An investigation of the effect of social class and sex on creativity and its associated personality factors

Abstract

The ability to be creative appears to be as much a reflection of aspects of the individual's personality as it is a reflection of his cognitive abilities. It was hoped to show in this investigation that both the social class and the sex of the individual would affect the development of the creative ability in that the child rearing practices which would affect both cognitive and personality attributes would differ between middle and working classes and according to the sex of the child being reared. Five creativity tests were given to 35 boys and 44 girls from both middle and working classes. The tests used were the Uses, Incomplete Designs, Circles, Tell a Story and Make a Picture tests. (The latter was specially designed for this research.) Correlations of these measures with intelligence and with each other indicated that creativity was not closely related to intelligence scores nor were the creativity scores related to each other.Social class was found to be unrelated to the creativity scores. However, boys were seen to gain significantly higher scores than girls on the verbal creativity test (Uses). The personality correlates investigated were1. "openness to experience" as measured by (a) "coping" behaviour (Sentence Completion Test), (b) expression of aggression in a Sentence Completion Test and a Story Test;(c) a questionnaire; (d) recall of emotionally arousing material.2. the ability to tolerate ambiguity. 3. breadth of categorising behaviour.These measures varied in their degree of relationship to creativity and there were distinct sex differences in the relationship of these measures to creativity. Overall expression of aggression and breadth of categorising proved to be the most useful personality measures in predicting creativity.The children's view of their parents' permissiveness was investigated, but this did not appear to foe related to the creativity measures or to the personality variables. There appeared to be no sex or class differences either.