Do We Have Creative Differences? How We Construe Creativity Influences the Salience of Novelty and Usefulness

Creativity is one of the most popular buzz words being used in society and business today. Yet, how do people determine if something is creative or not? Business leaders often clamor for more creativity and creative solutions from their employees and investors shop for entrepreneurs with creative ideas, yet by what standards are they evaluating these ideas. As creativity is often defined as an idea that is both novel and useful, it is conceivable that people may be using a variety of combinations of these components in determining their own standards for creativity. Many scholars focus on creativity as a global construct, which confounds the independent contributions of novelty and usefulness. Drawing from the established theoretical conceptualizations of creativity as a product, I seek to understand how novelty and usefulness contribute to creativity judgments. Particularly, the main focus of this dissertation is what factors influence how people may prioritize novelty or usefulness in making judgments of creativity. In seeking to understand how the relationship of novelty and usefulness to creativity may be moderated, the contextual influences of psychological distance are used to begin to explore the dynamic nature of creativity judgments. Using both field and lab experiments, I explore how framing a request for the evaluation of proposed ideas can change how novelty and usefulness combine to define creativity in practice.Doctor of Philosoph