A Comparison of Perceptions on the Investment Theory of Creativity between Chinese and American

2009 Fifth International Conference on Natural Computation A Comparison of Perceptions on the Investment Theory of Creativity between Chinese and American Pingping Liu, Xingli Zhang, Jiannong Shi * Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences Beijing, China *E-mail: shijn@psych.ac.cn Pingping Liu Graduate University, Chinese Academy of Sciences Beijing, China E-mail: liupp@psych.ac.cn Abstract A social validation methodology was applied across two cultures to examine the perceptions of resources on enhancing creativity based on Sternberg & Lubart s (1991) investment theory of creativity. The importance of six resources were rated and ranked by adults from China (n=190) and the United States (n=57). Both American and Chinese considered motivation as the most important resource for human creativity. However, next to motivation, Mann-Whitney U tests revealed that Chinese adults were more inclined to emphasize the importance of intelligence (p <.001) and knowledge (p <.01), while Americans preferred to regard the importance of thinking styles (p <.05). Furthermore, the majority of Americans and Chinese considered that personal factors contributed more to creativity than situational factors. These findings indicate that the concept of creativity is partially culture-specific. Keywords- creativity; cross-culture; motivation; knowledge I. INTRODUCTION Creativity has completely clear benefits for individuals, society and culture [1, 2]. Meanwhile, recent studies have revealed cultural variation in the expression of creativity, including implicit theories of creativity [3-7], assessment of creativity [8-12], creative performance [13-14] and so on. Some literatures also suggested that Asians have similar but not identical conception of creativity to people in the West [4, 7, 11]. In addition, the U.S is a leading country in encouraging people to be more creative or more innovative. For example, Americans earn more Noble prizes for literary creations or scientific discoveries than Chinese. Thus, in comparing people s perceptions of resources to promote creativity between American and Chinese, it should be noted that the findings could be helpful to foster creativity. A. The Investment Theory of Creativity A confluence theory, the investment theory of creativity, was proposed by Sternberg and Lubart based on the use of concepts from economic theory and research support. According to the investment theory, creativity can be predicted by a confluence of six distinct but interrelated resources: intellectual abilities, knowledge, thinking styles, personality, motivation and a support environment [1, 15-19]. Admittedly, other creativity theories are also persuasive, such as the componential theory of creativity proposed by Amabile[20], the systems view of creativity described by Csikszentmihalyi [21], a system model of creativity introduced by Shi [22]. Nevertheless, the confluence investment theory offers the possibility of accounting for diverse aspects of creativity. Both the levels of these resources and the decision to use a resource were sources of individual difference on creativity [18]. Thus, the present study seeks to examine and compare people s perspectives of those resources across culture. On the other hand, the recognition and acceptance of the investment theory is to be tested in the present study. B. Culture and Creativity The environment always had a profound effect on creative performance [2, 9, 23]. Previous cross-culture studies had suggested the similarities and differences of the expression of creativity between the east and west. In addition, some studies also indicated that there were marked different performance between Western and East Asian cultures, such as Chinese and English speakers[8, 15], or Chinese and German[13]. Furthermore, some explanations have been offered for the cultural differences on people s conception and performance of creativity. Some studies tried to explain the phenomenon by examining parents and teachers implicit theories of children s creativity [3, 6, 7]. Maybe environment and education played an important role in creativity development [14]. Perhaps Chinese culture had a more collectivist orientation and thought group interest more important than the interests of individuals [4, 24]. Maybe American and Chinese s concepts or evaluations of diverse aspects of creativity are different. For example, one study found that, scientists and politicians were the most often nominated figures of creativity by Chinese undergraduates [11], but artists, musicians and entertainers were the most often regarded as the figures of creativity by Western people[25]. Another study also found that Chinese s conceptions of creativity tended to include the following characteristics inspirational and contributing to the progress of society, which were not reported in the U.S. studies [4]. Thus, a preliminary study was conducted here to examine the sources of individual creativity difference across cultures. The present study seeks to understand (a) how people use 978-0-7695-3736-8/09 $25.00 2009 IEEE DOI 10.1109/ICNC.2009.129 217

