Revisiting the Investment Theory of Creativity

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1 CREATIVITY RESEARCH JOURNAL, 23(3), , 2011 Copyright # Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: print= online DOI: / Revisiting the Investment Theory of Creativity Li-fang Zhang The University of Hong Kong Robert J. Sternberg Tufts University This research further examines Sternberg and Lubart s (1995) investment theory of creativity by testing the newly constructed Multifaceted Assessment of Creativity (MAC). The MAC measures the extent to which people take into account the 6 resources for creativity (intelligence, knowledge, intellectual styles, personality, motivation, and environment) when they evaluate (a) hypothetical cases and (b) the importance of the six resources for identifying creativity. Two forms of the MAC (one assessing school boys and the other assessing school girls) were administered to 270 (120 male and 150 female) Chinese university students. Overall, results strongly supported the investment theory of creativity. Meanwhile, the 2 types of evaluation tasks yielded diverse results centered on the importance of intelligence and of styles. Furthermore, differential expectations were expressed for boys versus girls regarding what counts in creativity. For some individuals, a bachelor s thesis is the end of serious creativity. For many others, however, even a doctoral dissertation is just the beginning of a creative career. Why are there such individual variations in thinking about creative work? The research presented here tests the newly constructed Multifaceted Assessment of Creativity (MAC), which is based on Sternberg and Lubart s (1995) investment theory of creativity. This research was motivated by the fact that various resources for creativity articulated in the investment theory of creativity have been proven to be critical to creativity (e.g., Feist, 1998; Thompson, Steffert, & Gruzelier, 2009; Zhang & Sternberg, 2009). However, the theory, as an entire entity, has yet to be directly tested in one single study or set of studies. Such a single enterprise has been attempted here. This project was supported by the Committee for the Research Output Prize and the Committee on Research and Conference Grants as administered by the University of Hong Kong. Correspondence should be sent to Dr. Li-fang Zhang, Faculty of Education, The University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam Road, Hong Kong. lfzhang@hku.hk TWO ALTERNATIVE APPROACHES TO CREATIVITY Sternberg and Lubart (1992) conceptualized various approaches to studying creativity into two types: person-centered approaches and context-centered approaches. Person-centered approaches put more emphasis on the internal, acontextual aspects of creative performance, whereas context-centered approaches focus on the interaction of the individual with the external context in which he or she lives. The person-centered approaches to creativity are deeply rooted in the psychometric tradition. Some researchers (e.g., Torrance, 1975) oriented toward understanding the abilities underlying creativity have constructed instruments that measure individual differences in the production of creative products. These products are usually of a minor kind such as thinking of unusual ways of using a paper clip. Thereafter, the investigators assign scores to individuals on one or more aspects of their creative products, such as novelty, fluency, quality, and so forth. Attaching more importance to personality, other researchers (e.g., Barron, 1955) have examined individual differences in personality

2 230 ZHANG AND STERNBERG attributes in more and less creative individuals. Yet other researchers (e.g., Johnson-Laird, 1988; Schank, 1988; Simon, 1983), placing more emphasis on information processing, have used a computational approach to construct computer simulations of creative performance or to provide individuals with tasks that require creative problem-solving. The context-centered approaches to studying creativity look at the factors in the environment that influence creativity. For example, Amabile (1982) pioneered the social-psychological approach. Investigations using this approach focus on the critical role of intrinsic motivation or of freedom from evaluative pressure in creativity. As another example, Csikszentmihalyi (1988) explored effects of sociocultural variables upon creative performance. As a final example, Gruber (1988) devoted a substantial portion of his career taking an intensive biographical approach to studying the lives of creative