Defying the Crowd: Cultivating Creativity in a Culture of Conformity
Sternberg (psychology and education, Yale) and Lubart propose that creativity, like intelligence, is something everyone has and that it can be developed. Able to generate/intuit new and possibly unpopular ideas and work with determination to make these ideas accepted by others, creative people, the authors state, have the willingness to take sensible risks to go against the crowd in effective ways. These traits may explain why commercial, educational, and political institutions make great overtures to creativity but are seldom truly able to integrate it. Sternberg (editor of Encyclopedia of Human Intelligence, LJ 1/95, among many others) and Lubart also discuss the difference between creative potential and creative performance. They include individual chapters on the six personal, creative resources: intelligence, knowledge, thinking style, personality, motivation, and the environmental context. While not a "how-to" book, their work is accessible and appropriate for general psychology collections in larger public libraries and recommended for academic psychology collections.?Scott Johnson, Meridian Community Coll. Lib., Miss.Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.