Reading time: 18 minutes · Key authors: Guilford · Runco & Jaeger · Amabile · Csikszentmihalyi · Rhodes · Wallas · Sternberg & Lubart · Kaufman & Beghetto · Keywords: what is creativity · definition of creativity · theories of creativity · psychology of creativity · models of creativity · creative thinking · Big-C little-c · creativity in education · creativity and psychology
Few words are used as frequently and with as little agreement about their meaning as creativity. In a single meeting you might hear that the new product design is “very creative,” that the marketing department needs “more creative people,” and that today’s students “lack creativity.” Three uses, three distinct implicit meanings, none defined with precision.
This problem is not exclusive to everyday language. Until a few decades ago, academic psychology itself struggled to agree on what to study when studying creativity. The first systematic review of the literature, presented by Guilford in 1950, found that creativity represented less than 0.2% of all psychology output in the preceding ten years. It was, in Guilford’s own words, “the most neglected topic” in the entire history of scientific psychology.
That has changed radically. Today there is a robust field of research — the psychology of creativity — with well-established theoretical frameworks, validated measurement instruments, and replicable findings. This article brings together the most important definitions, models, and theories from that field: the ones anyone who wants to understand or teach creativity seriously needs to know.
The Problem of Defining Creativity
The first obstacle to understanding creativity is its definition. Not because no accepted definition exists — one does — but because the concept is complex enough that many partial definitions compete with each other, each capturing a different aspect of the phenomenon.
Runco and Jaeger (2012), in their article “The Standard Definition of Creativity” published in the Creativity Research Journal, traced the history of creativity definitions in the scientific literature and reached an important conclusion: although dozens of definitions exist in the literature, the vast majority converge on two criteria that can be considered the standard definition of the field:
“Originality is undoubtedly required. It is often labeled novelty, but whatever the label, if something is not unusual, novel, or unique, it is commonplace, mundane, or conventional. It is not original, and therefore not creative […] Originality is vital for creativity but is not sufficient. Ideas and products that are merely original might very well be useless.”
Their conclusion is that creativity requires two simultaneous conditions: originality (novelty, statistical rarity, unconventionality) and effectiveness (utility, appropriateness, relevance to a goal). This dual definition — which appears in the literature also as novelty + usefulness or originality + appropriateness — is the starting point of virtually all contemporary creativity research.
The definition has an implication worth emphasizing: being creative is not just being original. An idea can be completely original and completely useless — that is not creativity. Nor is it sufficient to be useful without being original — that is competence, not creativity. Genuine creativity requires the intersection of both conditions.
The Four P Model: A Taxonomy for Organizing the Field
Before turning to specific theories, it is useful to have a general map of the field. The most widely cited framework for organizing the different research approaches to creativity is the Four P’s model, introduced by Mel Rhodes in 1961 in his article “An Analysis of Creativity,” published in Phi Delta Kappan.
After reviewing more than forty definitions of creativity, Rhodes found that all of them could be organized into four categories that complement but do not reduce to one another:
Person: the profile of the creative individual — their personality traits, cognitive abilities, attitudes, values, and dispositions. Typical questions: What characteristics do creative people have? Can an individual’s creative potential be measured? What traits predict creativity?
Process: the cognitive and metacognitive operations involved in creative thinking. Typical questions: How is an original idea generated? What stages does the creative process go through? What mental mechanisms produce new connections?
Product: the tangible or intangible results of the creative process — ideas, works, solutions, inventions. Typical questions: How is it determined whether a product is creative? What are the criteria for evaluating creativity? What makes one solution more creative than another?
Press: the social, cultural, and institutional context in which creativity occurs. Typical questions: What conditions favor or inhibit creativity? How does the organizational or educational environment influence creative production? What role does culture play in the valuation of original ideas?
The Four P model remains the most widely used organizational framework in creativity training textbooks and programs, precisely because it makes clear that talking about creativity without specifying which dimension is being analyzed inevitably produces conceptual confusion.