people such as Piaget and Darwin. THE INVESTMENT THEORY OF CREATIVITY AND DERIVATIVE RESEARCH Other researchers, such as Sternberg and Lubart, have embraced both person-centered approaches and context-centered approaches. Consistent with several other theories of creativity (e.g., Rubenson & Runco, 1992; Runco, 2007; Walberg, 1988) loosely rooted in economic theories, Sternberg and Lubart (1991, 1992, 1995) constructed their investment theory of creativity to explain why some people are more creative than others. Using investment as a metaphor, Sternberg and Lubart argued that creative people, like good investors in financial markets, are ones who are willing and able to buy low and sell high in the realm of ideas (see also Rubenson & Runco, 1992). Buying low means pursuing ideas that are unknown or out of favor, but that have potential for growth. Very often, when these ideas are initially put forward, they meet concerted resistance (Sternberg & Lubart, 1995). Creative individuals persist despite this resistance and, ultimately, sell high, moving on to the next new or unpopular idea. According to the investment theory of creativity, there are six resources for creativity: intelligence, knowledge, intellectual styles, personality, motivation, and environment. The first five resources are personcentered, whereas the final one is context-centered. Resources for Creativity The first resource for creativity is intelligence. Three types of intelligence are particularly important: (a) the synthetic intelligence to see problems from new perspectives and to think outside the box, (b) the analytical intelligence to recognize and decide which of one s ideas are worth pursuing and which are not, and (c) the practical intelligence to know how to persuade others of the value of the newly proposed ideas (Sternberg, 1985a). The confluence of these three types of intelligence is equally important. Analytical intelligence used in the absence of the other two types of intelligence may result in critical, but not creative, thinking that produces new ideas. Synthetic intelligence used in the absence of the other two types of intelligence may result in new ideas that are not subjected to adequate scrutiny to ensure their quality. Practical intelligence in the absence of the other two types of intelligence may result in acceptance of ideas, not because the ideas are good, but because the ideas have been presented persuasively. For example, throughout history, charismatic politicians, through the sheer force of their personalities, have persuaded followers to accept sometimes destructive ideas. The second resource for creativity is knowledge. There are two sides to being knowledgeable about any subject matter or field. On the one hand, without knowledge, one has nowhere to begin in being creative. Creative ideas and behaviors typically derive, in part, from something that one already has known from past knowledge or experience. On the other hand, being too knowledgeable about a certain subject or field may stifle an individual s creativity the individual may get so absorbed in a particular way of seeing things that he or she tends not to think in novel ways. In a study of expert and novice bridge players, Frensch and Sternberg (1989) showed that expert bridge players were slower to adapt to experimentally created fundamental changes in the rules of the game than were novices. The third resource for creativity is intellectual style. Intellectual styles are preferred ways of using one s abilities. Among the 13 intellectual styles described by Sternberg (1988, 1997), three are particularly important for creativity: the legislative, global, and liberal styles. The legislative style is a preference for doing things one s own way. The legislative style is important for creativity because to be creative, one must develop one s own way of thinking, rather than merely thinking the way others do. The global style is a preference for thinking with a holistic picture of a situation in mind. Global thinking is important for creativity because one needs to know the general situation of a field (or subject matter) in order to identify important ideas to pursue. The liberal style is a preference for thinking in new ways. Liberal thinking is important for creativity because to be creative, one needs to think outside the box, rather than merely to follow the established ways of doing things. In their review of the literature on styles, Zhang and Sternberg (2009) identified much research evidence suggesting the important role of these intellectual styles in creativity.

