Playfulness, Ideas, and Creativity: A Survey

Abstract

This article investigates whether self-reports about playfulness are related to self-reports about creativity and the alternate uses of objects. An on-line survey was conducted of how people think about themselves. One thousand, five hundred and thirty-six people completed the survey. They were asked whether a variety of statements were very characteristic of themselves through to whether they were very uncharacteristic. Respondents were then asked to offer alternative uses for 2 different objects. Those people who characterized themselves as being playful clearly thought of themselves as being creative. The self-reports of their playfulness, creativity, and innovation were positively correlated with each other and were validated with their suggested uses for 2 different objects. Personality measures were derived from the respondents' self-assessments. On the openness scale, the measure was positively correlated with the respondents' assessments of their own playfulness and with the number of alternative uses for two objects.

Acknowledgments

We thank Max Alexander, Rahul Chakkara, and Jason Rentfrow for help and advice in conducting and advertising the survey.

Notes

Note. All values of Pearson's r are highly significant for a population of 1536 with the probability of two measures being randomly correlated for r = 0.1 being 1 × 10⁻⁵.

The tables of data not published in this report are available from the Dryad Digital Repository: http://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.kc4j4