Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research

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The Social Psychology of Creativity

Beth A. Hennessey

To cite this article: Beth A. Hennessey (2003) The Social Psychology of Creativity, Scandinavian
Journal of Educational Research, 47:3, 253-271, DOI: 10.1080/00313830308601

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Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research,
Vol. 47, No. 3, 2003

The Social Psychology of Creativity

BETH A. HENNESSEY
Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA 02481, USA

ABSTRACT Motivation plays a crucial role in the creative process. It is not enough to have
unusually high levels of skill or a deep conceptual understanding. In order for students to reach
their creative potential, they must approach a task with intrinsic motivation; they must engage
in that task for the sheer pleasure and enjoyment of the activity itself rather than for some
external goal. Researchers and theorists now understand that there is a direct relation between
the motivational orientation brought to a task and the likelihood of creativity at that task. And
it is particular features of the school environment and students’ daily routine that in large part
determine that motivation. The present paper outlines investigations revealing that the typical
classroom is fraught with teaching practices and programme features that kill intrinsic motiv-
ation and creativity. Research designed to immunise students against the negative effects of these
damaging classroom elements is reviewed. The argument is made that the undermining of
intrinsic motivation and creativity of performance may be largely driven by an affective, rather
than a cognitive, mechanism, and recent cross-cultural data gathered in a non-western
educational setting are reviewed.

Key words: intrinsic motivation; extrinsic motivation; consensual assessment technique;

immunization studies

INTRODUCTION
The empirical study of creativity has a long and distinguished history. As early as
1870, Galton published a study of the biographies and autobiographies of well-
known creative figures and set out to identify the unique qualities of intellect and
personality that differentiated this group from their less creative peers (Galton,
1870). This emphasis on the individual difference variables that contribute to high
levels of creativity was later fueled by J.P. Guilford who, in 1950, in his presidential
address to the American Psychological Association, argued that ‘the psychologist’s
problem is that of creative personality’ (Guilford, 1950, p. 444). This proclamation
prompted many investigators to carry out intensive laboratory studies of creative
persons (see, for example, MacKinnon, 1962), while a second group of researchers
and theorists had begun to focus their attention on the creative process, attempting
among other things to specify a universal sequence of steps involved in creative
production (see, for example, Wallas, 1926) or the cognitive skills necessary for
creative performance (Newell et al., 1962). Implicit in much of this work has been
ISSN 0031-3831 print; ISSN 1430-1170 online/03/030253-19  2003 Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research
DOI: 10.1080/0031383032000079236
254 B. A. Hennessey

a focus on the internal determinants of creativity, to the exclusion of external factors

such as the environmental circumstances conducive to creativity. Creativity does not
come about in a vacuum, yet curiously, researchers interested in the psychology of
creativity have typically chosen to decontextualise the creative process. The empiri-
cal study of this phenomenon has generally failed to include a consideration of
anyone or anything beyond the individual doing the creating.
In the mid 1970s, this gap in the creativity literature began to be recognised by
a small group of social psychologists who came to focus their attention on the impact
of situational factors on creative performance. Based on a number of investigations
carried out over the past two and a half decades, we now understand that there is
a direct link between the motivational orientation brought by an individual to a task
and their likelihood of creativity of performance on that task, and it is the environ-
ment, or at least certain aspects of the environment, that in large part determine that
motivational orientation.

THE MAGIC MARKER STUDY AND SOME OPERATIONALISATIONS

Pioneers in this research effort were Lepper, Greene and Nisbett who, in 1973,
investigated the effect of expected reward on young children’s motivation and
artistic performance. These researchers found that, for pre-schoolers who initially
displayed a high level of intrinsic interest in drawing with magic markers, working
for an expected ‘Good Player Award’ significantly decreased their interest in and
enjoyment of the task. When compared with an unexpected reward group and a
control (no reward) group, the children who had made drawings for the experi-
menters in order to receive a Good Player Award spent significantly less time using
the markers during subsequent free play periods than did their non-rewarded peers.
Moreover, this undermining of interest persisted for at least a week beyond the
initial experimental session, and the globally assessed ‘quality’ of the drawings
produced under expected reward conditions was found to be significantly lower than
that of the unexpected reward or control groups (Lepper et al., 1973).
How was it that this simple, one-time offer of a Good Player certificate could
serve to undermine the motivation and performance of pre-schoolers who were
passionate about using magic markers? It is precisely this research question that has
captured the attention of my colleagues and myself.
In our work, we distinguish between two types of motivation. Intrinsic motiv-
ation is defined as the motivation to do something for its own sake, for the sheer
pleasure and enjoyment of the task itself. Extrinsic motivation, on the other hand,
is the motivation to do something for some external goal. These operationalisations
are not all that different from the variety of conceptualisations of motivation that
have been offered over the years. For example, Hebb (1955) and Berlyne (1960)
proposed that enjoyable (intrinsically motivating) activities are those that present an
optimal level of novelty. White (1959) and Harter (1978) suggested that a sense of
competence and mastery are central components of intrinsic motivation. And De
Charms (1968), Deci (1971) and Lepper et al. (1973) placed their emphasis on a
 Social Psychology of Creativity 255

