From Implicit Theories to Creative Achievements: The Mediating Role of Creativity Motivation in the Relationship between Stereotypes, Growth Mindset, and Creative Achievement

Pin Li,Zhitian Skylor Zhang,Miguelina Nunez,Jiannong Shi,Yanna Zhang,Jia Zhang

doi:10.1002/jocb.446

Abstract

AbstractResearch has demonstrated that implicit theories of creativity are crucial in shaping an individual’s behavior and real‐life decisions toward being creative. The present study proposed and examined the underlying mechanisms of how two kinds of implicit theories—the growth mindset of the creative self and the stereotype of creative others—are associated with creative achievements through the mediating role of creativity motivation. Participants were 606 undergraduate students who were enrolled in an education major in two universities in China. Overall, the study found that Chinese students held a positive image toward a creative student, regarding him or her as highly competent, warm, and popular. Student perceptions of a creative other were positively related to their growth mindset of creativity. Moreover, results verified both the mediating role of creativity motivation on growth mindset, as well as the effect of positive stereotyping of the creative other on students’ creative achievement. These findings point to promising creativity motivation strategies including the cultivation of a malleable view of creativity and of creative role models, that may, in turn, promote creative achievement by encouraging students to do, learn, and accomplish new things.

Highlights

Research has demonstrated that implicit theories of creativity are crucial in shaping an individual’s behavior and real-life decisions toward being creative
The implicit social perception theory on creative persons (Zhang et al, in press) builds upon existing theory beginning with conceptions of creative persons (i.e., “What’s the characteristics of creative persons?”); followed by the stereotyping of the creative person (i.e., “How do I think of creative persons?”); culminating with the resulting emotional prejudice bred by the stereotype (i.e., “How do I feel about creative persons?”)
Previous studies suggested that Chinese students tend to regard male students as more creative (Lau & Li, 1996), our results indicate that when the prompt described a creative student in the education major, it elicited an implicit suspicion that the creative person in question—purportedly from the teaching domain—is female, rather than male

Summary

Introduction

Research has demonstrated that implicit theories of creativity are crucial in shaping an individual’s behavior and real-life decisions toward being creative. A growing body of empirical studies underscores the association between creative growth mindset and various motivational aspects of creative behaviors (for a review, see Zhang et al, 2019). The Creative Behavior as Agentic Action (CBAA) model (Karwowski & Beghetto, 2019) is a representative theory that explains the motivational function of the creative mindset, or of creativity-related self-beliefs. Unlike implicit conceptions of creative persons, implicit social perceptions like stereotyping and emotional prejudice are arguably contextually significant in the real world, because of the merit of social constructive processes (see Zhang et al, in press) Based on this theory, and depending on the context in which this specific dynamic arises, stereotypes attributed to creative persons may affect the observer’s daily behavior and life choices

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