Types of Creativity: From Mini-c to Big-C
One of the most useful contributions of contemporary psychology to the study of creativity is the distinction between types or levels of creativity according to their scope and impact. The most influential taxonomy is the Four C Model, developed by Kaufman and Beghetto (2009) building on earlier work by Csikszentmihalyi, Simonton, and others.
Big-C creativity: eminent, transformative creativity that changes a field of knowledge or culture. It is the creativity of Einstein, Shakespeare, Marie Curie, or Bach. It requires decades of work, recognition by the expert community of the field, and verifiable historical impact. It is statistically exceptional and is not a realistic goal for ordinary education or professional development.
Pro-c creativity: expert creativity developed through years of deliberate practice in a domain. The architect who designs original buildings, the chef who develops new recipes, the researcher who publishes relevant findings. It requires domain mastery and sustained production of original and appropriate work, but not necessarily the historical impact of Big-C.
little-c creativity: the creativity of ordinary problem solving, of improvisation in daily life, of finding new solutions to common challenges. It is the creativity that all human beings exercise to a greater or lesser degree, and which can be deliberately developed.
mini-c creativity: the most intimate level of creativity, introduced by Beghetto and Kaufman to capture the internal creative processes that accompany all genuine learning. When a student connects a new idea with their prior experience in a way that is original for them — even if it is not original for anyone else — they are exercising mini-c. It is creativity as a process of learning and personal meaning-making.
This taxonomy has direct consequences for education: teachers who expect to see Big-C in their classrooms will not recognize the real creativity occurring at the mini-c and little-c levels. And students who assume creativity is synonymous with genius will dismiss their own creative capacity before developing it.
Guilford’s Structure of Intellect Model
The first rigorous theoretical framework for studying creativity as a cognitive process was J. P. Guilford’s, presented in his presidential address to the American Psychological Association in 1950 and developed in his Structure of Intellect (SOI) model from 1956 onward.
Guilford proposed that intelligence was not a unitary factor but a set of cognitive abilities classifiable along three dimensions: operations (what the mind does), contents (what the mind operates on), and products (what type of result is produced). Within operations, he identified six types, two of which are fundamental to understanding creativity:
Convergent production: the ability to find the single correct answer to a problem that already has a defined solution. This is the type of operation that conventional intelligence tests measure almost exclusively.
Divergent production: the ability to generate multiple possible and original solutions from the same information. This is the central cognitive operation of creative thinking.
Divergent thinking, according to Guilford (1967), has four fundamental dimensions: fluency (quantity of ideas), flexibility (variety of categories), originality (statistical rarity of ideas), and elaboration (level of development of ideas). This four-part distinction remains the standard reference structure for measuring creative potential, including the world’s most widely used test for this purpose: the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT).
Guilford’s most enduring contribution to the field is the demonstration that creative thinking can be studied scientifically, measured empirically, and developed through deliberate practice.
The Four Stages of the Creative Process: Wallas’s Model
If Guilford’s model answers the question of what capacities are involved in creativity, Graham Wallas’s model answers the question of how the creative process unfolds over time.
Wallas, an English social psychologist, published his book The Art of Thought in 1926, in which he proposed that the creative process moves through four stages that have since been confirmed, revised, and extended by contemporary neuroscientific research:
Preparation: the phase of conscious, intentional work on the problem. The individual gathers information, studies the domain, formulates and reformulates the problem, explores perspectives, and exhausts the most obvious solution paths. It is a cognitively demanding phase that lays the groundwork for everything that follows.
Incubation: the phase of withdrawal from conscious work on the problem. The individual attends to other things, rests, or is distracted. But cognitive processing continues at an unconscious level, reorganizing the information accumulated during preparation in ways that conscious, directed thinking cannot produce on its own. Ritter and Dijksterhuis (2014), in a review published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience (PubMed Central, DOI: 10.3389/fnhum.2014.00215), confirm that during incubation “unconscious processes contribute to creative thinking” — that the unconscious processes active during incubation are not simply a rest period but a period of active non-conscious processing.