their implicit theories in evaluating the importance of the resources on enhancing creativity based on the investment theory of creativity, (b) how Americans and Chinese s attribution the similarities and differences of developing creativity, and (c) how people s acceptance of the investment theory of creativity in two different cultures. The general goal of the studies reported here was to examine these questions not only because no previous studies have been directly addressed these issues, but also because such studies could shed new light on cross-cultural studies of creativity [11]. Undoubtedly, the culture has a profound effect on creativity [9, 23]. We hypothesized that within each cultural group, there existed similarities and differences of preferences of resources on enhancing creativity. C. Methods and Materials The social validation methodology is based on the idea that implicit theories (or instrument development) have more ecological validity than the explicit theories of professional social scientists [6, 7, 25, 26]. This may be especially important when investing people s concepts in various cultures because ideas about creativity were expected to be linked to social values, cultural norms, and traditions [23]. A questionnaire survey and interviews were conducted. The measures were constructed and modified based on the Investment theory of Creativity. The descriptions of resources in English and Chinese version were originated from Handbook of Creativity and its translation by Shi, et al [18, 27]. Participants were invited to rate these resources for creativity on questionnaire and their rank reasons by interview. 12 Chinese graduate students and 5 Americans had checked against the Chinese and English version. II. STUDY 1 A. Method 1) Participants.U.S. data were collected from 57 adults in Haidian Christian Church, the Beijing International Christian Fellowship and shopping places in Beijing. All those American subjects first language was English. China data were collected from 190 adults from Peking University, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China University of Mining and Technology, China Agriculture University and residents in the Apartments of Beijing Normal University. All Chinese subjects were born in China. All these participants ranged in age from 18 to 55 years old (Table 1). 2) Procedure. The questionnaire was given to 276 people, and 247 samples could be used in this study. Participants were asked to rate the importance of the resources for enhancing creativity on a 5-point Likert scale ranging from 1 (very slightly or not at all important) to 5 (extremely important). Order of resources was counterbalanced in a Latin square arrangement in questionnaires, so that the ratings of each resource occurred approximately equally often from the first to the six positions. A demographic questionnaire was also used to ask about ages, gender, highest level of education, nationality and whether English was their first language of each participant. B. Results and Discussion 1) Culture Differences. Table 2 presents the means and standard deviation for the ratings of six resources on enhancing creativity between Chinese and American. Independent-Samples T test revealed that Chinese rated Intelligence (t = 3.953 p <.001), Knowledge (t = 3.344 p <.01), and Personality (t = 2.365 p <.05) more important than Americans. And there was no difference between Americans and Chinese about rating of motivation, environment, and thinking styles. Table 2 also presents the rank ordering of six resources on enhancing creativity. To examine the effectiveness of the rank ordering of resources, we conducted nonparametric Wilcoxon signed ranks tests on rating for each cultural group. However, there were no significant differences among the first rank to the fourth rank for Chinese group, which suggested the resources of personality, motivation, intelligence and thinking styles were among the same important level. Nevertheless, for American group, there were significant differences between thinking styles and knowledge ( Z =-4.072, p <.001), intelligence ( Z = -3.709, p <.001), while there was no significant difference between the first rank (thinking styles) and second rank (motivation). 2) Discussion. To some extent, the results provided some evidences and support for the investment theory of creativity, because the averaged rating scores of the six resources were above 3 (moderately important) for both Americans and Chinese. In sum, study 1 suggested some culture differences. Americans were inclined to rank thinking styles as the most important resource for creativity, and Chinese rated personality, motivation, Intelligence and thinking styles very high rank without significant difference. Some participants explained the reason that they couldn t identify the rating of these resources, because all of them were important. Thus, the evidence of the cultural difference is a bit ambiguity in study1. As a result, Study 2 was designed to test the culture difference from another perspective with the same participants. TABLE I. Variables BASIC DESCRIPTIVE FOR BOTH SAMPLELE S Chinese (n=190) Number of samples American (n=57) Total (n=247) Male 107 35 142 Female 83 22 105 18-25 Young Adult 112 25 137 26-55 Middle Adult 78 32 110 218

