Evaluating Options

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Decision Making
(Sternberg & Lubart, 1992). Theresa Amabile has identified three kinds of cognitive
and personality characteristics necessary for creativity (Amabile, 1996; Amabile,
Hennessey, & Grossman, 1986):
1. Expertise in the field of endeavor, which is directly tied to what a person has
learned. For example, a painter or composer must know the paints, techniques,
or instruments available.
2. A set of creative skills, including persistence at problem solving, capacity for divergent thinking, ability to break out of old problem-solving habits (mental sets),
and willingness to take risks. Amabile believes that training can influence many
of these skills, some of which are closely linked to the strategies for problem solving discussed earlier.
3. The motivation to pursue creative work for internal reasons, such as satisfaction,
rather than for external reasons, such as prize money. In fact, Amabile and her colleagues found that external rewards can deter creativity. They asked groups of children and adults to create artistic products such as paintings or stories. Some were
simply asked to work on the project. Others were informed that their project would
be judged for its creativity and excellence and that rewards would be given or winners announced. Experts, who had no idea which products were created by which
group, judged those from the “reward” group to be significantly less creative. Similar effects have been found in other studies (Deci, Koestner, & Ryan, 1999, 2001).
Is creativity inherited? To some extent, perhaps it is; but evidence suggests that the
social, economic, and political environment in which a person grows and lives also
influences creative behavior (Amabile, 2001; Nakamura & Csikszentmihalyi, 2001). Do
you have to be smart to be creative? Creativity does appear to require a certain degree
of intelligence, but you don’t have to be a genius (Simonton, 1984, 2002; Sternberg,
2001). In fact, although correlations between scores on creativity tests and intelligence
tests are almost always positive, they are relatively modest (Simonton, 1999). This finding is not surprising, because creativity involves divergent thinking about many solutions to a problem. As described later, high scores on most intelligence tests require
convergent thinking, which uses logic and knowledge to narrow down the number
of possible solutions to a problem. Research on creativity and its relationship to intelligence has intensified in recent years (Sternberg & Dess, 2001). One result of that
research has been to define the combination of intelligence and creativity in the same
person as wisdom (Sternberg, 2001; Sternberg & O’Hara, 1999).
Decision Making
䉴 How can I become a better decision maker?
Paper or plastic? Do I watch TV or study for the test? Should I get out of this relationship? Is it time to start thinking about a nursing home for Mom? Life is full of
decisions. Some are easy to make; others are painfully difficult and require considerable time, planning, and mental effort. Even carefully considered decisions can lead to
undesirable outcomes, though, because the world is an uncertain place. Decisions made
when the outcome is uncertain are called risky decisions or decisions under uncertainty.
Chance aside, psychologists have discovered reasons why human decisions sometimes
lead to unsatisfactory outcomes. Let’s consider some of these reasons.
convergent thinking The ability to
apply the rules of logic and what one
knows about the world to narrow
down the possible solutions to a
problem.
Evaluating Options
Suppose that you have to choose between (1) an academic major you love but that is
unlikely to lead to steady employment or (2) a boring major that almost guarantees a
high-paying job. The fact that each option has positive and negative features greatly