sense of control: when a person perceives her task engagement as externally con-
trolled, she is extrinsically rather than intrinsically motivated.
In sum, researchers and theorists tell us that a large number of features of task
engagement contribute to an intrinsically motivated orientation. The individual may
be curious about or in some other way stimulated by the presentation of the activity.
With task participation come feelings of competence, mastery or self-efficacy. And,
perhaps most significantly, while engaging in a task that they find intrinsically
interesting, individuals feel that their involvement is free of strong external control:
they get the sense that they are playing rather than working. Importantly, each of
these hallmarks of intrinsic motivation focuses on the individual’s inner phenomeno-
logical state. Whether prompted by just the right amount of novelty, feelings of
competence or a sense of control, the intrinsically motivated state comes about as
the result of an internal, very individualised process, the complexities of which we
are only beginning to appreciate.

THE BASIC RESEARCH PARADIGM

Over 25 years of empirical investigation have led us to the Intrinsic Motivation
Principle of Creativity: intrinsic motivation is conducive to creativity and extrinsic
motivation is almost always detrimental (Amabile, 1983, 1996). In its earlier
incarnations, this proposed relation between motivational orientation and creativity
of performance was advanced as a tentative research hypothesis. However, social
psychologists seeking to better understand the psychosocial factors that promote
creativity have now gathered so much unequivocal research evidence that this
proposition has been elevated to the status of an undisputed principle. In a basic
research paradigm, study participants who have been randomly assigned to either
constraint or no-constraint conditions (e.g. expected reward or no expected reward)
produce some sort of observable product that can be assessed for creativity. Their
motivational orientation (i.e. whether intrinsic or extrinsic) is also measured.
A paper published by my colleagues and myself in 1986 (Amabile et al., 1986,
Study 1) outlines a prototypical investigation from this research tradition. In this
study, the reward offered to elementary school children was not a tangible gift to be
delivered afterward. Instead, it was an attractive activity (playing with a Polaroid
camera) that the children were allowed to engage in before completing the target
experimental task. In other words, children assigned to the reward condition signed
a contract and promised to later tell a story in order to first have a chance to use the
camera. Children in the no-reward condition were simply allowed to use the camera
and then were presented with the story-telling instructions; there was no contin-
gency established between the two tasks.
In order to examine the impact of reward expectation on children’s verbal
creativity, the children in this study were asked to tell a story into a tape recorder to
accompany a set of illustrations in a book with no words (see Hennessey & Amabile,
1988). This story-telling activity was designed with three specific goals in mind.
First, it was necessary that individual differences in verbal fluency be minimised
because these differences could lead to high variability in baseline performances. In
256 B. A. Hennessey

the case of this story-telling task, this was accomplished with the stipulation that
children say only ‘one thing’ about each page. Second, in order to be appropriate for
testing hypotheses about creativity, the task had to allow for a wide variety of
responses. In other words, the target activity had to be an open-ended one for which
a wide variety of responses were possible (McGraw, 1978; Amabile, 1982b; Hen-
nessey & Amabile, 1999). Finally, like all the creativity tasks used in research of this
type, it was important that the story-telling procedure be pre-tested to ensure that
children of this age group did, in fact, find it to be intrinsically interesting.
Elementary school teachers familiar with children’s writing later rated the
stories relative to one another on creativity and a variety of other dimensions. A high
level of inter-rater reliability was reached, and results indicated that, overall, stories
produced by children in the no-reward condition were judged to be more creative
than were stories produced by children in the reward condition. This main effect of
reward was, in fact, statistically significant. Importantly, the only difference in the
experience of the rewarded and non-rewarded children in this paradigm was their
perception of the picture taking reward as contingent or not contingent on the target
story-telling activity.

THE CONSENSUAL ASSESSMENT TECHNIQUE (CAT)

In the investigation just described, the creativity of elementary school students was
assessed based on their performance on a story-telling task not all that different from
other language art activities being carried out in their classroom. In this respect, our
operationalisation of and measurement of creativity is different from that of a good
many other researchers in the field. Rather than administer a paper-and-pencil
creativity assessment, such as the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (Torrance,
1974), we ask participants in our studies to produce some sort of real-world
product. While the Torrance Tests and related measures may, in fact, accurately tap
one or more creative abilities or predispositions, we believe that a test that captures
the full range of creativity components has yet to be developed. Also troublesome is
the fact that a variety of social and environmental factors involved in the administra-
tion of the Torrance Tests and other similar measures have been found to influence
test results, and the construct validity of many of these tests has also been seriously
questioned. This validity issue is especially problematical given the fact that many of
the leading creativity tests have been validated against one another. Finally, one
additional concern involves the fact that while the scoring procedures utilised in the
majority of published creativity tests are purported to be objective, performance is
often rated according to criteria based upon the test constructor’s own, intuitive
notion of what is creative.
But how are investigators such as ourselves to decide whether products pro-
duced by persons working under the expectation of reward are more or less creative
than products made by persons in a control/no-reward condition? The Consensual
Assessment Technique (CAT) (Amabile, 1982b; Hennessey & Amabile, 1999) is
based on the assumption that a panel of independent expert raters, persons who
have not had the opportunity to talk with one another or with the researcher about
 Social Psychology of Creativity 257

