Journal of Creative Behavior

WEIHUA NIU

Individual and Environmental

Influences on Chinese
Student Creativity

ABSTRACT Primarily using self-report questionnaires and psychometric

tests in a sample of 357 Chinese high school students, this
study examines how both individual and environmental fac-
tors can independently predict student creativity as measured
by three different methods, including two product-orientated
measures (story completion and collage making), two diver-
gent thinking measures (circle task and picture completion),
and one self-report inventory on divergent thinking attitudes.
Two different types of theoretical models — the cognitive
approach and confluence approach — are compared and con-
trasted. Based on previous research, this study uses the
confluence approach to investigate the influences of individual
(i.e. intelligence, personality, motivation, thinking styles, and
knowledge) and environmental (i.e., school and family envi-
ronment) factors on creativity. The results have confirmed
the major hypothesis that both individual and environmental
factors play decisive roles in Chinese student creativity. Impli-
cations of these findings are discussed. This paper also calls
for a serious consideration of research on environmental influ-
ence on creativity and various mechanisms of this influence.

INTRODUCTION What makes one person more creative than another? Would it
be the characteristics of the person (e.g., creative instinct and
motivation), the nature of the social environment (e.g., soci-
etal and family structure), or both? The answer to this ques-
tion may seem quite obvious: two factors should explain more
than one factor alone, and major creativity theories seem to
embrace this assumption (e.g., Amabile, 1983, 1996; Cskis-
zentimihalyi, 1988, 1997; Simonton, 1991, 1994; Sternberg &

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Individual and Environmental Influences
on Chinese Student Creativity

Lubart, 1991, 1995). However, what is not so obvious is how

important each of these two factors is in independently deter-
mining creative potential, and how both of them work together
to influence creativity. Thus, this project aims to examine the
relative importance of both individual and environmental
factors in influencing creativity.

TWO DIFFERENT For a long time, creativity was perceived as a primary function
APPROACHES OF of the individual’s mental processes. Thus, earlier views on cre-
STUDYING
CREATIVITY ativity tended to focus principally on the influence of various
personal traits — both cognitive and non-cognitive — on the
creative achievements of eminent individuals. For example,
Galton (1869/1978) proposed three factors most responsible
for eminent individuals’ reputations and their creative achieve-
ments, namely, capacity (i.e., intelligence and special ability),
zeal (i.e., persistence and hard work), and striving (i.e., moti-
vation and fighting spirit). Guilford (1967, 1975) believed that
creativity was a subset of human intelligence, and could be
understood as a special form of problem solving skill. Viewing
creativity as a mental potential, Guilford coined the term of
divergent thinking to represent creativity. He proposed
four factors that he believed are important in the process of
divergent thinking. These four factors are: (1) sensitivity to
problems — the ability to recognize problems, (2) fluency —
the number of ideas individuals generated, (3) flexibility — the
ability to shift ideas in approaches, and (4) originality — the
ability to generate unusual ideas. Based on his four-factor model
of creative potential, Guilford devised a number of tests to mea-
sure divergent thinking, which would exert a strong impact on
creativity research for the next few decades. Much attention
has been paid in exploring the nature of creativity since
Guildford called for more studies in this field in his 1950 APA
presidential address. Many theories have been proposed, with
most falling into two categories: the cognitive and confluence
approaches.
The cognitive approach, such as the cognitive cognition
model (Finke, Ward, & Smith, 1992; Ward, Smith, & Finke,
1999) and the artificial intelligence (AI) model of creativity (e.g.,
Boden, 1999, 2000), assumes creativity to be largely influenced
by the cognitive process of the human individual. It also
assumes that people’s creative process is commonplace and
normative — as opposed to being unique to a few gifted
geniuses — and that individual differences in creativity could
be understood in terms of variations in the use of specifiable

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creative process or combinations of processes. The variations

of the intensity of applications of these cognitive processes, as
well as other cognitive capacities such as working memory,
essentially contribute to individual differences in creative po-
tentials. By studying more of the general population such as
college students, the cognitive approach removes the mysteri-
ous veil of creativity. This approach also provides a useful
method to the cognitive mechanisms of the creative process.
However, by overemphasizing the importance of the cognitive
components, this approach inevitably overlooks the impor-
tance of non-cognitive and environmental factors in their mod-
els. As such, models of this approach fail to capture the entire
picture of the creative process.
In contrast to the cognitive approach, the confluence
approach gives serious consideration to both individual and
environmental factors in explaining creativity. Several con-
fluence models have been proposed (e.g., Amabile, 1983, 1996;
Csikszentmihalyi, 1988; Gardner, 1993; Simonton, 1991, 1994;
Sternberg & Lubart, 1991; 1995), among which, some empha-
size the important and active role of the individual, as opposed
to the environment. Others address the equally important (if
not more important) role of the environment, as compared to
that of the individual, in predicting one’s creativity.
According to the former group of confluence theories, al-
though both are important, it is creative individuals who stand
out from the crowd, confronting whatever disobliging environ-
ment they may encounter. For example, in his study of histori-
cally eminent individuals, Simonton (1991, 1994) has focused
on the mutual (i.e., bilateral) interaction between these emi-
nent individuals and the broader environmental contexts in
which they lived, such as economic, political, social, and cul-
tural conditions. According to Simonton, although both the in-
dividual and environment play a mutually interactive role, the
individual has a more active and stronger influence on the en-
vironment than vice versa. Similarly, in their investment theory
of creativity, Sternberg and Lubart (1991, 1995) proposed that
creative individuals, like good investors, are generally more
inclined to persist in their idea and work in the hope of eventu-
ally being able to convince the society to change view, rather
than to give in to its initial disapproval. Unlike Simonton,
Sternberg and Lubart focused on examining a more general
population, such as college students, and they have found
six distinctive resources that contribute most to creativity,
namely: intelligence, knowledge, thinking styles, personality,