3 INVESTMENT THEORY OF CREATIVITY 231 The fourth resource for creativity is personality. To be creative, one needs to be willing to overcome obstacles, be willing to take reasonable risks, and be willing to grow (Sternberg & Lubart, 1995). Likewise, to be creative, one needs to be tolerant of ambiguity, open to new experience, and to believe in what one is doing (Feist, 1998). In particular, buying low and selling high typically means going against the crowd. Therefore, if one wants to think or act in creative ways, one has to be willing to stand up to conventions. Numerous studies (Barron & Harrington, 1981; Feist, 1998; Glover, 1977; Golann, 1962; Silvia, Nusbaum, Berg, Martin, & O Connor, 2009; Thompson et al., 2009) have supported the importance of these personality traits in creative work. All creative people encounter obstacles to the expression of their creativity. The important thing is that they persevere in the face of those obstacles. The fifth resource for creativity is motivation. To be creative, one needs to have intrinsic, task-focused motivation. The importance of such motivation for creativity has been shown in the research of Amabile (1983) and of others (Herman, 2009; Kreitler & Casakin, 2009). Existing research also suggested that people rarely do truly creative work in an area unless they really love what they are doing and focus on the work, rather than on the potential rewards. The sixth and final resource for creativity is environment. One could have all the internal resources needed to think creatively. However, without an environment that is supportive and rewarding of creative ideas, the creativity that an individual has within him or her might never be displayed. Creativity needs to be nurtured. An environment can be supportive in at least three ways: helping spark creative ideas, supporting creative ideas, and serving as a basis for evaluating and improving creative ideas. However, environments typically are not fully supportive of the use of one s creativity. Therefore, one must decide how to respond to the ubiquitous environmental challenges to the display of one s creativity. According to the investment theory of creativity, creativity requires the aforementioned six resources to converge. Moreover, the theory posits that creativity involves more than a simple sum of an individual s level on each resource. Instead, not all resources are necessarily fully involved in every exhibition of creative thinking or action. Some of the personality attributes (e.g., tolerance of ambiguity) may matter more for long-enduring creativity than for short-term bursts of creativity. Furthermore, not all the interactions among resources are linear. For example, no matter how legislative an individual s intellectual style may be, without at least a minimally adequate level of intelligence, creativity would be unlikely to be displayed. In addition, the weightings of the resources may vary from one creative project to the next. VALIDATING THE INVESTMENT THEORY OF CREATIVITY Thus far, two studies (reported in Lubart & Sternberg, 1995) have been conducted directly to test the investment theory of creativity. In the first study, the authors tested the predictive value of the five person-centered resources specified in the theory for creative production in eight tasks: designing two advertisements, making two drawings, solving two creative scientific problems, and writing two short stories. All correlations between average creativity scores across the four domains and scores on the tests measuring the five person-centered resources were statistically significant. The correlation for motivation was nonlinear, showing a curvilinear function whereby people with intermediate motivation showed higher levels of creativity than those with either high or low motivation. It was concluded that, in general, the results dovetailed well with the predictions of the theory. However, an unexpected finding was obtained: Creativity was significantly correlated with the local, rather than with the global, style. It was thought that this unexpected finding could have been due to the fact that the topics and titles given might have narrowed the tasks too much. The second study examined predictions concerning risk-taking behaviors the personality resource in the investment theory of creativity. The creative tasks were the same with those in the first study for the drawing and writing domains. In the risk-taking contest, participants entered their drawings and stories (separately) in contests involving varying degrees of risk and payoff. In the hypothetical-situations questionnaire, participants were asked how they would respond if they encountered certain risk situations. In the self-report questionnaire, participants were asked about risk taking in a wide range of situations. It was found that the participants generally tended toward being risk-averse, perhaps because of socialization against risk taking (Sternberg & Lubart, 1992, p. 5). Moreover, the results for the art domain supported the authors hypothesis that high risk-takers would be judged (by 15 independent evaluators) as significantly more creative than low risk-takers. However, the results for the writing domain did not clearly support this hypothesis. The reason was that what was evaluated as creative by the authors was sometimes found to be somewhat offensive to at least some of the independent judges. THE RESEARCH The two existing studies reported by Lubart and Sternberg (1995) are limited in three ways. First, both studies involved small sample sizes (44 participants in