Illumination: the moment of insight — the sudden appearance of the solution or connection that resolves the problem, frequently in moments of relaxation or distraction. It is Archimedes’ famous “Eureka!,” the melody of “Yesterday” that Paul McCartney says he dreamed. Research shows that these insight moments are not random: they occur with greater probability after adequate periods of preparation and incubation.
Verification: the phase of conscious work again, dedicated to evaluating, refining, and developing the solution or idea that emerged during illumination. Verification distinguishes creative insight from mere random occurrence: it subjects the idea to appropriateness criteria and transforms it into a finished product.
Wallas’s model, though more than a century old, remains the most widely cited description of the creative process because it captures something that neurocognitive research has repeatedly confirmed: the creative process is neither linear nor exclusively conscious. Incubation and illumination are real phenomena with measurable physiological correlates.
Amabile’s Componential Theory: Creativity in Social Context
While the models of Guilford and Wallas focus on individual cognition, Teresa Amabile, a researcher at Harvard Business School, developed from 1983 onward the theory that best integrates individual and social factors in creative production: the Componential Theory of Creativity.
According to Amabile (2012), creativity emerges from the confluence of four components:
Domain-relevant skills: the knowledge, technical skills, and accumulated experience in the specific field. Without domain knowledge, divergent thinking produces ideas that may be original but not appropriate.
Creativity-relevant processes: the cognitive skills and personality characteristics that facilitate creative thinking — tolerance for ambiguity, willingness to explore, ability to suspend judgment, skill at seeing problems from new perspectives.
Intrinsic task motivation: genuine interest, enjoyment, and personal sense of challenge in the task itself. Amabile demonstrated empirically that people are systematically more creative when motivated by the work itself than when motivated primarily by external rewards or threatening evaluations.
The social environment: the conditions external to the individual — the organizational or educational climate, the type of supervision or teaching, the presence or absence of autonomy, the attitude toward error. Amabile identified that environments that suppress intrinsic motivation (through excessive surveillance, threatening evaluation, rigid restrictions) reduce creativity measurably, regardless of the individual’s skills.
The fundamental contribution of the Componential Theory is the demonstration that creativity is not a fixed trait or innate talent: it is the product of the interaction between components that can be developed, cultivated, or inhibited. All components are sensitive to pedagogical or management intervention.
Csikszentmihalyi’s Systems Model of Creativity
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi offers one of the most radically systemic frameworks for understanding creativity. In his book Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention (1996), he proposes that creativity cannot be understood as an individual process: it is the product of the interaction between three elements of a system:
The person: the human being who generates ideas and proposes transformations in a domain. Their knowledge, cognitive skills, motivation, and openness to experience are necessary but not sufficient conditions for creativity.
The domain: the symbolic field — the rules, concepts, procedures, and established works of a discipline (music, physics, architecture, law). The domain is the repository of accumulated knowledge on which the creative individual operates. One cannot be creative in a domain one does not know.
The field: the experts and institutions that have the power to evaluate and validate whether a contribution is creative within the domain. A scientific finding, a work of art, or an innovative design only becomes a recognized creative contribution if the relevant field validates it.
The most important implication of Csikszentmihalyi’s model for education is that creativity does not occur only inside the student’s head: it also depends on the domain the student knows and on the social environment that values or renders invisible original contributions. An educator who does not recognize originality is not merely an insufficient assessor: they are a field that is failing to fulfill its function within the creative system.
Sternberg and Lubart’s Investment Theory
One of the most original and influential theories of recent decades is the Investment Theory of Creativity, proposed by Robert Sternberg and Todd Lubart in 1991 and developed in subsequent publications, including their article “Investing in Creativity” in American Psychologist (1996).
The central metaphor of the theory is that of the financial market: creative people are like intelligent investors who “buy low and sell high” in the marketplace of ideas. Creative people generate ideas that at the time of their formulation are seen as unconventional, risky, or even ridiculous — this is “buying low.” Then, when those ideas gain acceptance, creative people receive recognition for their originality and move on to the next set of unpopular ideas — this is “selling high.”