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motivation, and environment. Despite including both individual

and environmental variables in the investment theory, the
effect of the environment on creativity has yet to be fully
empirically documented from their research.
The latter group of confluence models implicitly or explic-
itly stresses the relatively more important role of the environ-
ment, as opposed to that of the individual. For example, the
componential framework of creativity, formulated by Amabile
(1983, 1996), describes creativity as a function of three com-
ponents, namely: (1) the person’s domain-specific skills, (2)
creativity-relevant skills, and (3) task motivation. Among these
three components, Amabile argues that task motivation plays
a crucial mediating role between the social environment and
creativity. Although all three components seem to belong to
individual factors, and the environment is not listed as a com-
ponent, results from research of Amabile and her colleagues
do suggest the decisive role of the environment, that is, envi-
ronments that induce extrinsic restraints and rewards tend to
be detrimental to one’s intrinsic motivation, and subsequently
dampen one’s creativity.
Explicitly addressing the crucial role of the environment in
creativity, Cskiszentmihalyi (1988, 1997) contends that cre-
ativity comes from an interaction among three factors: the
individual, the domain, and the field. In this model, the envi-
ronment is assumed to play a dual role in one’s creativity —
first as a nurturer, and next as a gatekeeper. Cskiszentmihalyi
argues that the nature of creativity is context-dependent, and
that the interaction among the three factors — domain, field,
and individual — is important in motivating creative individu-
als to achieve higher goals, as well as in driving cultural evolu-
tion. Although a lot of attention has been paid to the
environment, the influence of environment on creativity has
yet to be empirically studied.
Examining the entire corpus of research literature on cre-
ativity, one finds that there is a lack of empirical investigation
on the role of the environment in creativity, as compared with
the number of studies that investigate various individual fac-
tors such as intelligence and personality traits. For instance, a
search on the Psych-INFO database (1967 afterward) showed
more than 8000 studies to have been conducted on creativity
and personality but only about 300 studies that linked envi-
ronmental factors to creativity. In sum, empirical research on
the environmental factor of creativity pales in comparison to
that of individual factors.

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THE ROLE OF SOCIAL Social environments refer to the characteristics of the family,
ENVIRONMENTS IN
CREATIVITY school, community, and culture that surround the individual.
Broadly, the cultural, political, and economic conditions of a
society have been shown to be capable of shaping people’s
creative expression as well as their conceptions and evalua-
tions of creativity (Kim, 2004; Lubart & Sternberg, 1998; Niu
& Sternberg, 2001, 2003; Simonton, 1997). In general, studies
have shown that in societies where economic and intellectual
freedom are unrestricted, individuals are more capable of ex-
pressing creativity in various ways as compared with mem-
bers from a society where intellectual freedom is discouraged
(Jellen & Urban, 1989; Niu & Sternberg, 2001).
At a relatively local level, schools and families can also play
a critical role in creativity by creating an intellectual climate
that stimulates the creative potential of the individuals. Stud-
ies have shown that creative individuals typically come from
families or schools that stress independence, flexibility, and
self- exploration (Heck, 1978; Kaur, 1986; Misra, 1987; Olszew-
ski, Kulieke, & Buescher, 1987; Tsai, 1985). In contrast, socio-
economic factors such as family social-economic-status (SES)
seem to play a less significant role in creativity than that of
one’s intellectual environment (e.g., Moglia, 1987; Peirce, 1983).
It is worthwhile to note that most of the studies that have
examined the influence of family and school on creativity were
conducted two decades ago. Few if any studies have been con-
ducted in the recent years. This said, given the fact that most
newly developed creativity theories address the importance of
social-environmental influences, empirical research in this area
deserves much more serious consideration than it has been
accorded. It should also be noted that almost all theories in
the creativity literature have been formulated based on West-
ern contexts, particularly that of the United States; given the
fact that the nature of creativity is culturally relevant, in order
to test the cultural variation of creativity, a sample drawn from
outside the American population would be appropriate if
not desirable. Therefore, I have chosen to examine Chinese
culture for this project.

CURRENT STUDY The primary goal of this study has been to investigate how
individual and environmental factors are able to predict cre-
ativity within the context of Chinese society. More specifically,
five individual variables (i.e., intelligence, personality, motiva-
tion, thinking styles, and knowledge) and two environmental
variables (family and school) were examined to explore how

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each of these two factors separately predicts student creative

performance. The selection of each variable has been based
on general findings from previous research, showing the pro-
found influence of these factors on student general perfor-
mance. In this project, it is assumed that these same factors
would also exert a significant influence on student creativity.
It is hypothesized that each of these two factors, namely,
individual and social environment — accounts for a significant
amount of influence on student creativity; yet neither individual
traits nor environmental factors alone can sufficiently explain
one’s creative achievement. This hypothesis will be examined
alongside an alternative hypothesis, which states only indi-
vidual factors, but not the environmental factors, would sig-
nificantly and uniquely predict creativity. It is argued that a
person must posses some characteristics such as a certain
level of intelligence, certain amount of knowledge, certain type
of personality (i.e., openness to experience), certain style of
thinking (e.g., one that is inclined to independent thinking pat-
tern), and task-orientated motivation, in order to be creative.
However, without the appropriate social environment, the indi-
vidual cannot hope to achieve a high level of creativity. Funda-
mentally, this project hypothesizes that each factor — individual
and environment — uniquely contributes to creativity.

