Title: Domain Specificity of Creativity: Theory, Research, and Practice
Context: Creativity does not succeed without expertise. It’s just science.
Synopsis: From the time we are young, individuals are categorized. He’s a good athlete. She’s smart. Those guys over there eating crayons? Well, they just might be creative (we hope for their own sake). It is assumed, much like intelligence, that creativity is a generalized ability that can be applied by those who possess it to all fields of endeavor equally. Unfortunately, for the creative geniuses among us (looks in the mirror), this does not seem to be the case (frowns in the mirror). In fact, one’s ability to be creative in any aspect is almost wholly dependent on that person’s level of expertise in said field. After all, how can one know how to look differently at something unless they first know how to look at it conventionally? In other words, creativity is what is developed once one understands the status quo intrinsically. Otherwise creativity is an effortless crap shoot. There is a perhaps apocryphal story about Picasso that goes thusly: a woman asks him to draw her portrait. So he does rather expediently. But rather than hand it over he instead quotes an exorbitant price for the sketch. “But,” the woman protests, “it only took you a few seconds to draw that picture!” “No,” the artist retorts, “it has taken me my whole life to be able to draw that picture.” QED.
Best Bit: “Here’s an analogy: someone can have a rich vocabulary and also be a fast runner, and yet these can remain distinct domains with distinct underlying abilities required for success. A person who is creative in two domains doesn’t demonstrate that creativity is domain-general any more than a fast runner with a rich vocabulary demonstrates that running and vocabulary acquisition rely on the same basic abilities.”
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