Creativity and its social origin.

Chance favours the prepared mind! (Pasteur)

What is creativity? Is it a cognitive trait or an occasional state?

How can we prepare creativity?
we should be prepared to

• make mistakes
• be adaptable to different work environments
• be adaptable to changing circumstances
• see relationship between seemingly disconnected elements
• distill unusual ideas down to their underlying principles
• synthesize diverse elements Spot underlying patterns in events
• be ready to cope with paradoxes
• look beyond the first right answer

What Pasteur means is that the only way to maximize the probability of creativity is preparation. He correctly recognized that the essential element is still chance — the unforeseen, the unexpected — but that this fortuitous factor is most likely under prepared conditions!!!

Is there a social origin of good ideas?

Of course! People who live in the intersection of social worlds are at higher risk of having good ideas.
Ways of thinking and behaving are more homogenous within than between groups, so people connected to otherwise segregated groups are more likely to be familiar with alternative ways of thinking and behaving — which gives them the option of selecting and synthesizing alternatives.
Which mean = original ways of thinking and more likely to have good ideas!

The so called Information Brokers: People whose networks span structural holes (empty social spaces between different social groups) have early access to diverse , often contradictory, information and interpretations which gives them a competitive advantage in delivering good ideas.

Richard Florida’s basic thesis is that the economy is transforming, and creativity is to the 21 st century what the ability to push a plow was to the 18 th century. Creative occupations are growing and firms now orient themselves to attract the creative. Employers now prod their hires onto greater bursts of inspiration. The urban lesson of Florida’s book is that cities that want to succeed must aim at attracting the creative types who are, Florida argues, the wave of the future.

Creativity

Read over the following 32 human traits and check or mark the ones you believe are you at work or school, if you are not working full-time. You may choose as many or as few as you want. Some definitions are provided for words that are often mis-understood or may be unfamiliar to you.

1. sensitive

Being sensitive helps creativeness in many ways:
a. it helps with awareness of problems, known & unknown
b. it helps people sense things easier
c. it helps to cause people to care and commit themselves to challenges or causes.

2. not motivated by money

As important as money is in most societies or economies it is not a driving force for a creative person. Generally they have an intuitive sense of the amount of money they basically need and once that need is fulfilled then money stops affecting or driving them.

3. sense of destiny

Intuitively creative people know that they have a purpose, a destiny or they realize that they can choose or create one to drive them to reach greater heights of skill, ability, or talent.

4. adaptable

Without the ability to adapt people could not become creative. But rather than adapt to something they choose to adapt things to suit them, their needs or the goals they are striving towards.

5. tolerant of ambiguity

Two or more things or ideas being right at the same time challenges the thinking of a creative person. They love to be ambiguous to challenge other people and ideas. Ambiguity helps them see things from many different perspectives all at the same time.

6. observant

Creative people constantly are using their senses: consciously, sub-consciously and unconsciously, even non-consciously.

7. perceive world differently

Thoreau talked about people drumming to a different drum beat. Creative people thrive on multiple ways of perceiving: seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, tasting, sensing things. These different perspectives open up their minds to unlimited possibilities.

8. see possibilities

Average people, people who dont believe they are creative, people who are fearful or resistant to creativeness or creative thinking prefer to work within limits with limited possibilities. Creative people love to see many, even infinite possibilities in most situations or challenges.

9. question asker

Creative people, especially highly creatives, probably came out of their mothers wombs asking questions. Its in their nature to question. Question yes, not actually criticize. Their questioning nature often mistakenly appears as criticism when it is simply questioning, exploring, examining, playing with things as they are or might be.

10. can synthesize correctly often intuitively

This is the ability to see the whole picture, see patterns, grasp solutions with only a few pieces, even with major pieces missing. Creative people trust their intuition, even if it isnt right 100% of the time.

11. able to fantasize

Stop looking out the window Billy. Susie pay attention. Teachers, parents, and even friends often tell creative people this. Highly creative people love to wander through their own imaginary worlds. This is one of the major themes of the very popular cartoon strip Calvin and Hobbes. Both Calvin and Hobbes (Calvin’s alter ego?) are perpetual CRAYON BREAKERS.

12. flexible

Creative People are very flexible when they are playing with ideas. They love to look at things from multiple points of view and to produce piles of answers, maybes, almosts, when other people are content with the or an answer or solution.

13. fluent

It could be a door stop, a boat anchor, a weapon, a prop, a weight for holding down papers, etc., etc., etc. This is what a creative person would say about the possible uses of a brick.

14. imaginative

Creative people love to use their imagination to play to make seem real to experiment.

15. intuitive

The more creative a person is the more they tap their intuition skills; the abilities to see answers with minimum facts, to sense problems even when they arent happening.

