Need for Novelty and Creativity: Revisiting a Neglected Construct

Need for Novelty and Creativity: Revisiting a Neglected Construct

Project Director:  Adrianne John R. Galang
Funding Agency:  H.J. Eysenck Memorial Fund

It is a feature of many theories of creativity that creative persons are assumed to have a tendency to prefer the new (Galang, 2010). However it is unclear whether this preference is integral to the personality, or if it is a strategically adapted stance for generating innovation.  If it were the former we should expect it to be a general phenomenon that manifests outside explicitly creative tasks. Our project wishes to re-engage with the concept of need for novelty. Aside from trying to replicate the original results from Houston and Mednick (1963) related to creativity, the present study aims to test whether the positive reinforcement hypothesis or the punishment hypothesis would actually account for the preference for novel stimuli.