Edwin C. Selby

The Creative Personality

The study of the creative personality has established itself as a major avenue of research on creativity and creative problem solving, other areas being creative process, product, and environment (or press). With respect to personality research, over the past 50-plus years, many studies have examined characteristics, attitudes, preferences, styles, and other personal qualities that appear to distinguish highly creative individuals. The purposes of this article are to review the accumulated body of creative personality research; describe the works of a few major researchers and their methods; briefly review theories that have been offered to explain why these personal qualities are causes, correlates, and/or outcomes of the creative process; and examine the relatively new construct of creative and problem-solving styles. Style assessment builds upon traditional personality research but holds substantial promise for talent identification and development for all individuals, not just those recognized as creatively gifted.

Creativity Styles and Personal Type

Sixty-two student teachers enrolled in an initial teacher education program in a medium-sized, metropolitan university completed the Kirton (1976) Adaption-Innovation Inventory (KAI), the Myers-Briggs Type Inventory (MBTI; Briggs & Myers, 1976), and Khatena and Torrances (1976) What-Kind-of-Person-Are-You checklist. Path analyses revealed a strong causal link between KAI innovator style and creative self-perceptions. Of the MBTI introversion, intuitive, thinking, and perceiver types, only intuitiveness exhibited a total causal link to creative self-perception that came close to the KAI. Creativity, personality, and cognitive style literatures are diverse and more research is suggested, although the KAI instrument appeared to be an effective predictor of scores on a creative self-perception measure.

Problem Solving Style and Beliefs about Teaching, Learning, and Problem Solving

Seventy-four pre-service teachers in an urban graduate school of education were administered VIEW: An Assessment of Problem Solving Style and a questionnaire in which they were asked to rate the importance of numerous principles of learning, teaching, and problem solving. Judges had previously classified these principles according to the six different VIEW problem solving styles (Explorer, Developer, External, Internal, Person-oriented, Task-oriented). Participants categorized by a particular style rated more highly those principles that matched their style. Implications for instruction and the development of problem solving skills are discussed.

Problem-solving style and motivational attributions.

52 Masters-level female graduate students completed VIEW: An Assessment of Problem Solving Style and provided attributions for their successes and failures according to several categories of reasons. Attributions were in the form of percentages to the categories of skill or ability, effort devoted to the task, task difficulty, chance, or other factors, after Weiners theory of motivation. Women scoring as more Developer than Explorer on VIEW attributed a greater percentage of their failures to uncontrollable factors (chance and task difficulty). These results are consistent with the theory that individuals with a Developer style are more organized, deliberate, “planful,” and precise in their work efforts. Thus, such individuals would more likely attribute failure to factors they had not foreseen.