. (Eds.), Nurturing and developing creativity: The emergence of a discipline (pp. 331–349). Norwood, NJ: Ablex.Google Scholar
Blair, C. S., & Mumford, M. D. (2007). Errors in idea evaluation: Preference for unoriginality. Journal of Creative Behavior, 41, 197–227.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bink, M. L., & Marsh, R. L. (2000). Cognitive regularities in creative activity. Review of General Psychology, 4, 59–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Byrne, C. L., Shipman, A. S., & Mumford, M. D. (2010). The effects of forecasting on creative problem-solving: An experimental study. Creativity Research Journal, 22, 119–138.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carlson, W. B., & Gorman, M. E. (1992). A cognitive framework to understand technological creativity: Bell, Edison, and the telephone. In Wever, R. J., & Perkins, D. N. (Eds.), Inventive minds: Creativity in technology (pp. 48–79). Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Christiaans, H. H. (2002). Creativity as a design criterion. Communication Research Journal, 14, 41–54.Google Scholar
Cropley, A. J. (2006). In praise of convergent thinking. Creativity Research Journal, 18, 391–404.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1994) The evolving self: A psychology for the third millennium. New York: Harper Collins.Google Scholar
Dewey, J. (1910). How we think. Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ericsson, K. A., & Charness, N. (1994). Expert performance: Its structure and acquisition. American Psychologist, 49, 725–747.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Estes, W. K. (1991). Cognitive architectures from the standpoint of an experimental psychologist. Annual Review of Psychology, 42, 1–29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Finke, R. A., Ward, T. B., & Smith, S. M. (1992). Creative cognition: Theory, research, and applications. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Friedrich, T. L., & Mumford, M. D. (2009). The effects of conflicting information on creative thought: A source of performance improvements or decrements?. Creativity Research Journal, 21, 265–281.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gibson, C., & Mumford, M. D. (2013). Evaluation, criticism, and creativity: Criticism content and effects on creative problem solving. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 7, 314–331.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goldvarg, E., & Johnson-Laird, P. N. (2001). Naive causality: A mental model theory of causal meaning and reasoning. Cognitive Science, 25, 565–610.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Holyoak, K. J., & Thagard, P. (1997). The analogical mind. American Psychologist, 52, 35–44.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Huber, J. C. (1998). Inventions and inventivity as a special kind of creativity, with implications for general creativity. Journal of Creative Behavior, 32, 58–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hunter, S. T., Bedell-Avers, K. E., Hunsicker, C. M., Mumford, M. D., & Ligon, G. S. (2008). Applying multiple knowledge structures in creative thought: Effects on idea generation and problem-solving. Creativity Research Journal, 20, 137–154.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kolodner, J. L. (1997). Educational implications of analogy: A view from case-based reasoning. American Psychologist, 52, 57–66.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Licuanan, B. F., Dailey, L. R., & Mumford, M. D. (2007). Idea evaluation: Error in evaluating highly original ideas. The Journal of Creative Behavior, 41, 1–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lonergan, D. C., Scott, G. M., & Mumford, M. D. (2004). Evaluative aspects of creative thought: Effects of appraisal and revision standards. Creativity Research Journal, 16, 231–246.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Marcy, R. T., & Mumford, M. D. (2007). Social innovation: Enhancing creative performance through causal analysis. Creativity Research Journal, 19, 123–140.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Marcy, R. T., (2010). Leader cognition: Improving leader performance through causal analysis. The Leadership Quarterly, 21, 1–19.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Medeiros, K. E., Partlow, P. J., & Mumford, M. D. (2015). Leader cognition in vision formation: Simplicity and negativity. The Leadership Quarterly, 26, 448–469.
