Personality and thinking style in different creative domains.

Abstract

The crucial aspect of creativity in both personality and thinking style may be the ability or tendency to change within personality traits, such as, for example, moving between extraversion and introversion, and within thinking styles, such as moving between heuristic and algorithmic thinking. Such mobility is characteristic of the “complex” personality. On personality and thinking style tests, complexity would be expected to manifest itself in greater variability of responses to items measuring the same overall trait. This issue was investigated with 158 visual art, 136 music, and 309 psychology students. Art students (visual art and music students) showed greater complexity in conscientiousness than psychology and music students, respectively. Visual art students further showed a greater overall complexity (mean complexities across personality and thinking style) than psychology students did. A more traditional analysis revealed that visual art students were more neurotic, more open to experience and more inclined to heuristic thinking than psychology students do, whereas music students were more extraverted and more agreeable than visual art students were, and more inclined to heuristic thinking than psychology students were. Thus, it was possible to distinguish visual art students from music and psychology students by their personality and thinking style.