4 232 ZHANG AND STERNBERG each study). Second, both studies involved many tests, both self-reported and behavioral ones. Although such extensive testing has the obvious advantage of being comprehensive and objective (with the involvement of behavioral measures), administering such tests could be cumbersome and expensive. Finally, the existing studies did not take into account the contextual resource (i.e., environment) specified in the investment theory of creativity. The aforementioned limitations call for an alternative approach to further investigating the validity of the theory. One potential approach is to design questionnaires to examine the extent to which people take into account each of the six resources when they make judgments about creativity. Furthermore, because there is often a gap between people s espoused theory and their theory-in-use (e.g., Westby & Dawson, 1995), it is necessary to assess people s judgments about creativity when they are presented with different types of tasks. METHOD Participants Research participants were 270 (120 male and 150 female) students from a large research-oriented university in Shanghai, the People s Republic of China. With an average of 19 years, the students ages ranged from 17 to 23 years. These students were volunteer participants from two academic majors: finance (n ¼ 130) and engineering (n ¼ 140). Among these students, there were 135 freshmen and 135 juniors. Materials Composed of two parts, the MAC was designed to assess the six resources for creativity described in the investment theory of creativity. The first part assesses the degree to which people say they take each of the six resources for creativity into account when they are presented with hypothetical cases of school children. By evaluating and making judgments about the hypothetical cases, the participants would communicate their implicit theories of creativity (Sternberg, 1985b; Sternberg, Conway, Ketron, & Bernstein, 1981). The second part aims at eliciting, more explicitly, people s views about the usefulness of each of the six resources in making judgments about school children s creativity. The first part contains 30 hypothetical cases, each describing a school child. Each case is composed of six statements. One statement is based on the intelligenceresource criterion, a second on knowledge, a third on intellectual styles, a fourth on personality, a fifth on motivation, and a sixth on environment. The order in which the six statements are placed within each case is randomized. Each of these statements carries a preassigned value of the extent to which it satisfies the corresponding criterion. Furthermore, the 30 cases are balanced across the six resources and across the preassigned values. There are two forms of the 30 cases, one with hypothetical children being given male names (Boys Form), and the other with hypothetical children being given female names (Girls Form). Procedure Participants were asked to read each case and to rate on a Likert scale (from 1 to 6, where 1 ¼ almost certainly not, and 6 ¼ almost certainly yes) the likelihood that the child involved would be identified as being creative, both from the participant s own viewpoint (my judgment) and from their perception of the children s school s viewpoint (school judgment). Here is a sample case: 1. Susan is reasonably good at coming up with ideas that other people don t think of. 2. Susan knows somewhat well what other people have done in her field. 3. Most of the time, Susan enjoys dealing with tasks in new ways. 4. Susan is often willing to take sensible risks. 5. Susan is seldom eager to act in new ways. 6. Susan sometimes finds herself in a learning environment that allows her to think or act in new ways. 7. School s judgment (3) My judgment (2) The second part of the questionnaire is composed of six simple rating scales, each for one of the six resources. On a 6-point response scale, participants were asked to rate how useful they thought each of the six resources was for identifying creative students. Again, there are two forms of this part of the questionnaire. One (the Boys Form) elicits the participants views about the importance of each of the six resources in identifying creativity among boys, and the other (Girls Form) elicits the participants views about the importance of each of the six resources in identifying creativity among girls. It should be noted that six single-item scales were employed in this part of the inventory because responses to these items that directly asked the respondents to rate the importance of each of the resources in making judgment about creativity served to cross-validate the responses elicited by the more covert case descriptions in the first part of the inventory. The original inventory was written in English. It was then translated into Mandarin, using the translation and back-translation technique. Half of the participants