What distinguishes this theory is its identification of six resources whose confluence is necessary for creativity:
Intellectual abilities: in particular the ability to see problems from new angles, to recognize which ideas are worth developing, and to persuade others of their value.
Knowledge: sufficient mastery of the field to know what is conventional and where the opportunities for innovation lie. Without prior knowledge, there is nothing to innovate on.
Thinking styles: the preference for legislative thinking (creating new rules) over executive thinking (following existing rules) or judicial thinking (evaluating rules).
Personality: tolerance for ambiguity, willingness to overcome obstacles, readiness to take reasonable risks, persistence in the face of resistance.
Motivation: especially intrinsic motivation for the task — the genuine interest that sustains creative work over time.
Environment: the contextual conditions that allow, stimulate, or suppress creative expression.
The Investment Theory highlights something that purely cognitive models tend to underestimate: creativity requires social courage. Generating ideas that challenge consensus means exposing oneself to criticism, resistance, and rejection. Creative people do not only think differently: they choose to think differently despite the social costs that may entail.
Creativity and Flow: Csikszentmihalyi and Optimal Conditions
Beyond his systems model of creativity, Csikszentmihalyi is known for his research on flow: the optimal psychological state experienced when a person is completely absorbed in a challenging but manageable activity.
Flow is not synonymous with creativity, but it is closely associated with it. Csikszentmihalyi’s studies of highly creative individuals — artists, scientists, athletes, musicians — showed that they frequently reported flow states during their most productive creative episodes. Flow is characterized by: loss of time awareness, absence of self-consciousness, total absorption in the task, a sense of control and mastery, and sustained intrinsic motivation.
The conditions that generate flow — balance between challenge and skill, clarity of goals, immediate feedback, and sustained concentration — are also, to a large extent, the conditions that favor creativity. This convergence is not a coincidence: flow is the subjective experience of the optimal cognitive functioning that creativity requires.
For the educator, this has direct implications: designing learning experiences that generate flow states — challenging but achievable tasks, with clear goals and immediate feedback — is also designing conditions that favor creative thinking.
Creativity and Domain: Is Creativity Domain-General or Domain-Specific?
One of the most debated questions in the psychology of creativity is whether creativity is a general ability (transferring across domains) or domain-specific (developing separately in each field).
Plucker and Beghetto (2004), in their work “Why Creativity Is Domain General, Why It Looks Domain Specific, and Why the Distinction Does Not Matter,” argue that the question is ill-posed. Creativity has general components (such as divergent thinking, tolerance for ambiguity, and intrinsic motivation) and domain-specific components (the field knowledge that makes it possible to recognize what is original and useful in a given context). As a person deepens their experience in a domain, specificity dominates; in the early phases of learning, generality dominates.
This conclusion has direct pedagogical consequences: it makes no sense to teach “creativity in the abstract” disconnected from disciplinary knowledge, but it also makes no sense to assume that domain mastery automatically produces creativity without explicit work on the general creative processes.
The Neuroscience of Creativity: What the Brain Reveals
Neuroscientific research on creativity has advanced significantly over the past twenty years. Without entering into technicalities, it is worth mentioning some findings that illuminate the theoretical models described.
Neuroimaging studies show that during divergent thinking tasks, three neural networks that in other contexts tend to operate in alternation are simultaneously activated: the default mode network (active in spontaneous thought and imagination), the executive control network (which regulates attention and evaluation), and the salience network (which determines what information is important). The unusual coordination of these three networks is, according to the research of Beaty et al. (2016) and others, the neural correlate of high-level creativity.
This finding confirms something the theoretical models already suggested: creativity is neither unconstrained divergent thinking (default mode network activated without control) nor only disciplined convergent thinking (executive network dominant). It is the productive interaction of imagination and control — exactly what the models of Guilford, Amabile, and the Osborn-Parnes CPS described conceptually.