possible hallmarks of product creativity, are best able to make such judgements.
Over 20 years of research have, in fact, clearly established that product creativity can
be reliably and validly assessed based on the consensus of experts. Although
creativity in a product may be difficult to characterise in terms of specific features,
it is something that people can recognise and agree on when they see it.
The CAT is grounded on two complementary definitions of creativity. The
underlying conceptual definition that has been used in building a theoretical formu-
lation of the creative process states that a product will be judged as creative to the
extent that (i) it is both a novel and appropriate, useful, correct or valuable response
to the task at hand and (ii) the task is heuristic rather than algorithmic (Amabile,
1996, p. 35). The operational definition upon which the CAT is based is readily
applicable to empirical research: a product or response is creative to the extent that
appropriate observers agree it is creative. Appropriate observers are those familiar
with the domain in which the product was created or the response articulated
(Amabile, 1996, p. 33). Importantly, this consensual definition is based on the
creative product rather than the creative process. Not only has a clear articulation of
the creative process yet to be developed but, more importantly, any identification of
a thought process as ‘creative’ must finally depend on the fruit of that process, a
product or response.
Amabile and her colleagues have attempted to capture the essential characteris-
tics of the conceptual definition of creativity in the CAT (Amabile, 1982b; Hen-
nessey & Amabile, 1999). First, study participants are presented with tasks that
leave room for considerable flexibility and novelty of response. Second, these are
tasks for which the range of appropriate responses has been clearly identified in
participants’ instructions. Finally, the experimental activities employed are all
heuristic in nature; judges are only asked to make ratings of open-ended tasks, tasks
with more than one solution and a variety of paths to those solutions.
This approach is especially well suited to investigate environmental influences
on creativity. The majority of available assessment techniques resemble personality
or IQ tests in that they view creativity as an enduring personality trait. Whether they
request that a picture be completed, unusual uses for a brick be generated, adjectives
describing the self be selected or remote associations be discovered, most paper-and-
pencil measures have been specifically constructed to maximise individual differ-
ences. They had been constructed to do exactly what we in the study described
earlier were trying to avoid. Researchers like myself who take a social-psychological
approach must control for and, as much as possible, eliminate within-group varia-
bility in their dependent measures in order that they might detect more global
between-group differences produced by their direct experimental manipulations of
social and environmental factors. In this investigation involving schoolchildren,
individual differenes constitute the error variance. We were not interested in
whether a particular child was likely to consistently evidence greater levels of
creativity than the majority of his/her peers. We were interested in creativity not as
a relatively enduring and stable trait, but as the result of a fleeting and delicate
motivational state: a state brought on by environmental factors such as the presence
or absence of reward. What we needed was a measurement tool that de-emphasised
258 B. A. Hennessey

individual differences between subjects, a measure that allowed for considerable

flexibility and novelty of response and did not depend heavily upon the level of a
child’s skills or the range of his/her experience. The CAT fills each of these
requirements.
Our creativity ‘experts’, our raters in the 1986 (Amabile et al., 1986, Study 1)
investigation, were elementary schoolteachers familiar with the kinds of products
produced by children in this age group. The majority of our raters did not know one
another and they were not permitted to confer with one another prior to or during
the rating process. Using seven point scales and guided only by their own, subjective
definitions of creativity, judges were asked to rate the collages and the transcripts of
the stories relative to one another rather than against some abstract norm. In this
investigation, inter-rater reliability was highly acceptable: 0.91 for story creativity. A
sum of the ratings made by our three judges was computed for each product and
these calculations were then used as the dependent measure of product creativity in
the remainder of the analyses.

‘KILLERS’ OF CREATIVITY—A REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE

Like the investigation just described, the majority of early studies designed to
explore the impact of environmental constraints on motivation and performance
focused on the effects of expected reward (see, for example, Deci, 1971, 1972;
Kruglanski et al., 1971; Lepper et al., 1973; Greene & Lepper, 1974; Garbarino,
1975; Shapira, 1976; Kernoodle-Loveland & Olley, 1979; McGraw & McCullers,
1979; Pittman et al., 1982). Most of these research attempts have asked that study
participants produce some sort of real-world product, and the majority of investiga-
tions have employed the CAT (Amabile, 1982b; Hennessey & Amabile, 1999) or a
similar product assessment procedure. While, over the years, experimental
approaches have become increasingly complex, the basic message has remained the
same. Hundreds of published investigations reveal that the promise of a reward
made contingent on task engagement often serves to undermine intrinsic task
motivation and qualitative aspects of performance, including creativity (for a more
complete review of the literature, see Hennessey & Amabile, 1988; Amabile, 1996;
Hennessey, 2000a). This effect is so robust that it has been found to occur across
the entire lifespan, with pre-schoolers and seasoned professionals experiencing the
same negative consequences.
When investigations of the effects of reward were begun some 25 years ago, it
was thought that the determinants of motivational orientation were pretty much the
same for everyone. Intrinsic and extrinsic motivation were believed to combine in a
sort of hydraulic fashion. In other words, high levels of extrinsic motivation were
thought to preclude high levels of intrinsic motivation; as rewards were imposed,
intrinsic motivation (and creativity) would necessarily be decreased.
Now, a good many years and hundreds of investigations later, most researchers
taking a social-psychological approach to the study of creativity have come to
appreciate the many complexities of both motivational orientation and the reward
process. They have come to supplement their original hydraulic conceptualisation
 Social Psychology of Creativity 259