5 INVESTMENT THEORY OF CREATIVITY 233 responded to the Boys Form and the other half responded to the Girls Form of the questionnaire. RESULTS Results From Evaluation of Hypothetical Cases Reliability. An initial effort was made to examine the consistency of the research participants in rating the 30 cases, for both gender-combined and gender-separated data. The Cronbach s alpha coefficients for the judgments of the schools as perceived by the participants (school judgment) and the participants own judgments (my judgment) of the 30 cases for gender-combined data (i.e., responses to both forms of the hypothetical cases) were.84 and.86, respectively. Those for judgments of the 30 cases of boys only were.81 (school judgment) and.86 (my judgment). Those for judgments of the 30 cases of girls only were.86 (school judgment) and.87 (my judgment). These internal consistency reliabilities were considered sufficiently high for the remaining statistical analyses to proceed. T-tests. T-tests were used to identify group differences in the mean ratings of the 30 cases based on the participants gender, university class level, and academic discipline. Results from these t-tests indicated that research participants did not differ significantly in making judgments about creativity as a function of their gender, academic major, and university class level. Table 1 presents the summary statistics for these analyses. Multiple-regression analyses. Multiple-regression analyses were conducted separately for ratings of the 30 hypothetical boys and for ratings of the 30 hypothetical girls to find out the extent to which the research participants took into account the six resources specified in the investment theory of creativity in making judgments about creativity of school boys and girls. That is to say, multiple regressions provide a test of the fit of the six-resource investment theory of creativity to the data. Support for the validity of the MAC for assessing the investment theory of creativity is indicated to the extent that (a) values of R 2 (the squared multiple correlation of the ratings of creativity with each of the six resources specified in the investment theory) are high in magnitude and statistically significant, and (b) values of the regression beta weights corresponding to each of the six resources for creativity are statistically significant. Nonsignificant beta weights would suggest that, contrary to the investment theory, a variable (i.e., a resource for creativity) was not taken into account in making judgments about creativity (see results in Table 2). As shown in Table 2, intelligence and intellectual style produced statistically significant regression weights in all of the four multiple regressions. The beta value for the variable knowledge was statistically significant in all but one regression (i.e., knowledge was not uniquely taken into account when the participants themselves made judgments about school girls creativity). Interestingly, our participants believed that they would take motivation and personality into account in their evaluations of both male and female school children s creativity but that the school would take those two variables into account only when making judgments about school girls creativity. Also, as shown in Table 2, our participants believed that the school would take intelligence, styles, and knowledge into account only when making judgments about boys creativity. Finally, the variable environment was uniquely taken into account only when our participants made their own judgments about the creativity of school girls. Overall levels of prediction were reasonably high, with R 2 values of.51 (school s judgments of boys),.67 (participants own judgments of boys),.84 (school s judgments of girls), and.80 (participants own judgments of girls). Moreover, with these ratings higher for girls than for boys, the independent variables (i.e., the resources specified in the theory) fit better to the ratings of girls than to those of boys. TABLE 1 Group Differences in Ratings of Cases Based on Gender, University Class Level, and Academic Major School Judgment Self-Judgment Demographics Mean N df t-value 2-Tail Sig. Mean N df t-value 2-Tail Sig. Gender Male Female University class Freshmen Juniors Academic major Finance Engineering

6 234 ZHANG AND STERNBERG TABLE 2 Summary of Multiple Regression Analyses Rating (Statement) Boys-School Boys-Self Girls-School Girls-Self R b First predictor.52 Intelligence.42 Intelligence.48 Intelligence.56 Intelligence b Second predictor.42 Intellectual Styles.47 Motivation.37 Intellectual Styles.32 Intellectual Styles b Third predictor.37 Knowledge.32 Personality.34 Knowledge.43 Motivation b Fourth predictor.29 Knowledge.39 Motivation.31 Personality b Fifth predictor.29 Intellectual Styles.32 Personality b Sixth predictor.23 Environment F Df L 3,25 5,24 6,23 4,25 p <.05. p <.01. p <.001. These results generally lent support to the investment theory of creativity. Ratings of the female hypothetical cases were particularly consistent with the theory. When the participants made judgments about girls creativity, they took all but the environment variable into account and they believed that the school would take all six resources into account. Results From Rating the Importance of the Six Resources in Identifying Creativity Two separate repeated-measures analyses (one for boys and the other for girls) were conducted on the participants ratings of the importance of each of the six variables to examine if participants would attach different levels of importance to the six resources for creativity. These tests resulted in statistically significant differences among the six resources for the ratings of both boys (Wilk s lambda: F ¼ 9.59, p <.001; Hypothesis df ¼ 5; Error df ¼ 128; Eta squared ¼.27) and girls (Wilk s lambda: F ¼ 24.70, p <.001; Hypothesis df ¼ 5; Error df ¼ 126; Eta squared ¼.50). The mean rankings from the data based on the boys version of the rating scales, from the highest to the lowest resource of creativity, were 4.77 (intellectual styles), 4.49 (personality), 4.34 (environment), 4.25 (knowledge), 4.23 (motivation), and 4.07 (intelligence). Pairwise comparisons showed that participants attached significantly different levels of importance to the different resources for creativity for the