16. original

Being original is a driving force for creative people. They thrive on it.

17. ingenious

Doing the unusual. Solving unsolvable problems. Thinking what has never been thought of before. These are all traits of a creative person that make them be ingenious at times.

18. energetic

Challenges, problems, new ideas once committed to by a creative person truly excite them and provide them with seeming unlimited amounts of energy; such as Sherlock Holmes once he grasps a sense of the mystery.

19. sense of humor

Laughter and creativity truly go together. Many experts believe that creativity cant occur without a touch of humor believing that seriousness tends to squelch creativeness or creative thinking.

20. self-actualizing

The psychologist Abraham Maslow created this term in the 1960s representing the ultimate motivator of people the need or desire to be all you can be, to be what you were meant to be.

21. self-disciplined

This is one trait that appears to be ambiguous in highly creative people. They can appear disorganized, chaotic at times while at the same time they are highly self-disciplined. At the same time the greatly resist the discipline of other people who are not of like creative mind.

22. self-knowledgeable

During my life I have read biographies and biographic sketches or over 4,000 people, mostly considered to be the highest of the highly creatives in their respective fields. One of the few things they had in common is that they all kept some form of journal and were constantly striving to better understand themselves.

23. specific interests

This is still another ambiguous trait of creative people. They appear on the surface to be interested in everything, while at the same time they have very specific interests that they commit their true energies and efforts to. By being willing to be exposed to seemingly unlimited interests they discover more about their particular specific interests.

24. divergent thinker

Creative people love to diverge from the norm, to look at things from multiple positions, to challenge anything that exists. Because of this they are seen at times to be off-key, deviant, atypical, irregular, or uncharacteristic.

25. curious

Like the Cheshire Cat of Alice in Wonderland, creative people are continuously curious, often child-like.

26. open-ended

In order to explore many possibilities creative people tend to stay open-ended about answers or solutions until many have been produced.

27. independent

Creative people crave and require a high degree of independence, resist dependence but often can thrive on beneficial inter-dependence.

28. severely critical

Yes creative people challenge most everything, every idea, every rule. They challenge, challenge, and challenge some more to the point that most other people see their challenging as severe criticism

29. non-conforming

Conforming is the antithesis, the opposite of creativeness and in order to be creative, creative people must be non-conforming and go against the norm, swim up stream.

30. confident

This is another ambiguous trait in creative people. When they are at their most creative they are extremely confident. When they are in a stage of frustration when nothing seems to be working they often lack confidence. After much positive experience they begin to trust themselves and know that they will become depressed, frustrated nearly devastated but their internal sub-conscious confidence keeps them moving or at least floating until they experience or discover an aha! (a breakthrough idea or piece of information)

31. risk taker

This trait is a general mis-understanding of many non-creative people or people who fear the creativeness of creative people. Highly creative people are not really risktakers because they do not see what they are doing as a risk. They simply see it as a possible solution or path towards a solution. They have other possible solutions, often many others in their head or their notes to use if a particular idea or solution does work. As Thomas Edison once said when asked how it felt to have failed nearly 7,000 times trying to discover the best filament for an incandescent light bulb, those are not failures, they are solutions to problems I havent started working on yet.

32. persistent

Charles Goodyear (discover & inventor of vulcanized rubber) and Chester Carlson (inventor of electrostatic copying, the Xerox process: xerography) are two of the best examples of this trait in creative people. Both of them worked over 30 years trying to make a solution they discovered work. Creative people do not give up on things that mean a lot to them.

The more of the 32 traits you choose the more creative you are or you have the potential to be or become. And the more potentially you are a CRAYON BREAKER.

How many of the traits did you first mark as fitting you? The more you mark or use the greater you will be able to capitalize on your natural creativeness. Some of them you may use at work, some at home, some at school. Ask yourself why? Are there some barriers that prevent you from using some of the traits anywhere you choose?

I have found that some times it is helpful to deliberately practice particular traits to release my creativeness when I am feeling stale, dull, or blocked. We all experience creative block at times. The causes may be situational, physical, emotional, mental, relational or even undefinable.

Social Networks

A social network is a social structure between actors, mostly individuals or organizations. It indicates the ways in which they are connected through various social familiarities ranging from casual acquaintance to close familial bonds. The term was first coined in 1954 by J. A. Barnes (in: Class and Committees in a Norwegian Island Parish, “Human Relations”).

According to this science society is just the sum of all connections and it can be studied as nodes and ties.

Can we agree with this notion, that the quantity and quality of our ties are more relevant than the content of our behaviour?

The shape of the social network helps determine a network’s usefulness to its individuals. Smaller, tighter networks can be less useful to their members than networks with lots of loose connections, the so called weak ties to individuals outside the main network. More “open” networks, with many weak ties and social connections, are more likely to introduce new ideas and opportunities to their members than closed networks with many redundant ties.

