Associationist Theory Of Creativity By Mednick (and Other Authors)
Associationism was in its beginnings a philosophical approach that affirmed that human thought operated by associating a state with other successor states.
British associationists, including John Locke and David Hume defended that this principle of association applied to all mental processes and that ideas were associated in the mind following certain laws, among which the law of continuity and the law of similarity stood out.
How is this concept associated with creative processes? For this we must examine the associationist theory of creativity
The law of continuity postulates that ideas that have been experienced together tend to appear together in our minds (for example, when a situation evokes a feeling or the memory of a person).
The law of similarity, for its part, maintains that psychic contents that have similarity tend to manifest together in our thinking (for example, when a photo of someone evokes traits of their personality).
In 1962, Sarnoff Mednick published his associative theory of the creative process, in which he argued that creative thinking was the process by which disparate elements come together in new combinations to develop a useful proposal for the individual or society. The combination of the most remote elements is considered more creative than the combination of more similar elements.
Serendipity, similarity and meditation
Mednick proposed that the individual can produce creative solutions through one of three processes: serendipity, similarity, or meditation Serendipity would be a process of accidental association, similarity would be through evocation between two elements, and meditation would produce evocation when three or more elements were presented.
This author also identified different variables, especially differential ones, that could contribute to increasing the probability of reaching a creative solution or making a novel association. In this way, a basis was created for the psychological study of creativity from an associationist theory of creativity.
The Remote Associations Test
It seems that one of the advantages of association theory applied to creativity is that it could be tested. In 1967, Mednick operationalized the associative definition of creativity using the Remote Associations Test (RAT) which is a widely applied instrument in research on creative thinking, even today.
In their study, Mednick’s team reported the high RAT reliability values, as well as a positive correlation between high RAT scores and high mental flexibility, while low RAT scores were related to highly dogmatic individuals. Later studies have found a high correlation with the Creativity Rating Scale (CRS), while there does not seem to be a correlation between the RAT and the Miller Analogy Test (MAT) or with the Grade Point Average (GPA).
Criticisms of the creativity test
Despite the intensive use of the RAT in the study of creativity, The instrument has not been without criticism One of them is aimed at omitting the effect that the individual’s motivation may have on the score, as well as other factors intrinsic to the person, such as their past experiences. It has also been found that a high RAT score is significantly related to other cognitive variables such as verbal ability.
Likewise, the associative theory as a whole also has detractors. Among them is Daniel Fasko, who argues that the associative theory of creativity is too simplistic to address the complexity of this psychological phenomenon.
One of the proposals on creativity that has been born from associationism is the idea of incubation proposed by Alexander Bain.
This author proposes that Incubation occurs when new combinations of elements emerge from ideas that already exist in the mind of the individual. From this perspective, creation from nothing would be impossible, since creation is understood as an act of combining, in a novel way, the substrate stored in the minds of individuals.
incidental learning
Other authors point to the importance of the process of formation, retention and use of associations not only for creativity, but also for incidental learning, with incidental learning being understood as a situation in which seemingly irrelevant ideas or relationships tend to become associated later generating a change in the individual’s knowledge and/or behavior.
In this sense, it is understood that a creative individual will exhibit better incidental learning.
To explain the possible connection between creativity and incidental learning, two hypotheses have been proposed: (a) a highly creative individual has greater perceptual sensitivity for apparently irrelevant stimuli; and (b) the highly creative person can better retain the stimulus and make it more accessible later, for the purpose of using the information in an incidental learning task (Laughlin, 1967).
Creative thinking seen from associationism
In summary, from the perspective of associationism, creative thinking is the result of a mental process in which disparate elements come together in a novel way. resulting in a useful proposal to the individual or the environment or solving a problem.
According to associationists, ideas successively lead to other ideas and this continuum of connections would constitute the general functioning of the mind.
From this perspective, any associative theory of creativity will focus on analyzing the ways in which these ideas can be generated and on how these ideas are linked together in our minds
Currently, there is consensus that expanding the number of options or elements, so that a wide variety of associations can be generated, facilitates creativity. In fact, many of the current theories of creativity place the key to the creative process, precisely, in the association of ideas that Mednick proposed.