Creativity and Culture: Glăveanu’s 5A Framework
The models described so far tend to center creativity on the individual or, at most, on the individual-environment relationship. A more recent current in the psychology of creativity proposes that this perspective is insufficient.
Vlad Petre Glăveanu (2013), in his work on the 5A framework (Actors, Actions, Artifacts, Affordances, Audiences), argues that creativity is fundamentally a cultural and relational phenomenon, not only psychological and individual. Creativity occurs between actors who act, with and on cultural artifacts, in environments with specific possibilities, before audiences that do or do not value contributions.
This cultural perspective complements — without replacing — cognitive models: it reminds us that what is considered “creative” varies across cultures, historical periods, and epistemic communities, and that the evaluation of creativity is never purely technical but always culturally situated.
The Major Open Questions
Despite considerable advances, the psychology of creativity still has fundamental questions without definitive answers:
To what extent does creativity have a genetic basis and to what extent is it the result of environment and practice? Is there a universal “creative personality” or do the traits that favor creativity vary by domain and culture? Can artificial intelligence be genuinely creative according to the standard definition of originality + effectiveness? How does creativity relate to mental health — research shows both positive and negative correlations that are not yet fully explained?
These open questions do not invalidate the accumulated knowledge. They put it in perspective: creativity is a sufficiently complex phenomenon for its scientific study to be both intellectually demanding and pedagogically indispensable.
Conclusion: Creativity as a Serious Object of Study
Creativity is not an unfathomable mystery or a talent one either has or does not have. It is a complex psychological phenomenon, with cognitive, motivational, social, and cultural dimensions, that research has broken down into identifiable, measurable, and — most importantly for education — developable components.
The theoretical frameworks reviewed in this article — the standard definition of Runco and Jaeger, Rhodes’s Four P model, Kaufman and Beghetto’s Four C taxonomy, Guilford’s cognitive model, Wallas’s process model, Amabile’s Componential Theory, Csikszentmihalyi’s systems model, and Sternberg and Lubart’s Investment Theory — are not competing theories. They are complementary perspectives on a multidimensional phenomenon.
Understanding them together is understanding why creativity cannot be reduced to a single intervention, technique, or activity. It is understanding that developing creativity requires working simultaneously on the individual’s cognitive skills, their domain knowledge, their intrinsic motivation, and the conditions of the environment in which they work.
It is, ultimately, understanding why creativity is a long-term educational project that deserves all the seriousness the research has devoted to it.
References
Amabile, T. M. (2012). Componential theory of creativity (Working Paper No. 12-096). Harvard Business School. https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=42469
Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1996). Creativity: Flow and the psychology of discovery and invention. HarperCollins.
Glăveanu, V. P. (2013). Rewriting the language of creativity: The five A’s framework. Review of General Psychology, 17(1), 69–81. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0029528
Guilford, J. P. (1950). Creativity. American Psychologist, 5(9), 444–454. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0063487
Guilford, J. P. (1967). The nature of human intelligence. McGraw-Hill.
Kaufman, J. C., & Beghetto, R. A. (2009). Beyond big and little: The four C model of creativity. Review of General Psychology, 13(1), 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0013688
Plucker, J. A., & Beghetto, R. A. (2004). Why creativity is domain general, why it looks domain specific, and why the distinction does not matter. In R. J. Sternberg, E. L. Grigorenko, & J. L. Singer (Eds.), Creativity: From potential to realization (pp. 153–167). American Psychological Association.
Rhodes, M. (1961). An analysis of creativity. Phi Delta Kappan, 42(7), 305–311.
Ritter, S. M., & Dijksterhuis, A. (2014). Creativity — the unconscious foundations of the incubation period. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 8, 215. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2014.00215
Runco, M. A., & Jaeger, G. J. (2012). The standard definition of creativity. Creativity Research Journal, 24(1), 92–96. https://doi.org/10.1080/10400419.2012.650092
Sternberg, R. J., & Lubart, T. I. (1996). Investing in creativity. American Psychologist, 51(7), 677–688. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.51.7.677
Wallas, G. (1926). The art of thought. Harcourt Brace.