Usefulness consideration in creativity evaluation:The interaction of evaluators’ novelty-seeking and instruction

Abstract

Although creativity is defined as a combination of both novelty and usefulness, individuals generally tend to overlook usefulness when evaluating creativity. However, usefulness tends to matter for high novelty-seeking (NS) individuals and its consideration by low-NS individuals is promoted by the presence of a normative definition of creativity. This study examined the interaction between NS and with or without a definition in creativity evaluation. The following two hypotheses were verified: Although high-NS individuals consider both novelty and usefulness, low-NS individuals consider only novelty, and when a definition of creativity is presented, low-NS individuals also consider usefulness. In the experiment,189 participants were asked to rate the creativity of three types of stationery products (novel and useful, only novel, or only useful) with and without a definition presented and then respond to the NS scale. The results showed that high-NS individuals rated the creativity of novel and useful products higher than only novel ones, whereas low-NS individuals initially rated the creativity of both products equally but modified their ratings in line with high-NS individuals after the presentation of the definition. These results confirmed all hypotheses.