Merrifield, P. R., Guilford, J. P., Christensen, P. R., & Frick, J. W. (1962). The role of intellectual factors in problem solving. Psychological Monographs, 76, 1–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mobley, M. I., Doares, L., & Mumford, M. D. (1992). Process analytic models of creative capacities: Evidence for the combination and reorganization process. Creativity Research Journal, 5, 125–156.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mumford, M. D. (2001). Something old, something new: Revisiting Guilford's conception of creative problem solving. Creativity Research Journal, 13, 267–276.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mumford, M. D., Antes, A. L., Caughron, J. J., Connelly, S., & Beeler, C. (2010). Cross-field differences in creative problem-solving skills: A comparison of health, biological, and social sciences. Creativity Research Journal, 22, 14–26.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Mumford, M. D., Barrett, J. D., & Hester, K. S. (2012). Background data: Use of experiential knowledge in personnel selection. In Schmitt, N. (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of personnel assessment and selection (pp. 353–382). New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Mumford, M. D., Baughman, W. A., Maher, M. A., Costanza, D. P., & Supinski, E. P. (1997). Process-based measures of creative problem-solving skills: IV. Category combination. Creativity Research Journal, 10, 59–71.Google Scholar
Mumford, M. D., Baughman, W. A., Supinski, E. P., & Maher, M. A. (1996). Process-based measures of creative problem-solving skills: II. Information encoding. Creativity Research Journal, 9, 77–88.Google Scholar
Mumford, M. D., Connelly, M. S., Baughman, W. A., & Marks, M. A. (1994). Creativity and problem solving: Cognition, adaptability, and wisdom. Roeper Review, 16, 241–246.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mumford, M. D., Friedrich, T. L., Caughron, J. J., & Antes, A. L. (2009). Leadership development and assessment: Describing and rethinking the state of the art. In Ericsson, K. A. (Ed.), Development of professional expertise: Toward measurement of expert performance and design of optimal learning environments (pp. 84–107), New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Mumford, M. D., & Gustafson, S. B. (1988). Creativity syndrome: Integration, application, and innovation. Psychological Bulletin, 103, 27–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mumford, M. D., (2012). Creative thought: Cognition and problem solving in dynamic systems. In Runco, M. A. (Ed.), The creativity research handbook: Volume Two (pp. 33–78), New York: Hampton Press.Google Scholar
Mumford, M. D., Hester, K. S., Robledo, I. C., Peterson, D. R., Day, E. A., Hougen, D. F., & Barrett, J. D. (2012). Mental models and creative problem-solving: The relationship of objective and subjective model attributes. Creativity Research Journal, 24, 311–330.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mumford, M. D., Marks, M. A., Connelly, M. S., Zaccaro, S. J., & Reiter-Palmon, R. (2000). Development of leadership skills: Experience and timing. The Leadership Quarterly, 11, 87–114.Google Scholar
Mumford, M. D., Medeiros, K. E., & Partlow, P. J. (2012). Creative thinking: Processes, strategies, and knowledge. The Journal of Creative Behavior, 46, 30–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mumford, M. D., Mobley, M. I., Reiter-Palmon, R., Uhlman, C. E., & Doares, L. M. (1991). Process analytic models of creative capacities. Creativity Research Journal, 4, 91–122.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mumford, M. D., Reiter-Palmon, R., & Redmond, M. R. (1994). Problem construction and cognition: Applying problem representations in ill-defined domains. In Runco, M. A. (Ed.), Problem finding, problem solving, and creativity (pp. 3–39). Westport, CT: Ablex.Google Scholar
Mumford, M. D., Schultz, R. A, & Van Doorn, J. R. (2001). Performance in planning: Processes, requirements, and errors. Review of General Psychology, 5, 213–240.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mumford, M. D., Steele, L., McIntosh, T., & Mulhearn, T. (in press). Developing creative capacity: Educational and organizational interventions. In Yi, C. (Ed.), The social dimension of creativity. Seoul, South Korea: KRIVET.
