Naive theories of creativity and sociocultural factors revisited. The potential explanatory role of creative self-efficacy and creative personal identity.

Abstract

The relations between naive theories of the creative personality, creative self-efficacy-measured with the Short Scale for Creative Self (SSCS, Karwowski et al., in press)-and a series of cultural dimensions, treated as personal characteristics, are investigated in the Romanian cultural context. These variables regard independence-interdependence (Singelis, 1994), individualism-collectivism (Shulruf, Hattie & Dixon, 2003) and individualistic vs. collectivistic value orientation. Results show that dimensions of creative self-efficacy are positively and strongly associated with individualism and individualistic values (self-direction, stimulation, hedonism), but not with interdependence and collectivism. The social desirability of a creative personality prototype rated on a set of bipolar adjective pairs correlates with adherence to individualist values and this association seems to be mediated by creative personal identity, particularly for the agreeableness and conscientiousness descriptors. These results suggest that an idiocentric but not an allocentnc orientation may predict the components of the creative self. At the same time, they indicate that personal views on the creative personality may be modeled by adherence to individualist values and their integration in the definition of the self, more than by the beliefs regarding one's own abilities or the actual frequency of individualistic behaviors and beliefs. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved) (journal abstract)