evaluation of boys creativity. Specifically, the intellectual-styles variable came out as the most important variable, and was perceived as significantly more important than all of the variables except personality. Personality, rated as the second most important resource for creativity, was considered significantly more important than intelligence and motivation, but not significantly more important than environment and knowledge. Although rated respectively as the third, fourth, fifth, and the least important resources for creativity, environment, knowledge, motivation, and intelligence were not thought to carry significantly different levels of importance for making judgments about creativity among boys. Detailed statistics are shown in Table 3. The mean rankings yielded from the data based on the girls version of the rating scales, from the highest TABLE 3 Mean Differences Among Six Resources for Creativity: Pairwise Comparisons (From Repeated Measures) Mean Difference (I-J) Resource (I) Resource (J) For Boys For Girls Intelligence Knowledge Styles Personality Motivation E-02 Environment Knowledge Intelligence Styles Personality Motivation 1.50E Environment 9.02E E-02 Styles Intelligence Knowledge Personality Motivation Environment Personality Intelligence Knowledge Styles Motivation Environment Motivation Intelligence E-02 Knowledge 1.50E Styles Personality Environment Environment Intelligence Knowledge 9.02E E-02 Styles Personality Motivation p <.05. p <.01. p <.001.

7 INVESTMENT THEORY OF CREATIVITY 235 to the lowest resource for creativity, were 4.90 (intellectual styles), 4.69 (personality), 4.11 (knowledge), 4.09 (environment), 3.96 (intelligence), and 3.89 (motivation). Pairwise comparisons showed that participants attached significantly different levels of importance to the different resources for creativity when they evaluated girls versus boys. Specifically, intellectual styles, ranked as the most important resource for creativity, are rated as significantly more important than all other resources except personality. Personality, ranked as the second most important resource for creativity, was perceived as significantly more important than all other resources except intellectual styles. Knowledge, environment, intelligence, and motivation were ranked respectively as the third, fourth, fifth, and the least important resources for creativity. They were not rated as statistically different from one another. All four resources were considered significantly less important than intellectual styles and personality. Furthermore, intellectual styles and personality were not rated as being statistically different from each other. Mean Differences in the Six Resources Between Boys and Girls T-tests were employed to explore if the participants considered the importance of each of the six creativity resources differently for boys than for girls. These tests comparing mean scores for the Boys Form of the six rating scales and those for the Girls Form did not yield any statistically significant result. That is to say, in responding to the simple ratings of the six resources for creativity, the participants reported that, regardless TABLE 4 Mean Differences in Importance of Resources for Creativity Between Boys and Girls (N ¼ 270) Resource M SD t-value df Significance (2-Tailed) Intelligence Boys Girls Knowledge Boys Girls Styles Boys Girls Personality Boys Girls Motivation Boys Girls Environment Boys Girls of school children s gender, they would attach the same importance to each of the six resources when identifying creativity among school children. See Table 4 for detailed statistics. DISCUSSION The primary objective of this research was to use the newly designed MAC further to examine the validity of the investment theory of creativity. Specifically, the research sought to determine the extent to which the six creativity resources were taken into consideration under two different circumstances when research participants were presented with hypothetical cases and when they were directly asked to rate the importance of each of the six resources. Findings from both ratings of the 30 hypothetical cases and ratings of the 6 resources for creativity (each in two different forms) supported the reliability and validity of the MAC in assessing the six dimensions proposed in the investment theory of creativity. That is to say, our research participants believed that the six resources specified in the investment theory are important in making judgments about creativity. Moreover, results from the two types of data share one major commonality and, at the same time, revealed two striking differences. The similarity is shown by the fact that both types of ratings indicate that intellectual styles are very important in creativity. Within the context of the ratings of the hypothetical cases, intellectual styles entered three of the four regression models as the second predictor after intelligence. Meanwhile, when the participants were asked explicitly to specify the importance of each of the creativity resources in identifying creativity among school children, they rated intellectual styles as the most useful resource for creativity with regard to both boys and girls. The prominent place given to intellectual styles in making judgments about creativity could well be a reflection of the strong association between intellectual styles and creativity (Zhang & Sternberg, 2009). It also could be that the styles movement, which has been active for more than half a century (Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswick, Levinson, & Sanford, 1950), has raised the awareness of the research participants so that when they were presented with both types of rating tasks (i.e., rating of hypothetical cases with the six resources for creativity hidden in the statements of the cases and rating of the six resources with each construct clearly labeled), they attached great importance to styles. This point may seem to be implausible because the participants had no expertise in the field of styles. However, for two related reasons, the concept of styles has become increasingly widely