METHOD The participants in this study included 357 first-year high school
Participants students, as well as their parents and teachers, in Beijing and
Nanjing, both of which are major metropolitan cities in China.
The mean age of the students was 16.2 years old (SD = .37). In
each city, two different schools were chosen. One was a city-
level key school, in which only the top ten percent of the stu-
dents on a state-level academic test are eligible to enroll. Almost
all the students in this type of school will eventually be admit-
ted to a college in China upon graduation. The other was a
vocational high school, where students are likely to have scored
at the average or lower-than-average level on the same aca-
demic test. Typically, these students will not make it to college
upon graduation.
Specifically, in the city of Beijing, a total of 280 students
participated in this study *. Of these, 177 (103 female and 74
* Access to these high schools was assisted by local psychologists in these
two cities. The sample sizes of students in the selected schools varied
widely. They were typically based on the existing student body size in
the respective schools as well as on the relationship between these schools
and the local psychologists. Overall, the closer the relationship between
the schools and the local psychologists was, the more easily did the
investigator receive the approval from the school to recruit participants.

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male) were from a city-level key school called the “High School
Affiliated with the People’s University” (a full translation of the
Chinese name, Ren Da Fu Zhong, and abbreviated as RDFZ);
another 103 (68 female and 35 male) were from a vocational
school known as the “Beijing Applied Art School” (a full trans-
lation of the Chinese name, Shi Yong Mei Shu Zhong Xue,
and abbreviated as SYMS), where students have concentra-
tions either in the applied arts (e.g., hairstyling, tailoring, or
sculpturing) or other non-art majors (e.g. accounting or com-
puter programming).
In the city of Nanjing, a total of 77 students participated in
this study. Of these, 44 (28 female and 16 male) came from a
city-level key school known as the “Jiling High School” (a full
translation from the Chinese name, Jiling Zhong Xue, and
abbreviated as JLZX); and 33 (20 female and 13 male) stu-
dents were from a vocational school called the “Xiao Zhuang
Normal School” (a full translation from the Chinese name, Xiao
Zhuang Shi Fan, and abbreviated as XZSF), where students
studied subjects that would prepare them to become elemen-
tary school teachers in the future.
Materials The materials can be divided into three parts, namely:
(1) measures of student creativity; (2) measures and ques-
tionnaires of individual variables, including intelligence and
non-cognitive characteristics; and (3) questionnaires of social-
environmental variables and student school achievement.
Creativity measures Creativity was measured in three ways. First, there were two
product-orientated measures (collage design and story comple-
tion). The task of collage design is similar to that used in
Amabile’s studies, but to make the creative project easier to
perform, and to simplify the grading procedure, some modifi-
cations were made. For example, unlike Amabile’s task, which
provided paper cut-outs and other tools (such as glue) as
materials for participants to work with, in this study, each stu-
dent received an identical set of stickers with different shapes,
colors, and sizes; using stickers instead of paper cut-outs and
glues makes the project easier to complete. The same task
was also previously adopted in other studies (e.g., Niu &
Sternberg, 2001). As for the topic of the artwork, participants
were asked to select one from three given topics (namely,
“happiness,” “my home,” and “my dream”) to make a collage
design to represent that topic. Another product-orientated mea-
sure was to ask participants write a short story based on one
of the two given story starters; for example, one story starter
referred to a kidnapping of a chief chef and the other to an
event that took place in an Internet club.

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on Chinese Student Creativity

The second type of creativity measurement was the mea-

sure of divergent thinking, and the items were selected and
modified based on two activities of the Torrance Tests of Cre-
ative Thinking (Figural Tests) (Torrance, 1974), known as
the “picture completion” and the “circles” tasks. The Original
TTCT — Figural has two parallel forms, A and B, and consists
of three activities: picture construction, picture completion, and
repeated figures of lines or circles. Form B was adopted in this
study. To shorten the time of the assessment, only four items
from the picture completion and the circles tasks were selected.
In the picture completion task, participants were required to
develop a simple and abstract figure into a meaningful picture
and then name the picture, whereas in the circle task, they
were asked to generate ideas and pictures by adding lines, dots,
or circles to 24 given circles that are arranged in a 4 X 6 matrix
(the original circle task has two pages, one with circles of a
3x2 matrix and the other with a 5x6 matrix, yet for the purpose
of the simplification, only one page of circle was provided).
The third measure of creativity was a 24-item inventory, for-
mulated by Basadur and Hausdorf (1996), assessing people’s
general attitudes toward new ideas and the likelihood people
engage in creative activities. It includes 24 statements such as
“I really enjoy the challenge of finding a different way to solve
a problem,” and “When I get a new idea, I really get excited”.
Participants were asked to use a 7-point scale to rate the de-
gree to which each statement represented them.
Measures assessing The inventory for measuring participants’ individual vari-
individual variables ables included four different types of measures — one for mea-
suring general intelligence, and the other three for measuring
non-cognitive characteristics. Students’ level of knowledge in
mathematics and Chinese were obtained from the teacher’s
questionnaire, and from which a relative score (as percentile
compared to the whole class) was recorded, and which will be
introduced in the section of teachers’ questionnaire. A brief
introduction of the four measures is as follows:
General intelligence. The general intelligence of the stu-
dents was measured with Cattell Culture Fair Intelligence Test
(Scale 3) (Cattell, 1950). Essentially, this test was designed to
measure individual intelligence such that the influence of ver-
bal fluency is reduced to a bare minimum. The tests included
four subsets of non-verbal tasks, namely, series, classifications,
matrices, and conditions (topology), which required partici-
pants to infer relationships among shapes and figures. Partici-
pants were asked to select, from among the choices provided,

