Aiming at Creativity and Ending up with a Range from Low-Hanging Fruits to Foolishness: A Reflective Model of Creativity

The term “creative” is commonly used in everyday language and in academic discourse to discuss the nature of artistic and innovative productions. This usage inherently implies the existence of a variable of creativity that allows different creative works to be compared. The standard definition of creativity asserts that a production must possess both value and novelty in order to be considered truly creative. However, previous psychometric studies aimed at establishing the existence of such a creativity variable based on these two dimensions have produced results that seem to demonstrate their independence or even negative association, based on a weak to negative correlation between value and novelty. These widely replicated empirical results seem to call into question the notion of a single creativity variable associated with productions, leading to a paradoxical use of the term “creative” to describe the object produced. In our study, we aimed to reproduce these results while addressing methodological errors made in previous efforts to establish construct validity. This work led us to test the existence of a common cause for the observed variations in novelty and value. The higher order factor we obtain in our analysis encompasses subtle differences from the conventional creativity axis and interacts negatively with novelty, while correlating positively with value.