How creative you will be depends on who you are: The relationship between personality traits, cognitive styles and different types of creativity Author:Chia-Yu Liu, Wei-Lun Lin, Ping-Hsun Tsai
Research Article
Past studies on individual differences in creativity rarely explored empirically the joint effect of personality traits and cognitive styles on creativity. Moreover, past studies often mixed different types of creative performance. According to the dual process account of creativity theory (Lin & Lien, 2013) and the duplex model of cognitive style theory (Sadler-Smith, 2009), experiential cognitive style may be associated with open-ended creativity; whereas closed-ended creativity may involve versatile cognitive style that combines experiential and rational cognitive styles. This study aimed to separate two types of creativity (open-ended and closed-ended) and investigate the role of personality traits and cognitive styles on the two types of creativity. The results showed that creative personality traits were positively correlated with both types of creativity, but different cognitive styles had different relationships with different types of creativity. Further analyses revealed that versatile cognitive style played a mediating role only on the relationship between personality traits and closed-ended creativity, but not on the relationship between personality traits and open-ended creativity. Open-ended creativity was instead more associated with experiential cognitive style. In particular, experiential cognitive style mediated the relationship between personality traits and fluency. These results clarify the relationships between personality traits, cognitive styles, and creativity, and have implication on teaching and creativity applications.