III. STUDY 2 A. Methods 1) The second Study involved people s ranking these resources from the most importance to the least importance on enhancing creativity. Six resources are present together for participants. Participants were asked to write down the order of importance from the first to the sixth rank. The order of the six resources which were present to participants was randomized to avoid order effects. Moreover, all the participants were asked to evaluate the contribution percentages of personal and situational factors to creativity for each culture group. B. Results and Discussion Table 3 presents the percentages of participants in each group who ranked R1 (the first most importance) and R6 (the least importance) on creativity between Americans and Chinese. 36.32% Chinese participants chose motivation as R1, and majority American participants chose thinking styles (26.79%) and motivation (25.00%) as R1. Chi-square test results also revealed significantly different, χ 2 (5, N=246) = 22.31, p <.001. For the R6, Chinese marked environment (37.89%) as the least importance on creativity, but Americans chose knowledge (26.79%) and environment (30.36%) as the least importance on creativity. Significant differences also emerged in these ranks, χ 2 (5, N=246) =19.812, p <.01. Table 4 presents the averaged rank of importance and a Mann-Whitney U test between Chinese and American. Analysis indicated that there were statistically significant differences by cultures: intelligence (Z = -4.007, p <.001), knowledge ( Z = -3.212, p <.005), thinking styles ( Z = - 2.835, p <.01), environment ( Z = -2.420, p <.05). Wilcoxon signed ranks tests on rating for each cultural group also revealed that the rank of motivation was significantly higher than other resources for Chinese (p <.05). Meanwhile, the rank of thinking styles was significantly higher than intelligence (Z = -3.911, p <.001), and knowledge (Z = -3.703, p <.001). Thus, it was instructive to consider the research indicated strong culture differences. The result of study 2 was not completely consistent with study 1 findings. Thus, 16 participants were asked to judge which study was more reliable between study 1 and 2 if the results conflicted. 14 participants (87.5%) regarded study 2 was more convincing than study 1. For participations evaluation of the contribution percentages of personal and situational factors to creativity, both majority Chinese (72.6%) and Americans (67.9%) emphasized person contribute more to creativity rather than situational factors. IV. GENERAL DISCUSSION Overall, the findings of this preliminary study indicated the similarities and differences in perception the importance of resources on enhancing creativity between Chinese and American. To some extent, the investment theory of creativity was tested by the Study. The results of rating in study 1 and ranking in study 2 almost presented some consistent findings. Both Americans and Chinese considered motivation as the first most importance for promoting creativity. In addition, majority Americans and Chinese considered that personal factors contributed more to creativity rather than situational factors. Furthermore, Wilcoxon signed Rank Test and Mann-Whitney U test revealed significant culture differences. Finally, complete content and organizational editing bef In short, Chinese tended to emphasize intelligence and knowledge, but Americans were inclined to stress thinking styles as the second importance to creativity. Thus, the studies of creativity were partially culture-specific and should take the factor of culture into consideration. The results were also in good agreement with many studies of the importance of resources on enhancing creativity. For examples, one study found that the most important properties of creative achievement were achievement pursuit and initiative, which could be considered to emphasize the factor motivation [28]. On the other hand, the findings could also be useful for providing a conceptual framework for the development of explicit theories. These findings may have important educational implications. Maybe students should be encouraged to express different thinking styles in China, and perhaps Americans should emphasis the knowledge learning. Moreover, there are some limitations in the present preliminary study such as the majority participants with higher education. Further studies should be conducted to test the results seriously. ACKNOWLEDGMENT The authors thank all the voluntary participants. H. Shao, T. Liu, X. Duan and Y. Chen deserve thanks for study design and data analysis. We also thank Z. Zhang, outstanding reviewer of the original manuscript for her insightful comments. REFERENCES [1] R. 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TABLE III. PERCENTAGES TO RANK RESOURCES AS R1 OR R6 FOR CHINESE (N= 190) AND AMERICAN (N= 56) resources R1 R6 Chinese American Chinese American Motivation 36.32% 25.00% 10.00% 1.79% Personality 16.84% 23.21% 17.89% 12.50% Knowledge 15.79% 8.93% 14.21% 26.79% Intelligence 14.74% 1.79% 7.89% 23.21% Thinking Styles 11.05% 26.79% 12.11% 5.36% Environment 5.26% 14.29% 37.89% 30.36% TABLE IV. AVERAGED RANKS OF IMPORTANCE ON CREATIVITY AND A MANN-WHITNEY U TEST Chinese (n=190) American (n=56) resources Averaged Rank Ranking Averaged Rank Ranking Z p Motivation 2.72 1 2.64 1-0.195 0.845 Thinking Styles 3.63 5 2.93 2-2.835** 0.005 Personality 3.51 4 3.21 3-1.114 0.265 Environment 4.48 6 3.79 4-2.420* 0.016 Knowledge 3.38 3 4.20 5-3.212** 0.001 Intelligence 3.28 2 4.23 6-4.007*** 0.000 a Rank the importance of resources on creativity from the first to the sixth position. b * p <.05, ** p <.01, *** p <.001 221