with an additive model that recognises that under certain specific conditions, the
expectation of reward can sometimes increase levels of extrinsic motivation without
having any negative impact on intrinsic motivation or performance. In fact, some
types of extrinsic motivation can actually enhance creativity of performance.
Research reveals that study participants given a choice about task engagement
can come to perceive their receipt of a reward as a kind of ‘bonus’ rather than a
controlling extrinsic constraint. In one instance, college students who believed that
they had freely chosen to take part in a research study and who had been offered a
reward for their participation were the most creative and most intrinsically motivated
of any group, including a no-reward ‘control’ condition (Amabile et al., 1986, Study
3). Intrigued by these findings, researchers have gone on to discover an additive
effect of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation in a variety of circumstances. They now
understand, for example, that the powerful undermining effect of expected reward
is most likely to occur when what have come to be termed ‘task-contingent’ rewards
have been promised. Task-contingent rewards are rewards made conditional simply
on task completion (e.g. a pre-schooler is told ‘I’ll give you a good player certificate
if you draw a picture for me’). The impact of so-called ‘performance-contingent’
rewards, rewards promised and delivered only if a certain level of competency or
proficiency is reached (e.g. a college student is told ‘If you earn a score of 80 or
above on this creative writing assessment, you may waive the requirement that you
take the introductory level course’). Under certain specific circumstances, in fact,
the informational value implicit in performance-contingent rewards has been shown
to augment feelings of self-efficacy, intrinsic task interest and qualitative aspects of
performance (see, for example, Deci, 1975; Deci & Ryan, 1980, 1985b; Harack-
iewicz et al., 1984).
Building on this body of evidence, researchers have gone on to uncover the
deleterious impact of a variety of other environmental constraints, such as deadlines,
surveillance and competition (see, for example, Amabile, 1982a; Amabile et al.,
1990). In recent years, the investigative focus has also been expanded to include the
impact of evaluation, and the data reveal that the expectation that one’s work will be
judged may well be the most deleterious extrinsic constraint of all. Perhaps because
situations of evaluation often combine aspects of each of the other ‘killers’ of
motivation and creativity, the promise of an evaluation has been shown to severely
undermine the task interest and performance of persons across the entire age span,
individuals from all walks of life, from pre-schoolers to professionals whose very
livelihood depends upon the creativity of their work.
One prototypical study of the effects of evaluation was conducted by Amabile
in 1982. The primary purpose behind this investigation was to investigate the impact
of a competitive evaluation situation on the creativity of girls, ages 7–11. These
young study participants were randomly selected to attend either a Saturday or a
Sunday ‘Art Party’ held in the common room of their apartment complex. Girls
attending the Saturday (non-competition control) session were greeted at the
entrance by a table of desirable toys and gifts and which they were told would be
raffled off at the end of the party. They then spent the afternoon engaged in a variety
of fun activities, including a collage making task that they completed without any
260 B. A. Hennessey

expectation of evaluation. Girls attending the Sunday (competition) session had an

identical experience, with one important exception. They played the same games
and were given the same materials with which to make their artworks, but when they
arrived at the party and saw the table of prizes, they were told that these items would
be awarded to those children who made the ‘best’ collages.
Following the procedures outlined in the CAT, artist judges assessed the collage
designs on creativity and a variety of other product dimensions. Inter-rater reliability
on the creativity measure was 0.77 and analyses revealed that those collages made
by girls under the non-competition condition were rated as significantly more
creative than those made by girls under the competition condition (Amabile,
1982a).
As is the case with the reward literature, studies of the impact of expected
evaluation have become increasingly finely tuned over the years. Researchers now
have a much more sophisticated understanding of evaluation effects and are quick
to point out that not all evaluative contingencies can be expected to have the same
deleterious impact. Theorists now understand that the type of task presented to
study participants can, in large part, drive their experimental results, and recent
studies reveal that under certain specific conditions, both the delivery of a com-
petence-affirming evaluation and the expectation of an impending evaluation can
sometimes increase levels of extrinsic motivation without having any negative impact
on intrinsic motivation or performance. In fact, some forms of evaluation expec-
tation can actually enhance creativity of performance. These complex effects of
expected evaluation are demonstrated in several recent publications (see, for exam-
ple, Harackiewicz et al., 1991; Jussim et al., 1992).
Cheek & Stahl (1986) reported that when faced with the knowledge that they
would receive evaluative feedback, shy subjects performed significantly less cre-
atively than did those who were not shy. Thus, the effects of evaluation expectation
may be mediated, at least in part, by certain personality characteristics. In two
studies in which children were asked to make collages in competitive or non-com-
petitive settings, the detrimental effects of competitive evaluation were found to
apply to girls but not to boys (Conti et al., 1995). In fact, in both of these
investigations boys appeared to demonstrate higher levels of artistic creativity under
competitive conditions.
When Conti & Amabile (1995) examined the creativity of computer science
students, they found that participants’ skill levels mediated the impact of evaluation.
Low skill students wrote more creative programs when expecting an evaluation and
high skill students wrote better programs in the no-evaluation condition. Similar
effects are also reported by Pollak (1992) in a study where advanced art students
were asked to produce a drawing and Hill et al. (1994) also reported a skill
level–evaluation interaction pattern.

