Implicit Theories of Creative Ideas 1 Implicit Theories of Creative Ideas: How Culture Guides Creativity Assessments

The current studies provide evidence of two distinct implicit theories of creative ideas and so help to resolve the debate over differences in creativity assessments between Chinese and American samples. In three studies using three methodologies (qualitative inductive, cultural consensus modeling, and experimental), we employ data from 2,140 participants to reveal 26 domain general cues that can indicate whether a product or process is creative. About 95% of the Chinese used a broad range of cues whereas about 75% of the Americans used a narrow range of cues. Members of both cultures found cues such as breakthrough, surprise, and potential to indicate creativity. In contrast, cues such as easy to use, feasible, and for a mass market were indicators of creativity for most Chinese and non-creativity for most Americans. Thus, in addition to domain knowledge, knowledge about creativity itself contributes to creativity assessments. Cross-cultural differences in knowledge about creativity can help explain differences in how members of different cultures assess creativity. These findings have implications for the scholarly conceptual definition of creativity and suggest an array of possibilities for research on creativity and innovation. Implicit Theories of Creative Ideas 3 Implicit Theories of Creative Ideas: How Culture Guides Creativity Assessments People in their everyday experience judge whether the ideas underlying products, processes, and proposals are creative. These creativity judgments have important implications for many aspects of individual and organizational effectiveness. Supervisors assess whether subordinates generate proposals embodying creative ideas and use these assessments to grant rewards and promotions (Amabile & Mueller, 2008). Consumers assess whether products embody creative ideas, judgments that positively relate to product desirability and intentions to buy (Horn & Salvendy, 2009). In organizations that desire to innovate, decision-makers need to consider whether proposals embody creative ideas when determining which subset to fund and pursue (George, 2007). While judgments about creative ideas are ubiquitous in many aspects of organizational life, empirical evidence of how the average employee or consumer makes these judgments is limited. From a theoretical perspective, this gap is important to fill because, for the kind of reasons just noted, creativity is considered to fuel competitive advantage (Woodman, Sawyer, & Griffin, 1993). Further, there is an active debate on how people form these judgments. Scholars are suggesting that people in China and the US assess creativity differently (Leung, Au, & Leung, 2004; Leung & Morris, 2011; Lubart, 2010; Morris & Leung, 2010; Niu & Sternberg, 2006). If there are cultural differences, it would be important for advancing theoretical understandings of creativity assessments and could have implications for understanding business in two of the world’s largest economies. Therefore, reconciling the debate by providing the data needed to characterize cultural differences in creativity assessments has the potential to advance scholarship and practice on innovation across cultures as well as open up new lines of research on creativity. Implicit Theories of Creative Ideas 4 The most widely held theoretical account of the disagreement between Chinese and American creativity assessments is that Chinese norms and values around collectivism and traditionalism should lead Chinese people to prioritize usefulness over novelty in their creativity assessments, whereas American people’s norms around individualism and egalitarianism should lead American people to prioritize novelty over usefulness in their creativity assessments (Bechtoldt, De Dreu, Nijstad, & Choi, 2010; Chiu & Kwan, 2010; De Dreu, 2010; Erez & Nouri, 2010; Leung et al., 2011; Rudowicz, 2003; Zhou & Su, 2010). Yet the one empirical study to date examining how members of the two cultures weight novelty and usefulness when assessing the creativity of products has found that Chinese participants weighted novelty more than US participants did (Paletz & Peng, 2008). Further, work examining overall creativity ratings (rather than how novelty and usefulness play into these ratings) has not found significant differences between the creativity ratings of US and Chinese judges (Niu & Sternberg, 2001; Rostan, Pariser, & Gruber, 2002). Given this gap between theory and evidence around how members of the two cultures assess creativity, and because the ability to recognize ideas as creative is critical for many aspects of individual and organizational effectiveness (Csikszentmihalyi, 1997; Frese, Teng, & Wijnen, 1999), several theorists have issued a call for more research to better understand how people in China and the US assess creativity (Anderson, Potočnik, & Zhou, 2014; Erez et al., 2010; Hempel & Sue-Chan, 2010; Leung et al., 2011). We take up this call and provide evidence that clarifies how people in each culture might make creativity assessments that have the potential to impact many aspects of an organization’s ability to innovate. How Culture Shapes Creativity Assessments The literature examining how culture shapes creativity assessments proposes that people in different cultures disagree about what is creative primarily because culture shapes what people Implicit Theories of Creative Ideas 5 know. For example, Niu and Sternberg (2002) identified that critics in China described the movie “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” as pedestrian, while American critics described the movie as highly creative, presumably because Chinese audiences had been exposed to many similar types of movies before whereas Americans had not. Theory has long asserted that domain knowledge alone shapes creativity assessments (Amabile, 1982; Hennessey, Amabile, & Mueller, 2010). The main reason for this claim is that creativity is a relative judgment. To determine an idea’s creativity, people need to understand how the idea relates to what has already been established in the domain (Hennessey et al., 2010). However, recent work has shown that, even without systematic differences in domain knowledge, people’s assessments of creativity can differ systematically (Mueller, Melwani, & Goncalo, 2012; Mueller, Wakslak, & Krishnan, 2014). This raises the possibility that, separate from the domain knowledge people bring to bear to assess the ideas embodied in products, processes, and proposals, people may also have knowledge about creativity itself that they bring to bear to assess those ideas. Specifically, people may have implicit theories about what cues indicate that ideas are creative. If so, different people may draw on different implicit theories to assess ideas. Implicit theories (e.g., Atran, Medin, & Ross, 2005; Chiu, Hong, & Dweck, 