The Big Five Theories Of Creativity

Superior Essays
What is creativity?:
As you return home from work you realize you have nothing to eat home and can’t stand another dollar menu meal from McDonalds. Walking through the grocery store in the frozen aisle you pick out your favorite chicken stir-fry. As you warm up your meal do you even wonder how we came up with frozen foods? Someone must have thought of this idea. This individual must have been creative. Creativity, a term that is so commonly heard in everyday language. When creativity is thought of it is imaged to be simply utilized in the arts, but that is not a factual statement. Many questions arise when the topic of creativity comes up in conversations. Some say creativity is creating new information, others say its original art, but what
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A subcategory of this perspective is called the five factor or the big five theory. This theory claims that five major traits are present in all cultures. Each has various characteristics that help us better understand and categorize personalities. “Psychologists have long identified openness to new experiences as one of the ‘big five’ personality traits, which also include extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness and neuroticism.” (Westerhoff, 2009). These traits at present in all the various forms of this theory, but differ in the terms of the names they are given. These work together in people to create various personalities. The big five are represented in different types of people and are more prominent in different types of people. Openness to experience is the trait that will be focused on in this essay, as it pertains most prominently to people categorized as creative. “Opennes[s] to experience involves the extent of one 's intellectual curiosity, creativity, and insightfulness.” (Rogosch, & Cicchetti, 2004). Openness to experience is a trait that fits people who are able to detach themselves from previously conceive ideas and are able to create new ideas. These people must be able to know current ideas and must be able to construct new ideas at the same time. “‘be flexible and imaginative; they prefer complexity, explore new ideas, tolerate ambiguity and are able to …show more content…
The learning perspective focuses on the concept that personality is learned and can be taught. Creativity “is an acquired behavior-learnable, teachable, tangible, and crucial to human development” (Balkin, 1990). Many find creativity to be a trait that can be learned and therefore it is important to discuss how it can be learned. We see that skills in the arts are taught to people. Artists such as musicians are taught to compose and create new music. At this point it is important to differentiate between creativity and talent because “creativity and talent are not equivalent .” (Balkin, 1990). A talent is a task that is mastered by a person, while creativity is the act of creation. While people are not able to learn talents, people are able to learn to create. This theory focuses more on the intellect of a person because if one is smart enough they are able to learn to create. Many more factors play into this theory. Such as, the quality of education plays a role in determining if a person is able to learn creativity. This theory puts a lot of emphasis on techniques on learning

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