A PROPOSED MECHANISM
Researchers have found it all too easy to undermine task motivation and creativity
of performance with the promise of a reward or an impending evaluation. Demon-
strating how to kill motivation and creativity has been the straightforward part. What
 Social Psychology of Creativity 261

has not been as easy is understanding why these extrinsic task constraints can have
such a negative impact. What are the internal mechanisms that bring about the
undermining effects of expected reward and impending evaluation?
What we have come to learn is that most of us are not all that in touch with our
own motivations. We do not always know why it is that we do the things we do.
Almost as if we were outside observers of even our own actions, we seem to use
essentially the same rubrics for explaining our own behaviours as we do for
explaining why others behave in the ways that they do. In situations where both a
plausible internal and external (intrinsic and extrinsic) cause of behaviour are
present, we tend to discount the internal cause in favour of the external cause. For
example, a pre-schooler in the seminal ‘Magic Marker’ study (Lepper et al., 1973)
thinks to herself: ‘I must be making this picture not because it’s fun and I love using
markers but because this man has told me that I will get a Good Player Award’.
When multiple explanations for their behaviour are available, young and old
alike have been found to discount their own intrinsic interest in favour of a purely
external explanation for task engagement. Some social psychologists have come to
refer to this process as the ‘discounting principle’ (see, for example, Kelley, 1973).
Other theorists propose a related explanation termed the ‘over-justification’ hypoth-
esis, a formulation derived from the attribution theories of Bem (1972), Kelley
(1967, 1973) and de Charms (1968). According to this model, when a behaviour is
over-justified (when there exists both a possible internal and external cause for one’s
own or another’s behaviour), each of us will tend to overlook the internal cause (the
presence of intrinsic task motivation) in favour of the external cause (a reward or
evaluation was at stake). In effect, we discount the excess justification for explaining
why we did something.
Whatever the particulars of the theoretical explanation evoked, the fact remains
that in the face of expected evaluation or reward, competition, surveillance or time
limits, intrinsic motivation is bound to suffer. And without high levels of intrinsic
motivation, creative performance is highly unlikely. Why is intrinsic motivation so
necessary to creative performance? A number of cognitive psychologists have offered
empirical evidence and models that have proven useful in understanding how the
type of motivation brought to a task can influence performance on that task. For
example, Simon (1967) has proposed that the most important function of task
motivation is the control of attention. He postulates that task motivation determines
which of many goal hierarchies will be activated, and goes on to suggest that the
more intense the motivation to achieve a goal, the less attention will be paid to
environmental aspects that are seemingly irrelevant to achieving that goal. This
formulation can be used to explain the widely reported finding that incidental or
latent learning is impaired when a reward or evaluation is at stake (see, for example,
Spence, 1956; Kimble, 1961). It can also help to explain the negative effects of
extrinsic constraints on creativity.
Amabile (1996) offers a maze metaphor that is helpful in illustrating the
undermining effects of reward or evaluation. She asks that we think of an open-
ended ‘creativity-type’ task as a maze. There is one starting point, one entrance, into
this maze but there are a variety of exit points and many different paths to those
262 B. A. Hennessey

exits. Most importantly, some of those exits, or solutions, are more ‘elegant’ or
creative than others. In the face of an expected reward or evaluation, the goal is to
get in and out of the maze as quickly as possible. The ‘safest’, most straightforward
path will be chosen, as all behaviour is narrowly directed toward attaining that goal.
In order for a creative idea to be generated, however, it is often necessary to
temporarily ‘step away’ from environmental constraints (Newell et al., 1962), to
become immersed in the maze itself, to experiment with alternative pathways and to
direct attention toward more seemingly incidental aspects of the task. The more
focused an individual is about a promised reward or evaluation, the less likely it is
that risks will be taken and that these alternative paths to a solution will be explored.
Some theorists trained in the behaviourist tradition, most notably Eisenberger
and colleagues, have suggested that this undermining effect of reward or evaluation
on intrinsic motivation and creativity of performance, this unwillingness or inability
to experiment within the maze, can be explained by a simple ‘diffusion of attention’
or ‘competing response’ model (see, for example, Reiss & Sushinsky, 1975). In other
words, when individuals are distracted by their excitement about a soon-to-be-
delivered prize or their anxiety surrounding an impending evaluation, their intrinsic
motivation and enjoyment of the task at hand are undermined and they rush through
their work as quickly as possible. Importantly, while this diffusion of attention or
competing response hypothesis may explain the undermining impact of reward and
other extrinsic constraints under some circumstances, these models fail to ade-
quately explain the negative effects of rewards in all situations. Recall the ‘Picture
Taking’ study described earlier (Amabile et al., 1986). In that investigation, even a
reward promised and delivered prior to task engagement was found to undermine
subjects’ interest and performance. The mere labelling of the opportunity to use a
camera as a reward contingency was enough to kill intrinsic motivation and creativ-
ity, while children in a control condition who also participated in the picture taking
but believed this was just one in a series of ‘things to do’ suffered no such
decrements. Furthermore, investigations examining the interactive effects of reward
and choice (see, for example, Amabile et al., 1982) also call into question the
diffusion of attention explanation. These studies reveal that when subjects who
perceive they have no choice but to participate in an investigation are offered a
reward, their task motivation and creativity do not suffer the usual decrements.
When working under environmental constraints, people may indeed pay less
attention to a task or less attention to aspects of their environment that might prove
useful in generating a response to that task. However, this shift in focus need not
always occur simply because they are distracted by the reward they are to receive or
by their worries about what they have to do to obtain a favourable evaluation. Under
constraint conditions, people may simply feel less intrinsically involved. They may
feel less positively toward the task and less inclined to devote their energy and
attention to it.
There is good reason to believe, in fact, that affective processes can and do play
an important role in the mediation of the impact of extrinsic constraints on interest
and creativity. Earlier in this chapter, explanations of cognitive mechanisms such as
discounting and over-justification were offered. While these models have proven
 Social Psychology of Creativity 263

