Beliefs and creative performance: Relationships across three tasks

Creative work occurs on novel, ill-defined tasks. By virtue of their ambiguity and complexity, however, creative tasks allow the situation to be construed in a number of ways. Accordingly, one might argue that beliefs, as interpretive structures, would be related to performance on creative problem-solving tasks. To test this proposition, a battery of measures was developed to assess people's beliefs. Subsequently, 195 undergraduates were asked to work on three creative problem-solving tasks. When quality and originality ratings, reflecting performance on the creative problem-solving tasks, were regressed on the beliefs, multiple correlations in the low .40s were obtained. It was found that beliefs consistent with the nature of the task were those most likely to be related to performance. The implications of these findings are discussed with respect to the role of beliefs in shaping people's creative problem-solving activities.