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the answer that best suits the task requirement. Before they
completed the task of each subset, the students were given
samples of the task to practice for the purpose of gaining an
understanding of the nature of the task.
Orientation of Motivation. The motivation of the students
was measured with the Work Preference Inventory (WPI)
(Amabile, Hil, Hennessey, & Tighe, 1995), an inventory whose
purpose is to examine people’s stable traitlike motivational
orientation. WPI has two primary scales, namely, Intrinsic and
Extrinsic motivation. Sample items for measuring intrinsic
motivation include “curiosity is the driving force behind much
of what I do,” (from the Enjoyment subscale) and “the more
difficult the problem, the more I enjoy trying to solve it” (from
the Challenge subscale). Sample items for measuring extrin-
sic motivation include “I am keenly aware of the GPA (grade
point average) goals I have for myself,” (from the Compensa-
tion subscale). For this inventory, participants were simply
required to indicate, on a 7-point Likert scale, the degree to
which each test item described them.
Personality. The measure of the students’ personality was
assessed with Gough’s The Adjective Check List — Five Big
Factors and Creative Personality Scale (Gough, 1979, 1987).
It included five subsets of personality traits measure (compris-
ing a total of 141 adjective items) selected from Gough’s The
Adjective Check List, the purpose of which is to measure
six separate personality traits. The six traits were neuroticism
(e.g., emotional, moody, fearful, and tense), extraversion (e.g.,
outgoing, active, outspoken, and noisy), openness to experi-
ences (e.g., imaginative, curious, foresighted, and dignified),
agreeableness (e.g., good-natured, kind, gentle, and generous),
conscientiousness (e.g., deliberate, dependable, efficient, and
organized), and creativity (e.g., resourceful, insightful, inven-
tive, and original). For this instrument, participants were
required to indicate those adjective items that best described
them.
Thinking styles. The styles of thinking of the students were
measured with the Sternberg’s Thinking Style Inventory
(Sternberg, 1997). According to this theory, people predomi-
nately use one of the following three styles of thinking in deal-
ing with every day problems: (1) Legislative thinking style,
which is inclined to create or generate their own rules and ways
of doing things, preferring to decide for themselves what and
how they should perform a certain task. A sample item of this
style of thinking is: “when faced with a problem, I use my own

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ideas and strategies to solve it.” (2) Executive thinking style,

which is inclined to follow prescribed rules or ways of doing
things, and would prefer problems that are well-structured to
those that are more loosely defined. A sample item of the ex-
ecutive thinking style is: “When discussing or writing down
ideas, I follow formal rules of presentation.” (3) Judicial think-
ing style, which is inclined to evaluate rules and procedures,
and seek problems that require thorough analysis and evalua-
tion, as opposed to those that require either original designing
or implementation. A sample of this style of thinking is: “I
enjoy work that involves analyzing, grading, or comparing
things.” For this inventory, participants were simply required
to indicate, on a 7-point Likert scale, the degree to which each
test item described them.
Measures of Parent questionnaire. The parent questionnaires for this
environmental study were intended to identify: (a) the students’ socioeco-
variables and
student school nomic status; (b) their family’s financial commitment to edu-
performance cational funds (i.e., how much the family income goes to the
student’s education); and (c) the degree of emotional-intellec-
tual support as well as autonomy that they received from their
parents. This information was obtained with the measure from
the Parent Belief of Support Inventory (Simons, Lorenz, Con-
ger, & Wu, 1992) and the Belief of Autonomy Inventory
(Mayseless & Hui, 1998).
Teacher’s questionnaire. Lastly, information about the
students’ school environment and achievements in various sub-
jects was also obtained from their teachers, based on a simple
self-designed questionnaire. The information included two
parts. One was the students’ school achievement in the do-
main of Chinese language and mathematics, which are the
two major subjects that all students in all the high schools
in China are required to take. Teachers were asked to give a
relative score (percentile in the whole class) for each student
on subject of Chinese and mathematics. The other relevant
information pertained to the quality of the students’ social
relationship with their peers and teachers.
In order to ensure that there is no conflicting understanding
of the constructs that are used in this study, all the question-
naires, which were originally written in English (including the
instructions for TTCT and the Cattell Intelligence Test), were
translated into Chinese (by one Chinese graduate student who
is fluent in both languages) and back into English again (by
another bilingual Chinese graduate student). Discussion was
held between the primary investigator and the two graduate

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students where there were discrepancies in the translation pro-

cess, in order to ensure consistency of the use and definition
of the constructs.

PROCEDURE The administration of the assessment for this study spanned

two afternoons. The students came in groups to complete these
assessments and questionnaires after school. On the first day,
students took the four creativity tests, namely, story comple-
tion, collage making, picture completion, and the circles tasks,
each of which lasted 10-15 minutes (the divergent-thinking at-
titude inventory was scheduled to fill in on the second day, with
other questionnaires). All students completed the two diver-
gent-thinking assessments first (picture completion and the
circle task), and then completed the other two creative tasks
(collage making and story completion). On the second day,
students first sat for the Cattell Cultural Fair Intelligence test,
which lasted about 20 minutes, and then the divergent think-
ing attitude test, followed by the other three student invento-
ries, which lasted about 30 minutes in all.
At the end of the first-day assessment, the students were
asked to bring the parents’ questionnaire home for their par-
ents to fill in. They were then asked to bring the questionnaire
back to school the next day, or to mail it directly to the primary
investigator. At the same time, the teachers were asked to com-
plete the teacher survey.
Scoring methods Creativity scores were the major dependent measures in this
for creativity study. Each student had five different creativity scores. The
first, the divergent thinking attitude score, was calculated by
summing scores (ranging from 1 to 7 for each item) on the
positive and reversed negative items. The other four creativity
scores used with reference of two different scoring systems,
namely, Amabile’s consensual assessment technique (CAT)
and Torrance’s four criterion components (fluency, flexibility,
originality, and elaboration), depending on the nature of the
creativity tasks.
Specifically, principles of CAT were used if the task met
the following three criteria: (1) it can lead to concrete and clear
products for people to compare and judge; (2) it is open-ended
enough for products to show novelty; and (3) doing the task
does not require much special expertise and technique, such
that it becomes very likely that every participant would be able
to complete the task within the specified timeframe. Three
tasks out of the total four in this project met the above three

