Psychological research requires creativity.

Psychologists design studies, develop explanations, and provide practical recommendations.

The best researchers know how to ask good questions.

Creativity researchers study science as a creative profession.

We know more about creativity today than at any other time in history. This is the golden age of creativity research. Creativity research helps us solve pressing social problems, be more innovative at work, and live more fulfilling lives. Psychologists make new discoveries about creativity every year.

Scientists aren't the only people who study the world, but we have a special way of doing it. Other people who look at the world closely and write about it include newspaper reporters, anyone with a diary, and novelists. What makes psychology different is that we use rigorous methodologies that prevent the research from being only subjective. If a psychologist does their job well, then any other psychologist would discover the same thing they did. Another distinctive feature of science, compared to reporting or novel writing, is that we focus on new information, on things that no one in the world knows. If we gather the same facts that another scientist has already written about, that’s not interesting. Science is about discovering new things. After we’ve discovered some new facts, psychologists need to explain those facts. We ask questions like, Why are those things true? What might explain how those things came to be true? Now that we know these things are true, what predictions can we make about how future studies will turn out? To answer these questions, we use theories to explain these facts and to make predictions about what other facts might be true.

A successful psychologist needs to develop the ability to form a focused research question that can be answered in a reasonable amount of time, with a reasonable amount of effort and expense. Here’s an example of how a creativity researcher might develop a focused research question. Let’s say that you’re interested in how creativity changes over the lifespan. A possible research question is “are older people more creative than younger people?” But that’s not focused enough. That question is so big and broad that it’s studied by a entire subfield of creativity research. You need to have a specific question: How much older and how much younger? Are you going to study people who work in creative professions, or study everyone? Will you compare old and young people who are the same in almost every way, so you’re not comparing apples and oranges?

By the time you’re done narrowing down your research question, it ends up being something more specific, like this: “Do novelists over age 50 publish novels that sell better than novels by writers under 30?”

Now that you have your research question, you choose a methodology, you gather data, you organize the data, and you analyze the results. Let’s say that the results are that older novelists sell more books. The question then becomes, so what? Scientists actually call this the "so what" question. There are at least two reasons why you might care about any scientific study. The first is that there might be practical, real-world implications. Writers might be able to use the results of your study to help them be more creative. The second reason you might care is that there might be broader research impacts. For example, there might be an implication for studies of creativity more generally, maybe even including scientific creativity.

Scientists are optimists. We believe that there's always more to learn, and we believe that we have methods and expertise that can advance knowledge for all humanity. Our job is to answer questions that have never been answered before. There will always be things we don’t know, questions that haven’t been answered. The job of the scientist is to create new knowledge.

If the job of a scientist is simply to gather facts about the world, that’s not very creative. That’s like being a tax accountant and gathering financial information from your client. But scientists create at every stage of their research. Psychologists have been studying scientific creativity since the 1950s. When the National Science Foundation (NSF) was created in 1950, one of its missions was to identify and nurture scientific creativity. That’s why the NSF funded so much of the earliest creativity research.

Every year there's new research on creativity, and that's why I write this blog for Psychology Today—to share the exciting new creativity research that’s being published every year.

Sawyer, K., & Henriksen, D. (2024). Explaining Creativity: The Science of Human Innovation. Oxford University Press.

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