The Domain-specificity In Creativity Evaluation

Creativity evaluation is critical to creativity research.Novelty and appropriateness are recognized as the criteria of creativity evaluation,whilst the domain specificity of creativity determines that its evaluation criteria is not constant.There exist a variety of differences in the understanding and attitude people holding to creative products in different creative domains,and these differences further reflects on the evaluation criteria.Considering creativity evaluation research often fails to reach an agreement on creativity evaluation criteria,this study was making effort answering this question from the perspectives of peoples' attitudes toward creativity,different evaluation criteria of creativity and different relationships between novelty and appropriateness in different creative domains,aiming to provide basis for the selection of creativity evaluation criteria in different domains.Study 1 focused on the differences in the attitude people holding toward creativity in different domains.This study explored the differences of implicit and explicit attitudes toward creativity in art-literature and technique domains by means of implicit association test(IAT)and subjective report.The result shows that people tended to associate art-literature creativity with the concept of novelty,whilst technical creativity are more likely to be associated with the concept of appropriateness.Study 2a focused on the differences in people's creative evaluation criteria of different domains.In this study,subjective reports were used to explore the differences in the importance of the evaluation criteria of novelty and appropriateness in the evaluation of creativity in the domains of literature,technology and science.The results suggest that novelty was more important than appropriateness when evaluating artliterature and scientific creativity,whilst the results were on the contrary when evaluating creativity of technical domains.Besides,the importance of appropriateness in scientific creativity evaluation was between art-literature and technical domain.Study 2b focused on how the influences of novelty and appropriateness of creative products on creative evaluation varies when people evaluate art-literature,technical and scientific creativity.This study used the subject report method in which participants evaluated scoring creativity of products of different creative domains which varied in novelty and appropriateness.The result indicates that both novelty and appropriateness were important criteria of creative evaluation,whilst novelty and applicability will be considered more comprehensively when people evaluate technical creativity,and that appropriate features in are-literature and scientific domain could significantly increase the creativity evaluation.Study 3 attempted to explore the differences of interaction patterns of novelty and appropriateness dimensions in different domains.Participants were asked to finish creative tasks of different domains under different novelty and appropriateness requirements.The results show the typical trading off between novelty and applicability is one-way,that is,the pursuit of higher novelty features reduced appropriateness of creative products,but the pursuit of higher appropriateness features had no impact on novelty.The following conclusions were drawn under the conditions of this study:(1)With regard to implicit attitude,people tend to associate the concept of novelty with art-literature creativity,and the concept of appropriateness with technical creativity.(2)People take more consideration of novelty features when evaluating art-literature creativity,whilst more consideration of appropriateness features when evaluating technical creativity.(3)Higher appropriateness features promote people's evaluation of art-literature and scientific creativity,whilst creative products in technical domains get higher creativity evaluation only if they're both highly novel and appropriate.(4)When generating creative ideas,higher novelty reduces the appropriateness of ideas,but higher appropriateness features have no influence on the novelty of ideas.In general,this research shows people hold different attitudes toward creativity in different domains,and that the differences in attitudes further reflect on the creativity evaluation criteria.Besides,it is domain-general that novelty trade off with appropriateness.The limitations of this study lie in the usage of too much evaluation materials and the absent of taking expertise into consideration.These problems shall be solved in future studies.