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conditions. They are collage design, story completion, and pic-

ture completion.
The circles task did not lead to one single product. Instead,
the task required students to generate numerous responses,
such that both the quantity and quality of these responses
would be employed as criteria in judging overall performance.
Thus, Torrance’s four criterion components’ scoring method
(based on its 1974 manual) was employed for scoring this task,
which will be explained in more detail in the next section.
Scoring procedure In Amabile’s research, student original creative artwork (col-
Collage design lage design) was evaluated. However, because all student
collage designs in this project were produced in China, and
all the judges were in the U.S., for the ease of carrying the
artwork, all the students’ collage designs (357 of them) were
scanned into the computer and then color printed with a
reduced size of 5x7 inches (about one-fourth of the original
products).
Four judges — Chinese graduate students from the social
sciences (three from psychology and one from philosophy, two
males and two females) from Yale University were engaged to
rate the creativity of the collage designs. The validity of using
non-artists as judges in evaluating artistic creativity of student
artwork of this kind has been previously examined (Amabile
1996; Niu & Sternberg, 2001). In order to reduce evaluative
biases, all the judges were blind to the condition of participants’
art design samples. They were shown a sample set of pictures
of students’ collage designs and a sheet of stickers with differ-
ent colors, shapes, and colors. They were told that these de-
signs were created by high school students within a 15-minute
duration, and that the students were given an identical set of
stickers that were shown to them. The judges were also told
that, during the 15-minute experiment, students were asked to
choose one of three topics, namely, “happiness,” “my home,”
or “my dream,” and to make a collage design that represented
the chosen topic.
Initially, the project follows the original grading procedure
suggested by Amabile (1996), that is, to evaluate each artwork
on different dimensions (e.g., originality, appropriateness, and
overall creativity); however, given that there were 357 student
art products, it was very difficult for judges to give each of the
357 pieces of artwork several scores in a realistic time period
(e.g., less than two hours). Important principles, as illustrated
by Amabile (1996) were followed. These principles are: (1) the
judges’ job was to evaluate how creative each design was in

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comparison with other designs, and (2) they were supposed

to use their own subjective judgment of the creative work, rather
than to compare the students’ designs to some external objec-
tive criterion.
Therefore, the judging procedure was modified and orga-
nized as follows. First, judges classified all designs of the same
topic into three groups, according to three levels of creativity:
high, moderate, and low. Each of these three levels of pictures
was further divided into two sub-levels (one level being more
creative than the other). Thus, there were now six different
groups of pictures based on six different levels of creativity.
These groups were identified on a scale of 1-6, with 6 repre-
senting the most creative group of pictures, and 1 represent-
ing lowest. Similar procedures have also been used in other
research (e.g., Kaufman, 2002).
In order to ensure that the final sorting represented the
judges’ most definitive, as opposed to impulsive, evaluation,
the judges were told that they could change their ratings at
any time during this period. Thus, they were free to rearrange
the original sorting or relocate the pictures from one level to
another. Furthermore, in order to discourage evaluations made
from impulse or affected by fatigue, the judges were given
ample time and occasional breaks during the whole process.
Story completion All the students’ essays were typed and printed such that
only one essay appeared on one page. Four judges — Chinese
graduate students (two males and females) in psychology in
China — were engaged to rate the creativity of these stories.
Again, in order to reduce evaluative biases, all the judges were
blind to the conditions of participants’ writing samples. The
entire rating process for this task was identical to that for the
collage-design task.
Picture completion Two Chinese graduate students in psychology (one male
and one female) were invited to act as judges for this task.
Again, the entire rating process for this task was identical to
that for the collage-design task.
Circles Scoring the circles task followed the scoring guide of the
Torrance Test of Creative Thinking (TTCT) figural test (Tor-
rance, 1974). Four scores — fluency, flexibility, originality, and
elaboration — were obtained, and a combination of these four
was used to represent the overall creativity of this task. Two
raters (both are female Chinese graduate students in psychol-
ogy from Yale University) graded the circles task together,
using the following procedure.

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Individual and Environmental Influences
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Fluency. The fluency score was obtained by counting only

the number of unduplicated circles that students completed.
Flexibility. Flexibility is defined by the TTCT as the num-
ber of categories of a student’s responses. There was no fixed
set of categories for grading; rather, the categories were gener-
ated by appointed raters, based on the responses of the stu-
dents. Examples of categories include human faces, human
parts, balls, and so forth.
Two steps were undertaken to grade this score. The first was
to generate a category list. Because the sample for this study
comprised Chinese high school students, which is different
from the sample used in the TTCT scoring guide (which com-
prised of American students), creating a new set of category
list was deemed appropriate if not essential. In order to gener-
ate a new category list, two raters worked together to catego-
rize the responses. Although some responses could easily be
classified, such as animal faces, human faces, and balls, oth-
ers did not permit easy categorization, such as natural scenes,
abstract figures, and serial stories. For those responses that
proved difficult to categorize, the two readers discussed their
varied opinions until they achieved an agreed identification. In
the final analysis, 59 categories were generated. Once this
categorization process was completed, the second step of the
rating process began, which entailed review of all the pictures
again in order to calculate the flexibility score. The flexibility
score was obtained by counting the number of different
categories into which a participant’s responses could be
classified.
Originality. Originality is defined by the TTCT as the rare-
ness or uniqueness of a response; the smaller a percentage of
a particular response created by a student with respect to
the whole set of responses generated by the whole sample of
students, the higher original score would be the response.
In the original TTCT manual, the originality scores of vari-
ous responses were listed, ranged between 0 and 4. A manual
was also provided that illustrated the principles for scoring,
including: a score of zero was assigned to 5 percent or more of
the responses, a weight of one point is given for responses
given from two percent to 4.99 percent of the respondents.
Then a weight of 2 was assigned if they showed creative
strength (that is, require intellectual energy beyond what is
learned, practiced and habitual, and result in responses that
are away from the obvious and commonplace). Based on this
guide, a new grading manual, instead of using the original one,

