Is There an ‘Arts Bias’ in the Creativity Research Journal? Comment on Glāveanu (2014)

In a recent article, Glāveanu (2014, p. 11) discussed the ‘‘arts bias’’ in conceptions of creativity, pointing out that there has long been a tendency to equate creativity with aesthetic domains such as fine art, music, or literature. He referred to the results of an earlier study of his own, in which people responding to an online survey saw creativity as predominantly a matter of arts-related activities (Glāveanu, 2011). In discussing this finding Glāveanu cited Runco’s (2007) conclusion that there is a widespread ‘‘misunderstanding that equates [creativity] with artistic talent’’ (p. 384). Glaveanu pointed out that this misunderstanding has deep roots in Western traditions, going back to Greek antiquity, and was prominent in early psychological studies such as those of Freud. As Glāveanu (2014) concluded, intense interest in artistic creativity has persisted until the present day. A. J. Cropley (2012) agreed with Glāveanu, and argued that the issue is not purely a scholarly or theoretical matter, but has serious practical consequences. McWilliam and Dawson (2008, p. 634) summarized these with almost shocking clarity, concluding that creativity has been ‘‘relegated to the borderlands of the visual and performing arts. ’’ In, for instance, education, according to Cropley, practical consequences include not just failure to promote creativity itself in the classroom, but also neglect of teaching and learning based on creativity principles such as problem finding, making remote associations, or taking mental risks, despite the fact that these have substantial positive effects on attitudes, values, motivation, or attentiveness, and through these on learning of standard school contents (i.e., the 3 Rs). D. H. Cropley and A. J. Cropley (2013) argued that creativity theory could also be applied with profit in other areas of real life (they focused on the apparently remote domain of combating crime), but is largely ignored, for the reason just given (conflation of creativity with the arts). D. H. Cropley, A. J. Cropley, Kaufman, and Runco (2010) also complained that there is a strong tendency to regard creativity as unquestionably good because of its association with the generation of aesthetic beauty, whereas more realistic observation shows that it has a substantial dark side. Anderson, Potocnik, and Zhou (2014) pointed out that, through a variant of the arts bias (the proinnovation bias), generation of novelty in organizations is regarded as always good. Thus, the arts bias raises the danger of (a) ignoring many nonartistic areas in which creativity theory could profitably be applied and (b) failing to look in an adequately differentiated way at areas where it is applied. Encouragingly, Glāveanu (2014) showed that other domains, such as engineering or even everyday activities such as cooking, were also recognized as creative by the people he studied in his more recent research, and that there was only partial support for the idea of an arts bias. He gave modern interest in ‘‘everyday creativity’’ (e.g., Richards, 2010, p. 189) and ‘‘functional creativity’’ (e.g., D. H. Cropley & Cropley, 2010, p. 30) as examples. Considerations of the kind outlined raise the question of how domains of creativity are conceptualized in articles published in the Creativity Research Journal. Put plainly: Do the journal’s contents reflect an arts bias? The balance of this Comment reports the results of a relatively superficial, but nonetheless informative, analysis of the contents of the journal from this point of view.