useful for understanding the negative effects of reward and evaluation in adults, they
fail to adequately explain why young children have also been observed to suffer
decreases in intrinsic motivation and creativity. Simply stated, children under the
age of 7 or 8 years have consistently been shown to lack the cognitive capabilities
necessary for weighing multiple sufficient causes and employing discounting (see, for
example, Shultz et al., 1975; Smith, 1975). In fact, some studies have indicated that
many young children seem to employ an additive algorithm and interpret the
expectation of reward as an augmentation of intrinsic interest (see, for example,
Di Vitto & McArthur, 1978; Morgan, 1981). How is it that, when working under
the expectation of reward, young children frequently demonstrate decreases in
intrinsic motivation and creativity of performance yet they seem cognitively
incapable of engaging in the thought processes that underlie the over-justification
paradigm?
One viable alternative to the discounting explanation is that the reduction in
intrinsic interest in young children (and perhaps all of us) is driven primarily by the
learned expectation that rewards, evaluation, time limits and competitive elements
are usually paired with activities that need to be done, activities that are often not
fun and sometimes even aversive. The undermining of intrinsic interest may result
as much from emotion or affect as it does from thoughts or cognitive analysis.
Children may learn to react negatively to a task as ‘work’ when their behaviour is
controlled by socially imposed factors (such as rewards) and they may react posi-
tively to a task as ‘play’ when there are no constraints imposed. A negative affect
resulting from socially learned stereotypes or scripts of work (see Ransen, 1980;
Morgan, 1981; Lepper et al., 1982) may be what leads to decrements in intrinsic
interest (see Hennessey, 1999).

A RECIPE FOR THE TYPICAL CLASSROOM?

Whether the targets of investigation are 3-year-old pre-schoolers or 73-year-old
seasoned professionals, the findings are consistent. Over the years, we have
identified five sure-fire killers of intrinsic motivation and creativity: expected reward,
expected evaluation, surveillance, time limits and competition (see Amabile, 1996;
Hennessey, 1996). Sometimes, when I’m presenting this research evidence to my
students, I ask them to consider whether this list of killers might just as well be
labelled as a recipe for the typical classroom. As unbelievable as it may seem, we
have somehow managed to structure educational environments in such a way that
intrinsic motivation and creativity are bound to suffer, if not be completely
destroyed. The all-important question that needs to be addressed is how this
situation can be turned around. One solution would be for educators to eliminate
both task-contingent rewards and controlling systems of evaluation and situations of
competition from the classroom. But old habits die hard and it is questionable
whether these fundamental changes in the way that students are taught could be
successfully mandated. Rather than trying to transform classroom practice, a second
option would be to change the way students react to situations of competition or to
the promise of an upcoming reward or evaluation.
264 B. A. Hennessey