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 Journal of Creative Behavior

was formed to rate originality. For instance, the response of

“the symbol of Taiji” (a particular traditional Chinese symbol
that represents the yin-yang movement) would earn a high
score of two points, which is regarded as the most original,
while the response of “pie” (as in an apple pie) would earn a
lower score of zero points for its lack of originality. However,
for the same reason that necessitated the creation of new
categories for the flexibility score, a new manual of response-
evaluation was created for the purpose of scoring this sample.
Thus, both responses, namely, the symbol of Taiji and pie,
would be given a moderate score of one point (instead of two)
for their lack of originality. While the symbol of Taiji may be
considered as an original response in the American sample, it
is regarded as a relatively commonplace response for the
Chinese sample of this study. Thus, universality is not presup-
posed for originality.
Elaboration. Elaboration is defined by the TTCT as details
that are added to the minimum basic idea. The TTCT manual
suggests that one point is given for each essential detail of the
total response, but once that class of detail is scored, further
responses of the same class are not counted. As an example
given by the manual, the basic figure of a dog (with head, body,
and legs) would not gain any elaboration points. However, if
the participant added details to the basic figure, such as spots
on the dog’s body, a tongue, a nose, eyes, shading, or the cloud
in the sky, each of these additional particulars would be given
one elaboration point. Following this principle, two raters inde-
pendently scored the elaboration. The first randomly selected
75 responses were graded by two independent raters for the
purpose of familiarization with the scoring system. Once this
was achieved, each rater rated half of the remaining responses
(about 140).

RESULTS The inter-judge reliabilities for the four creativity measures —

Reliability of i.e., collage design, story completion, picture completion, and
creativity measures
the circles task (only originality and elaboration were computed
for this task), were calculated using Cronbach’s coefficient
alpha. The reliability coefficient was .86 on the task of collage
design and .74 on the story-completion task. The reliability
scores on picture completion (four pictures in total) ranged
from .75 to .89 (.88, .89, .75, and .78). The reliability score of
originality of the circles task was .91. All the above inter-judge
reliability scores were considered as high, according to Cicchetti
and Sparrow (1981).

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Individual and Environmental Influences
on Chinese Student Creativity

Data screening Because most data came from questionnaires and ratings,
prior to engaging any further analysis, data screening was
necessary to maximize the accuracy of the data file. Two
important steps were taken. The first was to check and deal
with missing values, and the second was to check for the
normality of variables and to perform data transformations,
when necessary.
Missing values and Of all the 357 participants who participated in this study,
imputation. 203 of them had complete data, which counted for 57% of the
whole dataset. Missing values were scattered throughout mul-
tiple cases and variables, most of which occurred in relation to
variables that were drawn from the parent and teacher ques-
tionnaires, such as family educational expense (money spend
on education). It would be a substantial loss of data simply to
exclude all participants who did not complete all responses; in
this case the sample size would be reduced to almost half. SPSS
Missing Value Analysis (MVA) showed Little’s MCAR test to be
non-significant (X2 (17665) = 17665, p = .28), suggesting that
the data were missing at random. For missing values that
occurred in a completely random fashion, the Expectation
Maximization (EM) method of data imputation was employed,
because it is the simplest and most reasonable approach
(Tabachnick & Findell, 2000). The ensuing result section is
based on a full sample of 357 cases (with all missing data
statistically inserted).
Normality check and Normality of major independent and dependent variables
data transformation. was assessed by checking for the skewness of the distribution.
If a distribution is highly skewed (e.g., at .001 level), data trans-
formation was applied to recover a more normal distribution
of each variable. Of all the variables, one of the individual vari-
ables, namely, intrinsic motivation (S = .50, z = 3.88), and three
of the creativity measures, namely, the circles task (S = 1.22, z
= 9.46), story completion (S =. 41, z = 3.21), and collage
design (S = .70, z = 5.45), appeared to be positively skewed.
However, after performing square-root transformations, all
these distributions became relatively normal (see Table 1).
In addition, four individual variable measures appeared to
be negatively distributed: two personality measures, namely,
agreeableness (s = –.46, z = –3.53) and neuroticism (s = –.89,
z = –6.52), and two thinking-style measures, the legislative
thinking style (S = –.47, z = –3.65) and the judicial thinking
style (S = –.57, z = –4.40). To deal with negative skewness, the
data were first reflected by subtracting the original score from
the maximum score plus one, as advised by Tabachnick and

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TABLE 1. Normality Check after Data Transformation.

Mini- Maxi- Mean SD Skew Z

mum mum
SQRT (IM) 3.74 9.11 6.147 0.511 –0.361 –2.798
SQRT (reflected agreeable) 1.00 4.80 2.808 0.729 –0.117 –0.907
SQRT (reflected neuroticism) 1.00 4.24 2.572 0.546 0.244 1.891
SQRT (reflected legislative TS) .87 2.29 1.530 0.283 0.094 0.729
SQRT (reflected judicial TS) 1.00 2.65 1.751 0.362 0.086 0.667
SQRT (story completion) 1.00 2.40 1.630 0.314 –0.037 –0.287
SQRT (collage design) 1.00 2.47 1.585 0.389 0.345 2.674
SQRT (circle task) .00 12.33 6.807 1.780 0.138 1.070

Fidell (2000). After transformation, the distribution of all four

measures became relatively normal. All z scores were less than
2.8 (Table 1). Next, these reflected scores were reflected back,
using the maximum score plus one as the constant to be sub-
tracted from the reflected score. Therefore, the ensuing data
analysis is based on the transformed and imputed data, and
not those of the original data set.
Creativity The current investigation asked participants to complete two
performances on creative products (story completion and collage design), two
different measures
divergent-thinking measures (picture completion, the circle
task) and one self-report inventory on divergent thinking atti-
tudes. Inter-correlations among all these five variables showed
that, except for the task of collage design, student perfor-
mances on all other four measures were significantly corre-
lated (see table 2). In the following analysis, an attempt shall

TABLE 2. Correlations among five creativity measures.

