More than the eye of the beholder: The interplay of person, task, and situation factors in evaluative judgements of creativity

Birney, D.P.; Beckmann, J.F.; Seah, Y.Z.

doi:10.1016/j.lindif.2015.07.007

More than the eye of the beholder: The interplay of person, task, and situation factors in evaluative judgements of creativity

Birney, D.P.; Beckmann, J.F.; Seah, Y.Z.

Authors

D.P. Birney

Professor Jens Beckmann j.beckmann@durham.ac.uk
Professor

Y.Z. Seah

Abstract

Judging creativity accurately is difficult. Individuals who are involved in product creation tend to overestimate the creativity of their work; individuals not involved lack understanding of the creative process that led to the product under scrutiny. We studied creativity judgements in a tripartite person–task–situation framework. Under high, medium, or no structure conditions and different orders of evaluation, participants (N = 90) rated the creativity and purchase appeal of products created by themselves and others. Accuracy was defined as differences from consensus evaluations of participants not involved in production (N = 30). Moderator analyses suggest that externally set structure of the evaluation process (e.g., using a set of criteria) facilitates the quality of creativity judgement. In unstructured conditions, evaluating one's own product before evaluating a peer's leads to low accuracy, but higher levels of conscientiousness seem to mitigate potentially deleterious effects of lack of structure. Higher levels of openness facilitated accurate creativity judgements of peer-produced products, but not self-produced products. A person–task–situation approach is needed to fully unpack the complexity of processes underlying accurate evaluation of creativity.

Citation

Birney, D., Beckmann, J., & Seah, Y. (2016). More than the eye of the beholder: The interplay of person, task, and situation factors in evaluative judgements of creativity. Learning and Individual Differences, 51, 400-408. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lindif.2015.07.007

Journal Article Type	Article
Acceptance Date	Jul 14, 2015
Online Publication Date	Aug 4, 2015
Publication Date	Oct 1, 2016
Deposit Date	Aug 7, 2015
Publicly Available Date	Aug 4, 2016
Journal	Learning and Individual Differences
Print ISSN	1041-6080
Electronic ISSN	1873-3425
Publisher	Elsevier
Peer Reviewed	Peer Reviewed
Volume	51
Pages	400-408
DOI	https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lindif.2015.07.007
Keywords	Creativity, Judgement, Person–Task–Situation, Evaluation accuracy.
Public URL	https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1424464

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Copyright Statement
NOTICE: this is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in Learning and Individual Differences. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Learning and Individual Differences, 51, October 2016, 10.1016/j.lindif.2015.07.007.