Creativity in the Movies

NAGC has never been closer to us than one in this year. Atlanta was just next door compared to St. Louis and Vancouver. This time we switched to the topic of creativity. That will be what we will focus on more, I believe. Here is the summary and results of our study:


SUMMARY

The research on creativity using movies mostly examined the cinematic quality and cinematic creativity. However, the way creativity is defined in the movies is ignored in the literature. Highly creative characters in the movies both affect the perception of creativity among lay people and how they define and understand creativity. Movies including character(s) with high creativity also offer opportunities to creativity researchers to examine common debates of the field from a different perspective. In this study, implicit definitions of creativity in the movies were examined. This study presents an empirical perspective to teachers and researchers about the creativity in fiction.

The study included seventeen movies in four different domains: music, writing, science & technology, and social & educational. The comparison of the movies based on fictional characters and true stories indicated that, true stories reflect a better picture of creative individuals when the explicit (scientifically recognized or used) theories of creativity is considered, even though this difference was not significant. The true stories have higher positive creative characteristics than the fictional movies which had higher negative characteristics.  Therefore, the implicit theories in the movies differed more in the fictional movies than the true stories. Comparisons across domains indicated that positive characters are almost same, but negative characteristics differ.