THE IMMUNISATION STUDIES

In a recent series of investigations, my colleagues and I set out to study whether
creativity and motivation might be maintained even in the face of reward. In our
design of these experiments, we were guided by a medical metaphor. We decided to
look at the extrinsic constraint of an expected reward as a kind of germ or virus and
wondered whether it might be possible to ‘immunise’ children against its usually
negative effects on intrinsic motivation and creativity. Again drawing on a biological
analogy, our goal was two-fold: (1) to strengthen intrinsic motivation and (2) to
provide antibodies (techniques) for fighting extrinsic motivation.
In the first of these research attempts (Hennessey et al., 1989, Study 1),
elementary school students (ages 7–11 years) were randomly assigned to intrinsic
motivation focus or control groups and met with an experimenter over two consecu-
tive days for the purpose of viewing videos and engaging in directed discussion. The
tapes shown to students in the intrinsic motivation focus condition depicted two
11-year-olds talking with an adult about various aspects of their schoolwork. Scripts
for this condition were constructed so as to help children focus on the intrinsically
interesting, fun and playful aspects of a task. Ways to make even the most routine
assignment exciting were suggested and participants were helped to distance them-
selves from socially imposed extrinsic constraints, such as rewards. Tapes shown to
students in the control condition featured the same two young actors talking about
some of their favourite things, including foods, music groups, movies and seasons.
Following this training procedure, all students met individually with a second
adult for testing. Half the children in each of the training conditions were told that
they could take two pictures with an instant camera only if they promised to tell a
story later for the experimenter. For children in the no-reward condition, this
picture taking was presented simply as the first in a series of ‘things to do’.
In this 2 ⫻ 2 factorial design, presentation of reward was crossed with type of
training received. It was expected that only those participants who had been
specifically instructed in ways to overcome the usual deleterious effects of extrinsic
constraints would maintain baseline levels of intrinsic motivation and creativity in
situations of expected reward (i.e. they would be immunised against the effects of
extrinsic constraints). The data from this initial investigation not only confirmed
these expectations, but gave us reason to believe that our intervention had much
more of an impact than we had expected. Intrinsic motivation-trained children
tended to report higher levels of intrinsic motivation on a paper-and-pencil assess-
ment than did children in the control (no-training) condition and, in addition, we
found that the offer of reward actually augmented the creativity of the trained group.
This additive effect of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation was quite robust. In fact, the
creativity of children who received intrinsic motivation training and expected a
reward was significantly higher than that of any other design group.
In our initial discussion of these immunisation study results, we conjectured
that children who entered the creativity testing situation after having undergone
intrinsic motivation training would have a much more acute awareness of their own
intrinsic interest in school-type tasks. Thus, the reward may have served to heighten
 Social Psychology of Creativity 265

their already positive feelings about the tasks they were doing. In an effort to test
these hypotheses, two follow-up investigations of our intrinsic motivation focus
techniques (Hennessey et al., 1989, Study 2; Hennessey & Zbikowski, 1993) were
subsequently carried out. Each was designed as a conceptual replication of Study 1.
Essentially the same experimental design was employed, and it was again the
children who had received immunisation training and who were expecting a reward
who produced the most creative products. Yet, in these subsequent two studies, the
effect of training was far less dramatic. In Study 2, statistical comparisons revealed
that the creativity of those children receiving training and expecting a reward for
their performance was significantly different from only one of the other three design
groups, and in Study 3, although children assigned to the intrinsic motivation
focus/reward condition again produced the most creative products, their perform-
ance was only significantly different from that of the no training/reward group.
Taken together, the results of Studies 2 and 3 indicate that we cannot expect that
children exposed to our intrinsic motivation training and offered a reward for their
performance will demonstrate unusually high levels of creativity. We can expect,
however, that these children will be able to maintain baseline levels of intrinsic
motivation and creativity under reward conditions.
What is it about our immunisation procedures that allow children to maintain
their creativity even when they expect a reward? It appears that our efforts to help
them learn to de-emphasise the importance of extrinsic incentives and concentrate
instead on their own intrinsic interest and task enjoyment paid off. Even in the face
of reward, the children were able to maintain a positive, intrinsically motivated
approach. They brought to our experimental tasks a playfulness and a willingness to
take risks that many researchers believe are crucial to creativity (Campbell, 1960;
Crutchfield, 1962; Lieberman, 1965; Barron, 1968; Stein, 1974; Dansky & Silver-
man, 1975; Amabile, 1983, 1996).
Evidence from non-experimental studies coupled with observations of and
interviews with artists and other persons who rely upon their creativity for their life’s
work echo our ‘immunisation’ results. While many of the ‘killers’ of motivation and
creativity that have been isolated experimentally have also been found to be detri-
mental in the ‘real world’ of work, these negative effects have not proven universal.
For some people, certain extrinsic motivators have been shown to have either no
effects or even a positive effect on task interest and creativity of performance. For
example, in a study of commissioned and non-commissioned works done by
professional artists, the extrinsic incentive of a commission was seen by some artists
as a highly controlling constraint, and the creativity of their work plummeted. Yet
for those who looked at the commission as an opportunity to achieve recognition or
a confirmation of their competence by respected others, creativity was enhanced
(Amabile et al., 1993).
How can these individual differences be explained? Our data on these pro-
fessional artists and the children taking part in our immunisation studies parallel
nicely earlier work exploring the relevance of self-perception processes to the
over-justification effect. In a 1981 investigation carried out by Fazio, the negative
impact of expected reward was also mitigated in young children for whom initial
266 B. A. Hennessey

intrinsic interest in the target activity had been made salient (Fazio, 1981). In other
words, it may not be the expectation of reward per se that undermines intrinsic
motivation, rather it may be the individual’s interpretation of that reward and his or
her role in the reward process that in large part determines whether task motivation
will be undermined, enhanced or remain unchanged.

CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS

Whatever an individual’s particular talents, skills and creative thinking abilities, the
conditions under which he/she works can significantly impact on the level of
creativity produced. Intrinsic motivation is a primary driving force behind the
creative process and over 20 years of research evidence tells us that it is the social
environment that, in large part, determines this motivational orientation. Investiga-
tors interested in specifying this link between motivation and creativity initially
focused on experimental settings. They directly manipulated aspects of the social
environment and looked for accompanying changes in the creativity of the ideas and
products produced. More recent investigations have also included non-experimental
methods such as surveys, interviews and an examination of archival sources. This
broadening of focus convinced researchers that they must adopt a more comprehen-
sive ‘systems’ approach to the study of creativity. The impact of expected reward,
expected evaluation, competition and the like is far too complex to be summarised
in terms of absolutes. Individual difference variables must also be considered.
Many contemporary theorists and researchers have come to believe that motiv-
ation can no longer be conceptualised simply in terms of a transitory and very much
situation-specific state. They advocate instead an examination of both environmen-
tally induced states and enduring motivational orientations or ‘traits’. In many
respects, we have come full circle. Social psychologists who once rejected the
emphasis placed by Galton, Guilford and colleagues on issues of personality now
argue that a consideration of individual difference variables must be included in
models of creative performance. Deci & Ryan (1985a), for example, focus on
causality orientations, or characteristic ways that each of us develops for understand-
ing and orienting to inputs. More specifically, they hypothesise that individuals vary
in the degree to which they exhibit three such orientations (‘autonomy’, ‘control’
and ‘impersonal’) and they argue that these individual differences have important
implications for a variety of motivationally involved processes. At the core of what
they term their Self Determination Theory (SDT) (Ryan & Deci, 2000a,b) is the
consideration of innate psychological needs and the degree to which persons are able
to satisfy these basic needs as they pursue and attain their valued goals. Within this
SDT framework, extrinsic motivation is not seen as the simple absence of intrinsic
motivation. Instead, motivational orientation is viewed as a highly complex and
multi-layered continuum.
Similarly, Amabile (1993) has proposed a model of ‘motivational synergy’
where rewards can sometimes serve as ‘synergistic extrinsic motivators’. In other
words, rather than detract from initial interest, they can, under certain specific
 Social Psychology of Creativity 267

circumstances, combine in an additive fashion with intrinsic motivation and actually

enhance task enjoyment and involvement.
My colleagues and I (Amabile et al., 1994) have also advocated the examination
of stable trait-like motivational orientations. Toward this end, we developed a
personality inventory designed to assess intrinsic and extrinsic motivational tenden-
cies in adults. The Work Preference Inventory (WPI) has been administered to
hundreds of college students and working adults and a number of important
differences between respondents have been revealed. While there has consistently
emerged a positive relation between intrinsic motivation and creativity, it is clear
that for some people certain reward types and other extrinsic forces in the workplace
can serve as positive motivators that provide information value or facilitate task
engagement. Not all of us define the optimal work environment in the same way.
The message is clear. The impact of environmental factors on motivation and
creativity is significant and highly complex. Prompted by this new understanding, a
small number of researchers have now moved beyond the confines of the individual
experiment to offer comprehensive systems approaches to the social psychology of
creativity. Amabile (1993), for example, has proposed a model outlining the variety
of factors necessary to produce innovation in the workplace and Sternberg & Lubart
(1991) have offered a similar so-called ‘investment’ model. For my own part, I am
currently working on a systems approach to creativity in schools (Hennessey,
2000b). We are excited about these projects and believe that they hold substantial
promise at both the theoretical and applied levels.
Yet for me at least, there remains one potentially important, even nagging,
problem. Each of these systems approaches, like each of the individual investigations
upon which they have been based, is entirely grounded in Western (read ‘American’)
cultural tradition. Can we assume that these environmental factors, these same
killers of intrinsic motivation and creativity of performance, hold across cultures very
different from our own? With the exception of a few studies carried out in highly
industrialised Asian areas, investigators have failed to question whether the negative
impact of expected reward, expected evaluation and competition is a global
phenomenon or whether it is culturally specific.
In an effort to fill this research void, my students and I recently undertook two
complementary investigations. Fifty-eight school children (28 Americans and 30
Saudis) who had been randomly assigned to either an expected reward or to a
no-reward (control) condition made a collage and told a story. Saudi elementary
school teachers rated the products produced by students living in Saudi Arabia for
creativity and a variety of other dimensions, while American teachers judged the
products produced in the USA. The fact that we were able to obtain highly reliable
assessments from both groups of judges leads us to believe that the CAT can, in fact,
be successfully employed across cultures. Data from the American sample also fully
supported the Intrinsic Motivation Principle. For the collage task, data from the
Saudi sample also showed significant decreases in intrinsic task motivation under
reward conditions, but there failed to emerge significant differences in the creativity
of the reward and no-reward conditions, and no significant between-group differ-
ences emerged on the story-telling task.
268 B. A. Hennessey

Can the Intrinsic Motivation Principle of Creativity be applied to populations

of Scandinavian students and adults in the workplace? Does the expectation of
reward or evaluation undermine the creativity and intrinsic motivation of Chinese or
Turkish children? Is there a link between motivational orientation and creativity of
performance for persons of all cultures? It is my hope that researchers from around
the world will be motivated to explore these issues.

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