Divergent Story Picture Circle Collage

thinking comple- comple- task design
attitude tion tion
Divergent thinking attitude 1
Story completion .317** 1
Picture Completion .107* .202** 1
Circle task .191** .146* .173** 1
Collage design .000 .045 –.033 –.112* 1
Note: N=357. *: P < 0.05 (2-tailed). **: P< 0.01(2-tailed).

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on Chinese Student Creativity

be made to analyze creativity in terms of a factorial score drawn

from all five measurements, which is called overall creativity.
Exploratory Analysis The central question of this study was concerned with how
individual and environmental factors predict creativity. To
answer this question, an exploratory analysis was undertaken
to examine the correlations among all the predicting variables
and the overall creativity score. Appendix A summarizes these
correlations.
As Appendix A shows, the score of overall creativity signifi-
cantly correlates with most, if not all, of the predicting vari-
ables. Six distinct variables were significantly correlated with
general creativity. They are: (1) the environment, as measured
by type of school1 (r = .358), father’s education (r =. 357),
mother’s education (r = .313), and father’s occupation (r = 302);
(2) intelligence (r = .302); (3) the general category of person-
ality along the subscales of extraversion (r = .164), openness
to experience (r = .120), and creative personality (r = .239);
(4) intrinsic motivation (r = .219); (5) knowledge, as measured
by school performance on Chinese (.219) and mathematics
(r = .149); and (6) thinking styles along the subscales of ex-
ecutive thinking style (r = –.211) and legislative thinking style
(.208). However, only the executive thinking style (r =. 106)
appeared to be significantly correlated with collage design but
none of the other variables.
Regression analysis Regression analysis was conducted in order to examine the
influences of various independent variables on creativity.
Stepwise regression analysis was first carried out to inspect
which variables could uniquely predict overall creativity. Table
3 summarizes the results of this stepwise regression (only vari-
ables with significant beta weights were reported).
Table 4 shows that the above list of predictors could explain
45.5% (adjusted R square = 44.4%) of the total variance of
overall creativity. These predictors include: (1) the environment
(as measured by type of school, father’s educational level, and
parent autonomic belief); (2) student IQ; (3) knowledge (as
measured by school performance on Chinese language);
1 The type of school comprises information about the school, such as the
school’s revenue and available educational resources, overall quality of
teachers and opportunities for teacher training, contents and levels of
educational curriculum, and the school neighborhood. Although type of
school may be classified as an environmental variable, it is also highly
correlated with students’ academic achievements, students’ intelligence,
and achievement motivation. Therefore, type of school is better to be
treated as a mixed factor, or maybe an environmental factor after
intelligence is controlled.

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 Journal of Creative Behavior

(4) intrinsic motivation; (5) extravert personality; and (6)

legislative and executive thinking styles.
Hierarchical regression analysis was further conducted,
using the above individual factors and environmental factors
as predictors. IQ was entered first, followed by the environmen-
tal factors (type of school, father’s educational level, and
parent autonomic belief), and finally the individual factors
(Chinese performance, legislative and executive thinking styles,
intrinsic motivation, and extraversion personality). The results
revealed that IQ alone could explain 15.4% of the total
TABLE 3. Stepwise regression analysis of overall creativity.

Predicting Std.
variables B Error Beta t Sig.

Environmental Type of school .491 .109 .239 4.524 .000

Predictors Father’s
education .197 .054 .180 3.682 .000
Autonomic belief
of parents .008 .040 .084 2.106 .036
Individual IQ .022 .009 .142 3.034 .003
Predictors Performance
on Chinese .029 .054 .225 5.437 .000
Extraversion .039 .011 .155 3.696 .000
Intrinsic
motivation .256 .086 .131 2.968 .003
Executive
thinking style –.093 .035 –.106 –2.633 .009
Legislative
thinking style .364 .155 .103 2.342 .020

Dependent Variable: overall creativity

TABLE 4. Model summary of individual and environmental predictors of overall

creativity.

Model R R2 Adjusted SD R2 F Df1 Sig. F

Df2 Change
R2 Change Change
IQ .392 .154 .151 .92 .154 64.033 1 353 .000
Environment .561 .314 .306 .83 .161 27.358 3 350 .000
Individual .674 .454 .440 .75 .140 17.699 5 345 .000

Dependent Variable: overall creativity

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Individual and Environmental Influences
on Chinese Student Creativity

variance of overall creativity, while the environmental factors

could explain 16.1%, and the individual factors the rest of the
14.0 % (see table 4)
Tables 3 suggests that six distinctive predictors — intelli-
gence, knowledge, personality, motivation, thinking styles, and
the environment — significantly predict at student overall cre-
ativity. Table 4 further suggests that among all these six pre-
dictors, intelligence and environmental factors alone (about
one-third of total explained variance for each) are more impor-
tant in influencing one’s creativity than the combination of all
the other individual factors.

DISCUSSION The results of this study supported the major hypothesis of

this study, in which each of the individual and environment
factors uniquely contributes to overall creativity. Of the indi-
vidual predictors, intelligence alone accounted for the largest
proportion of variance — about one-third of total explained
variance — of the overall creativity, followed by the social envi-
ronment (which comprised the components of school environ-
ment, family SES, and parent’s beliefs of autonomy), which
accounted for another one third of the total explained variance.
Together, the rest of the four individual predictors, namely,
personality, motivation, thinking styles, and knowledge,
explained the last one-third of the total explained variance.
One critical implication of this finding is that when the
influence of intelligence was controlled, social environment
could explain at least as much variance of creativity as a
combination of all the other personal characteristics of these
individuals. It thus suggests a critical role that social environ-
ment plays in predicting creativity. This implication is contrary
to the alternative hypothesis that is mentioned in the begin-
ning of this study, which suggests that individual characteris-
tics are more important than the social environment in
influencing creativity.
What do these findings contribute to current literature on
creativity? First, this study enhances the confluence approach
of creativity by supplementing evidence of the environmental
influences on creativity. Secondly, this study has provided
empirical evidence to support how variations of the environ-
ment alone — holding individual variables constant — could in
fact influence creative performance. In the preceding introduc-
tion section of this paper, the gap between theoretical formu-
lations and empirical evidence supporting the environmental
hypothesis was highlighted. Although this project was designed
to fill in this gap, more empirical evidence is essential.