8 236 ZHANG AND STERNBERG known to students in many higher education institutions in mainland China, including those in the university where the present data were collected. First, in the last decade or so, students in a great number of universities have been exposed to academic talks on intellectual styles. Second, in the past several years, a number of academics who are currently working in mainland Chinese universities have obtained their doctoral degrees overseas and have written their dissertations on styles. Such academic activities would naturally make university students appreciate the concept of styles, consciously or subconsciously. Simultaneously, two major differences emerged from the two types of data. The first concerns the degree of importance attached to intelligence. In making judgments about school children s creativity based on the hypothetical cases, with no exception, the research participants considered intelligence to be the most important resource for creativity. However, when asked to rate the importance of each of the six resources for creativity on the 6-point response scale, the participants consistently rated intelligence as the least important contributing factor to creativity. There could be multiple possible explanations of the seemingly contradictory findings from the two types of data centered on the importance of intelligence to creativity. First, multicollinearity in the multiple regressions could have been partially responsible for the differential results obtained in the two types of evaluation tasks. It could also be that the research participants had different conceptions about each of the terms for the six resources for creativity (intelligence, knowledge, intellectual styles, personality, motivation, and environment). When they were asked to rate the usefulness of each of the six resources in identifying creativity among school children, the participants were not provided with a definition for any of the six sources. Even if such definitions had been provided, the participants interpretations of the definitions could still be very different. Finally, an equally, or perhaps most, plausible explanation of this finding is that the research participants espoused theory of creativity differed from their theoryin-use. This discrepancy between theory and practice could be related to social desirability. For at least the past 3 decades, many people, at least in Asian countries, have believed that intelligence is not the most important factor in school success. In the meantime, the notion of styles has become an increasingly more popular concept among students and teachers. As a result, when presented with the terminology representing the six resources for creativity, the research participants perhaps rated intelligence as least important and style as most important for creativity. Nevertheless, in practice, when they rated the hypothetical cases cases that involved statements that did not specify the particular constructs (attributes) that they were supposedly evaluating the research participants unknowingly attached greater importance to intelligence than they did to styles. A second main difference revealed by the two types of ratings pertains to the levels of expectations that the participants expressed for boys versus girls. In rating the hypothetical cases, our participants expressed higher expectations for boys than for girls: Compared with girls, boys were expected to be creative with fewer (and lesser) resources for creativity. Girls were thought to require a lot more resources in order for them to be creative. However, when asked to rate the importance of each of the six resources for identifying creativity among school children, our participants did not express such differential expectations. The differential expectations for boys and for girls found in this sample of mainland Chinese university students are consistent with the results obtained in Zhang and Sternberg s (1998a) study of conceptions of giftedness among school children in Hong Kong, whereby pre-service and in-service teachers expressed higher expectations for boys than for girls. Zhang and Sternberg (1998a) postulated that girls progressive loss of self-confidence (AAUW, 1992; Arnold, 1993) and increasing doubt about their own intellectual abilities (Stipek & MacIver, 1989) might have been derived from lowered expectations for them. At the same time, these conflicting findings obtained from the two types of data, once again, suggested that the participants espoused theories of creativity deviated from the implicit theories they used in making judgments about the hypothetical cases. Certainly, this research is limited to Chinese university students; and as such, the MAC needs to be tested among other populations. Nevertheless, because this research yielded convincing results that make substantive sense, practical implications of this research may be proposed for educational practice. Consider a question that often comes from teachers: What can we do to encourage creativity? These findings suggest that teachers could cultivate creativity by taking into account at least six variables: intelligence, knowledge, intellectual styles, personality, motivation, and environment. Irrespective of the similarities and differences identified in the two types of data, the six resources specified in the investment theory of creativity were deemed important contributing factors in creativity by our research participants. That is, this research provided empirical evidence supporting the theoretical argument that creativity comes from, in addition to intelligence and knowledge, intellectual styles that are creativity-generating (e.g., legislative and global styles), personality traits that communicate open-mindedness, sensible risk-taking, and willingness to grow, as well as from an intrinsic motivation. Creativity can also be

