The Importance of Domain-Specific Expertise in Creativity

Abstract

Although creativity and expertise are related, they are nonetheless very different things. Expertise does not usually require creativity, but creativity generally does require a certain level of expertise. There are similarities in the relationships of both expertise and creativity to domains, however. Research has shown that just as expertise in one domain does not predict expertise in other, unrelated domains, creativity in one domain does not predict creativity in other, unrelated domains. People may be expert, and people may be creative, in many domains, or they may be expert, or creative, in few domains or none at all, and one cannot simply transfer expertise, or creativity, from one domain to another, unrelated domain. The domain specificity of creativity matters crucially for creativity training, creativity assessment, creativity research, and creativity theory. The domain specificity of creativity also means that interdisciplinary thinking, interdisciplinary collaboration, and interdisciplinary creativity are even more important than one would assume if creativity were domain general.

Keywords:

• creativity
• creativity assessment
• domain specificity
• expertise
• interdisciplinary thinking

Notes

1. There is evidence that intelligence, or whatever it is that IQ tests measure, is fairly domain general in the sense that it is correlated with performance in a wide variety of domains (Neisser et al., 1996), but as we will see, that is not true of any so-called tests of creativity.

2. Recent research suggests that skill in insight problem solving may have very little in common with real-world creative behavior, which presents another level of domain specificity. Beaty, Nusbaum, and Silvia (2014) looked at the correlations between success at solving two classic insight problems and real-world creative achievement and concluded that there was “no evidence for a relationship between insight problem solving behavior and creative behavior and achievement” (p. 287).

3. As a good summary judgment of the validity of creativity self-assessments, Reiter-Palmon et al. (2012) concluded that Analyses provided evidence of domain specificity of self-perceptions [of creativity]. The scales correlated with self-report measures of creativity, but not with objective measures. Self-perceptions of creativity had strong to moderate relationships with personality and creative self-efficacy. These results suggest that although self-perceptions of creativity may provide some information about creativity, researchers should be cautious when using this measure as a criterion. (p. 107)

4. Imagine giving two IQ tests and finding that the tests were essentially uncorrelated with each other (as Torrance himself found for his two eponymous Figural and Verbal tests). Even if the two intelligence tests were extremely different in format, such as Raven’s Progressive Matrices and the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale–Revised (WAIS-R), one would expect at least a moderate to strong correlation between them and similar predictive abilities for achievements that IQ scores are expected to predict (which is exactly what one finds for the WAIS-R and Raven’s progressive matrices; Bingham, Burke, & Murray, 1966; Kern, Bordieri, & Taylor, 1993; Vincent & Cox, 1974). If one did find such a lack of expected correlation and a pattern of predictive failures, psychometricians would conclude that the two tests were not measuring the same things and that one or both must be invalid measures. They would certainly not try to explain away such discrepant findings while continuing to use both IQ tests, virtually interchangeably, as measures of intelligence. But this is precisely what has happened with the Torrance Tests.

5. As noted in the early section on How We Know Creativity Is Domain Specific, these assessments tend to show good stability—subjects’ creativity ratings within a domain tend to be stable across similar assessments and over time—but show virtually zero across-domain correlations, strong evidence of the domain specificity of creativity.

6. Weinstein et al. (2014) compared their research results (the same ones reported in Gardner and Davis’s [2013] book) with a study that made the cover of Newsweek magazine in 2010 (Bronson & Merryman, 2010) that argued that creativity was in decline, based on changes in scores on one of the Torrance Tests over roughly the same period of time. “The Creativity Crisis” was the title of the Newsweek cover (15 July 2010). Weinstein et al. (2014) concluded, based on the results of their longitudinal study of actual creative performance of adolescents in two different domains, that the answer to the question “Is creativity in crisis?” cannot be answered globally, as Newsweek and the Torrance Test study argued, but must instead be asked, and answered, on a domain-by-domain basis because “[i]t depends on where one looks. With so much at stake, creativity research seeking to document and explain putative trends in creativity is well advised to use a variety of measures and a variety of media as creatively as possible” (p. 183). Weinstein et al. (2014) titled their study “A Decline in Creativity? It Depends on the Domain,” and in explaining their research design noted that “there is considerable support for the notion of domain specificity related to creativity” (p. 175) and quoted Runco’s (2004) Annual Review of Psychology entry on “Creativity” to emphasize this point: Runco (2004) suggested that the concept of domains “must be acknowledged because most of what has been uncovered about creativity is domain specific” (p. 678). Further, Runco suggested that considering and elucidating differences across domains is “one of the most important impetuses in the literature” (p. 678). To understand how creativity is actually changing in different domains, it is imperative that research considers the products of those domains. (p. 175).

7. Domain specificity may be part of the reason for the many contradictory studies in this area, some showing a pronounced negative impact of extrinsic motivation, others showing a positive impact or no impact (see, e.g., Amabile, 1983, 1996; Baer, 1997, 1998b; Conti, Collins, & Picariello, 2001; Eisenberger & Cameron, 1996; Eisenberger & Rhoades, 2001; and Eisenberger & Shanock, 2003). Extrinsic motivation might decrease creativity in some domains and increase it or have no impact in others.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

John Baer

Dr. John Baer is a professor at Rider University. His research on the development of creativity and his teaching have both won national awards, including the American Psychological Association’s Berlyne Prize and the National Conference on College Teaching and Learning’s Award for Innovative Excellence. He currently serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Creative Behavior; Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts; and the International Journal of Creativity and Problem Solving. His books include Being Creative Inside and Outside the Classroom; Creativity and Divergent Thinking: A Task-Specific Approach; Creative Teachers, Creative Students; Creativity Across Domains: Faces of the Muse; Reason and Creativity in Development; Are We Free? Psychology and Free Will; Essentials of Creativity Assessment; and Teaching for Creativity in the Common Core Classroom. He has been a teacher and program director in gifted education and served as a regional director in the Odyssey of the Mind creative problem solving program. Dr. Baer is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, and he has received research grants from the National Science Foundation, the Educational Testing Service, the National Center for Educational Statistics, the Carnegie Foundation, and Yale, Rutgers, and Rider universities. E-mail: [email protected]