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Finally, it should be noted that this project was conducted

in China. Thus, the population of the study entailed primarily
Chinese students. Suffice it to say, the findings of this project,
particularly that of the significant influence of environment on
creativity, were specific to the Chinese culture. Thus, any gen-
eralization of these results can only be made with caution.
While many Western researchers have emphasized the role
of individual characteristics at the expense of the environment
in determining creativity (e.g., Kaufman, 2002), findings from
this study caution against this perspective, at least for certain
cultural contexts. Given the fact that most theories of creativ-
ity were constructed on the basis of Western (especially Ameri-
can) populations, research using non-Western (especially
non-American) samples is particularly important. This is to
permit observation of potential cultural variations or determi-
nants of creativity, as evidenced in this project.
The findings of this project are instructive. The foremost
implication is that societies in general, and families, schools,
and workplaces in particular, could work actively to create an
environment that protects and nurtures individuals’ sense of
autonomy, on the one hand, and discourage blanket confor-
mity, on the other, in order to enhance creativity. Contrariwise,
any direct or indirect attempt to restrict freedom or induce
uncritical obedience from the individuals could stifle creativity.
At least two possible directions for future research are rec-
ommended. First, conventional approaches to the study of
creativity tend to overlook certain components of creativity,
which is relatively complex in nature. For instance the cogni-
tive approach tends to neglect the environmental effect on cre-
ativity, while the AI approach tends to ignore consideration of
individual differences. For this reason, this project opted for
the confluence approach to the study of creativity, thereby
including both individual and environmental variables. As such,
the project may be said to be more inclusive in its approach
than mainstream studies. It is recommended that future
research take this point into account. Secondly, more research
on how individual characteristics (such as intelligence and
motivation) and environment (at both distal and proximal lev-
els) interactively affect creativity is desirable. Future research-
ers may seek to tease apart various mechanisms in order to
explore potential environmental pathways of creativity. It is
likely that different mechanisms work for different individuals
with different cultural backgrounds and different learning
potentials.

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on Chinese Student Creativity

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Send correspondence to: Weihua Niu, Department of Psychology, Pace

University, New York, NY 10038, wniu@pace.edu

APPENDIX A. Correlations among Predicting Variables and Student Creativities.

Overall Type of Father’s Father’s

Creativity IQ School Occupation Education
Overall Creativity 1
IQ 0.308** 1
Type of School 0.358** 0.501** 1
Father Occupation 0.302** 0.362** 0.538** 1
Father Education 0.357** 0.339** 0.550** 0.653** 1
Mother Occupation 0.178* 0.237** 0.433** 0.590** 0.531**
Mother Education 0.313** 0.268** 0.460** 0.427** 0.623**
Par. Belief of Auto. –.121* 0.049 0.063 0.066 0.034
Par. Belief of Supp. .139* –0.016 –0.111* –0.082 –0.113*
Chinese 0.219** 0.087 0.177** 0.217** 0.214**
Mathematics 0.149** 0.015 0.102* 0.007 0.056
Extraversion 0.164** –0.042 –0.109* 0.028 0.026
Agreeableness –0.058 –0.164** –0.105* 0.017 –0.039
Conscientiousness 0.028 –0.029 0.035 0.087 –0.015
Neuroticism 0.005 0.073 0.139** 0.150** 0.106*
Openness 0.120* 0.062 0.018 0.179** 0.132*
Creative Personality 0.239** 0.139* 0.103* 0.188** 0.159**
Legislative Thinkin. 0.208** 0.158** 0.096 0.051 0.125*
Executive Thinking –0.211** –0.126* –0.091 –0.072 –0.097
Judicial Thinking –0.063 –0.052 –0.092 –0.078 –0.063
Intrinsic Motivation 0.226** 0.175** 0.151** 0.108* 0.100
Extrinsic Motivati. –0.057 0.025 –0.050 –0.062 –0.098
Note, N = 357. **: p < 0.01(2-tailed). *: p < 0.05 (2-tailed).

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APPENDIX A (Continued).

Mother’s Mother’s Parental Parental

Occupation Education Autonomy Support Chinese Math.
Mother’s
1
Occupation
Mother’s 0.648** 1
Education
Parental
–0.017 0.004 1
autonomy
Parental
–0.138* –0.156** –0.121* 1
support
Chinese 0.149** 0.205** 0.057 –0.173** 1
Mathematics –0.108* –0.004 –0.072 –0.097 0.585** 1
Extraversion –0.032 –0.006 0.017 –0.143* –0.067 –0.024
Agreeableness –0.092 –0.094 –0.042 –0.007 –0.007 –0.022
Conscientious-
–0.008 –0.009 0.122* –0.028 0.000 –0.010
ness
Neuroticism 0.127* 0.083 0.060 –0.072 0.060 0.043
Openness 0.073 0.037 0.000 0.016 0.013 0.026
Creative
0.132* 0.103* 0.037 –0.014 0.010 –0.028
Personal.
Legislative
0.094 0.122* 0.092 –0.136* 0.105 –0.007
Think.
Executive
–0.105* –0.086 0.048 –0.033 –0.037 0.019
Thinking
Judicial
–0.047 –0.052 –0.118* 0.061 –0.180** –0.203**
Thinking
Intrinsic
0.069 0.158** 0.040 –0.177** 0.088 0.072
Motivation
Extrinsic
–0.171** –0.091 –0.071 0.057 0.017 0.027
Motivati.

Note, N = 357. **: p < 0.01(2-tailed). *: p < 0.05 (2-tailed).

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