Creativity Judgment: What Makes a Person Creative?
The idea of creativity is closely linked to the idea of genius. Genius is a term we use to describe someone who is not only creative but also brilliant and successful. But are genius and creativity the same thing?
In a recent study, “Implicit impressions of creative people: Creativity evaluation in a stigmatized domain” it was found that there are two kinds of impressions we can make about someone's creativity. The first one is an explicit impression, which can be defined as how we perceive a person's creativity on the surface level. The second kind of impression is implicit, which means that it exists below our conscious awareness.
What does this mean for you?
These findings suggest that our mind has different ways of processing information about someone's creativity depending on whether or not they are working in an industry considered to be stigmatized (i.e., sex work).
This means that if you're looking at a creative person who works in a non-stigmatized field, your brain will process their creativity the same way it would process any other type of information about them — like their age or gender identification — but if they're working in something like pornography then your brain may have more difficulty understanding what they do because you have no context for it yet.
This could lead us to believe someone isn't creative just because they work with something that may seem taboo, but what we should really do is try and understand why society has labeled it as such.
Wilson Dávalos-Nieves, Co-founder of Collaboratory.
Collaboratory helps scientists discover and connect to potential collaborators.