9 INVESTMENT THEORY OF CREATIVITY 237 nurtured by an environment that is supportive and rewarding of creativity (Sternberg & Grigorenko, 2007). Therefore, truly to encourage creativity among students, teachers should target the wide range of factors proposed in the investment theory of creativity. Not only should teachers provide intellectual stimuli to increase students knowledge and to enhance their levels of intellectual skills, but also they should attend to students intellectual styles, personality, motivation, and to the environment. Furthermore, these findings have implications for selection exercises at schools. At times, creativity is used as a selection criterion for school enrichment programs. In this selection, what factors should teachers think of? The investment theory of creativity and its research findings make it clear that at the very least, the six resources for creativity investigated in this research should come into play. The question that arises is: Can teachers (or any one) always act upon what they truly believe in? For example, in theory, our research participants believed that intellectual styles and personality play the most important roles in creativity and that intelligence is the least important in identification of creativity among school children. Furthermore, in theory, our research participants alleged that, regardless of school children s gender, they would value the resources for creativity the same way for boys as they would for girls. However, in practice, our participants rated intelligence as the most important variable (as opposed to styles and personality) and they had differential expectations about creativity for boys and for girls. The theory practice gaps found in this research are not unique. Consider how far education has gone with respect to cultivating creativity in schools. For the last two decades or so, developing creative thinking has been said to be one of the important missions in many schools around the world. However, there is little evidence of many successes in developing creative thinking through schooling. Instead, thinking and behaviors that go against creativity (e.g., local and conservative intellectual styles) have often been rewarded at schools across the globe (Bernardo, Zhang, & Callueng, 2002; Cano-Garcia & Huges, 2000; Nachmias & Shany, 2002; Zhang & Sternberg, 1998b). High academic achievers are often those who demonstrate conforming thinking and behaviors. As another example, previous research (e.g., Dawson, D Andrea, Affinito, & Westby, 1999; Westby & Dawson, 1995) revealed a paradox between school teachers self-reports that they enjoyed creative children in the classroom and the finding that the same teachers displayed their dislike for characteristics such as nonconformity that traditionally are associated with creativity. Similarly, consider how far schools have gone in narrowing the gender gap in mathematics achievement. For the past two decades, it has been commonly perceived that the gender gap in mathematics achievement has become increasingly narrower. Teachers have been thought to give equal attention to school boys and girls in mathematics classes. As a result, similar, if not exactly the same, expectations should have been communicated to boys and to girls. However, research on girls educational experiences continues to show that girls are given much less attention than are boys (e.g., American Association of Women Education Foundation, 2002). Research continues to suggest that, beginning in the middle-school grades, girls have less confidence in their mathematical ability than do boys. This finding indicates that girls lower scores on mathematics and associated intellectual skills and personality could be the result of the discouragement that girls received over a long period of time. The confidence in learning mathematics girls initially display at a younger age diminishes as a consequence of their having been socialized in an environment in which girls receive the subtle (or, not-sosubtle) message that they are not expected to do well in mathematics. These theory practice gaps and many others require that teachers be aware of the possible discrepancies between their espoused theory of creativity and the theory that they actually use when making judgments about their students creativity. Meanwhile, teachers should be aware that they may inadvertently express lower expectations for girls than for boys in their educational practice. If they change, everyone will benefit. REFERENCES Amabile, T. M. (1982). Social psychology of creativity: A consensual assessment technique. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 43, Amabile, T. M. (1983). The social psychology of creativity. New York: Springer-Verlag. 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