Mumford, M. D., Supinski, E. P., Baughman, W. A., Costanza, D. P., & Threlfall, K. V. (1997). Process-based measures of creative problem-solving skills: V. Overall prediction. Creativity Research Journal, 10, 73–85.Google Scholar
Osburn, H. K., & Mumford, M. D. (2006). Creativity and planning: Training interventions to develop creative problem-solving skills. Creativity Research Journal, 18, 173–190.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Parnes, S. J., & Noller, R. B. (1972). Applied creativity: The creative studies project. The Journal of Creative Behavior, 6, 164–186.Google Scholar
Peterson, D. R., Barrett, J. D., Hester, K. S., Robledo, I. C., Hougen, D. F., Day, E. A., & Mumford, M. D. (2013). Teaching people to manage constraints: Effects on creative problem-solving. Creativity Research Journal, 25(3), 335–347.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Plucker, J. A., & Renzulli, J. S. (1999). Psychometric approaches to the study of human creativity. In Sternberg, R. J. (Ed.), Handbook of creativity (pp. 35–61), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Puccio, G. S., & Cabra, S. F. (2012). Idea generation and idea evaluation: Cognitive skills and deliberate practices. In Mumford, M. D. (Ed.), Handbook of organizational creativity (pp. 189–215). San Diego: Elsevier.Google Scholar
Reiter-Palmon, R., Mumford, M. D., O'Connor Boes, J., & Runco, M. A. (1997). Problem construction and creativity: The role of ability, cue consistency, and active processing. Creativity Research Journal, 10, 9–23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Robledo, I. C., Hester, K. S., Peterson, D. R., Barrett, J. D., Day, E. A., Hougen, D. P., & Mumford, M. D. (2012). Errors and understanding: The effects of error-management training on creative problem-solving. Creativity Research Journal, 24, 220–234.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rouse, W. B., & Morris, N. M. (1986). On looking into the black box: Prospects and limits in the search for mental models. Psychological Bulletin, 100, 349–363.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rubenson, D. L., & Runco, M. A. (1992). The psychoeconomic approach to creativity. New Ideas in Psychology, 10, 131–147.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Runco, M. A., & Acar, S. (2010). Do tests of divergent thinking have an experiential bias?. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 4, 144–148.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Runco, M. A., (2012). Divergent thinking as an indicator of creative potential. Creativity Research Journal. 24, 66–75.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Runco, M. A., Dow, G., & Smith, W. R. (2006). Information, experience, and divergent thinking: An empirical test. Creativity Research Journal, 18, 269–277.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Scott, G. M., Lonergan, D., & Mumford, M. (2005). Conceptual combination: Alternative knowledge structures, alternative heuristics. Creativity Research Journal, 17, 79–98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shipman, A. S., Byrne, C. L., & Mumford, M. D. (2010). Leader vision formation and forecasting: The effects of forecasting extent, resources, and timeframe. The Leadership Quarterly, 21, 439–456.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Simonton, D. K. (2012). Fields, domains, and individuals. In Mumford, M. D. (Ed.), Handbook of organizational creativity (pp. 67–86), Oxford: Elsevier.Google Scholar
Sternberg, R. J. (1985). Beyond IQ: A triarchic theory of human intelligence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Stokes, P. D. (1999). Learned variability levels: Implications for creativity. Creativity Research Journal, 12, 37–45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stokes, P. D. (2005). Creativity from constraints: The psychology of breakthrough. New York: Springer Publishing Company.Google Scholar
Stokes, P. D. (2007). Using constraints to generate and sustain novelty. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 1, 107–113.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vincent, P. H., Decker, B. P., & Mumford, M. D. (2002). Divergent thinking, intelligence, and expertise: A test of alternative models. Creativity Research Journal, 14, 163–178.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wallas, G. (1926). The art of thought. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co.Google Scholar
Weisberg, R. W. (1999). Creativity and knowledge: A challenge to theories. In R. J. Sternberg (Ed.), Handbook of Creativity (pp. 189–212). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Weisberg, R. W. (2006). Creativity: Understanding innovation in problem solving, science, invention, and the arts. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.Google Scholar
Weisberg, R. W. (2011). Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater: A case study in inside-the-box creativity. Creativity Research Journal, 23, 296–312.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Welling, H. (2007). Four mental operations in creative cognition: The importance of abstraction. Creativity Research Journal, 19, 163–177.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×