Personality, Cognitive Skills, and Creativity in Different Life Domains

Abstract

A preliminary effort was made to integrate personality and cognitive-skill approaches to understanding the sources of creativity. It was proposed that personality and cognitive skill each have differential predictive power for different types (i.e., domains) of creativity. Further, it was proposed that cognitive skills at least partially mediate personality effects on creativity and that personality and cognitive skills may interact to shape creativity. Both personality and divergent thinking measures were used to predict 3 types of creativity-problem solving, artistic, and social-among 41 students in a creativity course. Results of bivariate correlational, analysis of variance, and regression analyses provided some support for the ideas that (a) different types of creativity are somewhat independent of each other, (b) personality and divergent thinking have somewhat different relations to creativity of different types, (c) originality of thinking partially mediates the relations of personality to creativity in different domains, and (d) personality and divergent thinking have some interactive, as well as some main effect, impacts on creativity.