In other words, a group of friends who only do things with each other already share the same knowledge and opportunities.
A group of individuals with connections to other social worlds is likely to have access to a wider range of information. It is better for individual success to have connections to a variety of networks rather than many connections within a single network.

Social capital refers to the relationship between individuals, social networks and reciprocal norms applied within the network.

Social Interaction

Is the process by which we act and react in relation to those around us
We can say they are events in which people attach meaning to a situation, interpret what others are saying, and respond accordingly.

Because individuals are capable of creative action, they continuously shape reality through decisions.
Perceived reality is not a fixed statement, it is rather created through human interaction.

Interaction depends on the relationship between what we express in words and what we convey through numerous other forms of communication.

Each languages the product of a specific community and its history, its shared experiences and sensibilities.

Roles are socially defined expectations that a person having a given status, or social position, follows.
Social life can be seen as played out by actors on a stage, or on many stages as much as are our roles we play.

The Power of the Context

The Stanford prison experiment was a landmark psychological study of the human response to captivity, in particular, to the real world circumstances of prison life, and the effects of imposed social roles on behavior. It was conducted in 1971 by a team of researchers led by Philip Zimbardo of Stanford University. Volunteers played the roles of guards and prisoners and lived in a mock prison built in the basement of the Stanford psychology building. However, the experiment quickly got out of hand and was ended early.
Ethical concerns surrounding the famous experiment often draw comparisons to the Milgram experiment, which was conducted in 1963 at Yale University by Stanley Milgram, Zimbardo’s former high school friend.

For the whole experiment here

Culture & Society

Culture refers to the ways of life of members of a given society, or a group within a society.
Society is a system of interrelationships, which connects individuals together.
All societies are united by the fact that their members are organized in structured social relationships according to a broad and unique culture.
Culture says something about how people live, how they behave. It includes how they dress, how they consume, how they work, how they relate themselves towards family, religion and leisure.
What is identity? Is there a social definition for personal identity? And what is changing in our definition of our own identity? Traditional identity was mostly inherited, the contemporary individual defines his/her identity by his/her own, by choosing style, culture, professional goals. It is much more a cultural definition rather than a definition of origin.

Stereotyping: Basing our predictions on the role a person plays is helpful. It saves us time and energy and facilitates communication. Making assumptions about a person based on the role he/she occupies, unavoidable though it may be, comes close to stereotyping.

What is public opinion?

How can a minority influence a majority? Serge Moscivici a sociologist did a very interesting research about minority influence, he claimed: “A minority …. can … influence subjects to revise the very basis of their judgements, while a majority can make them almost all accept its point of view. In other words, majority influence works on the surface while minority influence has deep-lying effects”
Do you agree?

Social Research

It is a matter of sociological research to go beyond surface-level understandings of ordinary life.
To achieve best results in social research we must know the most useful methods to apply in a given study, and how best to analyse the results.
First empirical investigations: observe and collect data about how things occur.
After theoretical questions: interpretation of facts and data and developing a theoretical model.
One of the main problem to face doing social research is the analysis between cause and effect.
A causal relationship between two events or situations is an association in which one event or situation produces another.

Research Methods.

Qualitative. It’s aim is the subjective understanding of things. It lacks generalization. It’s mainly in depth-study.
[example of questionnaire]
Quantitative. It’s concerned with statistical data and trends, it analysis correlation and causes among large number of individuals. It can generalize theories and patterns.

Practical use of social research:

In social sciences, in marketing, in politics, in communication, in economy.

Example for applied research in: economy and social trends, media landscape.

What is sociology

Historical reasons for the development of sociology:
-Age of Enlightenment
Cultural change

-French Revolution
Political development

-Industrial Revolution
Socio – economic change

The causes for social change differ, different thinkers see different causes.

Durkheim: social facts
Marx: economy  and economic relations. Class struggle –> communism
Weber: culture, religion influences personal attitude

Welcome to our blog!

Hello, welcome to our sociology blog.

This will be our dashboard, our conversation table.

Here I will introduce next week’s lecture. Every comment is welcome.

This is the programme of this year’s course:

•

Lesson 1 and 2: a brief introduction and history.
Lesson 3: Culture and society.
Lesson 4: Globalization.
Lesson 5: Personal interaction.
Lesson 6: Sociology of groups.
Lesson 7: Social networks.
Lesson 8: Creativity.
Lesson 9: Consumption.
Lesson 10: Communication.
Lesson 11-12: Media studies and the Internet.

And what about the final evaluation??

I will judge your commitment, attendance and of course the final exam.

The final written work, will be: some multiple choice answers and some open questions.