1997; Detert & Edmondson, 2011), sometimes also called cultural models (Atran et al., 2005), lay beliefs (Yates, 1992) or naïve beliefs (Snyder & Swann, 1978), are mental representations about what causes, predicts, or indicates what (Levy, Chiu, & Hong, 2006). Implicit theories are developed through socialization, exposure to media, and perceiving enacted cultural norms. This is why culture has been shown to shape implicit theories of, for example, leadership (House, Javidan, Hanges, & Dorfman, 2002), personality (Chiu et al., 1997) and cooperation (Keller & Loewenstein, 2011). Just as different people might view a cue (e.g., height, aggressiveness, charisma) as more or less Implicit Theories of Creative Ideas 6 indicative of someone being a leader, so too might people view a cue as more or less indicative of creativity. The predominant view in the creativity literature is that all people share the implicit beliefs that creative ideas embodied in products, processes, and proposals are characterized by novelty and usefulness, the conceptual definition used by creativity researchers (Amabile, 1982; George, 2007). However, rather than assume that all lay people draw on the same definition of creativity, it is possible that people tend to use implicit theories of creativity drawn from shared cultural experience when they assess outcomes for creativity. For example, people may take a more expansive view of what indicates creativity and so look to cues beyond novelty and usefulness to assess creativity. If people in different cultures have different beliefs about what implicit cues indicate creativity, this could explain why research has found conflicting evidence regarding whether and what differences in creativity assessments there are across cultures. Thus, rather than assume any particular definition of creativity, we examined the implicit theories about what specific cues people believe are indicators of creativity. We employ an expansive view of culture and creativity assessments that encompasses the possibility that people might look to many cues to diagnose creativity (Batey, 2012; Rudowicz, 2003). There are many hints from the literature than an expansive framework may provide a fruitful avenue for examining differences in implicit theories of creativity between members of Chinese and US cultures. Although not yet systematically examined empirically, there are suggestions from case studies and examples that Chinese people may view cues such as moral goodness (Wu, 1994), collective spirit (Khaleefa, Erdos, & Ashira, 1996), social harmony (Liu, Wang, & Liu, 1997), and intuitiveness (Wonder & Blake, 1992) as indicating creativity. Implicit Theories of Creative Ideas 7 This approach of considering a wide range of specific cues indicating creativity has been used successfully by the literature on implicit theories of creative people. The literature on the implicit theories of creative people asserts that members of a culture have shared belief systems about which specific cues indicate whether a person is creative (Sternberg, 1985). Work from this paradigm has generally asked individuals in a given culture to nominate specific cues characterizing creative people, such as “unconventional,” “artistic,” and “quirky” (Elsbach & Kramer, 2003). If a person behaves in a way that is suggestive of these cues, then others are more likely to categorize the person as “creative.” The question remains whether the same approach that has been used to examine how we diagnose creative people could also be used to examine how we diagnose creative ideas. Regarding creative ideas, no work to date has developed a broad and comprehensive examination or conceptual understanding of the implicit theories lay people in different cultures may have about what cues indicate that the ideas embodied in a product, process, or proposal are creative. Unpacking the implicit theories lay people have about creative ideas is important because it can add to what we know about the processes through which creative ideas are recognized. Accordingly, we examine whether, apart from domain knowledge, culture can shift the implicit theories of what cues indicate creativity, and thereby shift how lay people in different cultures assess creativity. To understand the relationship between culture and creativity assessments, it is important to map out the many cues seen to indicate creativity by American and Chinese people. This can also provide a basis for explaining when and why people in the US and China agree and disagree in their creativity assessments. Specifically, people from the US and China may agree that certain ideas are creative because those ideas all share cues that members of both cultures agree Implicit Theories of Creative Ideas 8 indicate creativity. In addition, people in the US and China might disagree that certain ideas are creative if those ideas have cues that members of the two cultures disagree about with respect to whether they indicate creativity. Prior work has theorized about the possibility that certain cues might indicate creativity (Rudowicz, 2003; Wu, 1994), but to our knowledge, no research to date has systematically described a comprehensive set of cues and considered how each of those cues are viewed by people in both the US and China. Doing so could provide the empirical basis for resolving the ongoing debate over the prospect of systematic cultural differences in assessing creativity. In the three studies that follow, we contribute to the literature on creativity and culture by documenting cultural differences in implicit theories about what cues indicate creative ideas and using these differences to show systematic differences in creativity assessments. The first study is an inductive one seeking to surface, without constraint, people’s implicit theories about what cues indicate creativity (following Weller’s, 2007 recommendations and as done by, e.g., Atran et al, 2005 and Keller & Loewenstein, 2011). It first derives cues using a content analysis from one large sample of participants explaining why they perceive something to be creative or uncreative. Then, with a second sample, we tested for whether there are broadly shared implicit theories about whether and how those cues indicate creativity. Next, following prior models of deriving and testing implicit theories (e.g., House et al, 2002), the second and third studies provide experimental tests of whether those different implicit theories yield different assessments of creativity. The studies provide evidence that knowing what implicit theory of creativity people hold is useful for anticipating their creativity assessments. Taken together, these studies provide a basis for building new theory on implicit theories of creative ideas, for explaining cultural Implicit Theories of Creative Ideas 9 differences in creativity assessments, and for generating new insights about how people recognize creative ideas.