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14 results in Cambridge Elements

Creative Agency Unbound

Creative Agency Unbound
  • Ronald A. Beghetto, Maciej Karwowski
  • Published online:
    30 September 2025
    Print publication:
    23 October 2025
  • Creative Agency Unbound explores how individuals transform creative potential into creative actions. Creative agency refers to the self-directed capacity to envision and enact meaningful changes within contextual constraints. This Element introduces the updated Creative Behavior as Agentic Action (CBAA) model, explaining four key decision points that shape creative engagement: Can I do this creatively? (creative confidence), Should I do this creatively? (creative centrality), Will I do this creatively? (creative risk-taking), and How will I do this creatively? (creative self-regulation). Each decision and its related self-belief is discussed in successive sections, integrating theory, research, and practical applications to illustrate how creative self-beliefs motivate creative behaviors. This Element serves as a foundational resource for those seeking to understand, study, and foster the transformation of creative potential into creative action.
The Imagination Pulse

The Imagination Pulse
  • From Flickers to Firestorms in Reading
  • Sarah Bro Trasmundi
  • Published online:
    08 August 2025
    Print publication:
    04 September 2025
  • This Element explores the transformative power of reading as a deeply imaginative, embodied process. It challenges conventional views of reading as mere decoding and argues that reading involves a dynamic interplay between perception, imagination, and the body. Drawing from ecological-embodied theories and cross-disciplinary insights, it introduces the concept of 'breaks' in reading – moments of pause, disruption, and reflection – as essential to fostering rich imaginative engagement. By focusing on multiscalar attention, pacemaking, and material engagement, the Element proposes a novel framework for understanding reading as an active, creative process that enhances cognitive and emotional depth. Through a cognitive ethnography of reading, the Element demonstrates how these imaginative breaks can cultivate more meaningful and sustained interactions with texts, offering insights for education and reading practices. Ultimately, the Element seeks to reimagine the role of reading in enhancing imaginative capacities and navigating today's complex social and global challenges.
Psychodrama

Psychodrama
  • A Creative Method to Survive and Thrive
  • Hod Orkibi
  • Published online:
    14 July 2025
    Print publication:
    07 August 2025
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  • This Element presents an integrated account of psychodrama theory, practice, and research. It begins by exploring psychodrama's psychosocial roots and emphasizes Jacob Levy Moreno's pioneering work. Core concepts such as spontaneity, creativity, adaptability, encounter, act-hunger, action insight, and act fulfillment are discussed in detail. This is followed by an overview of psychodrama practice, including session structure, core techniques, and a positive psychodrama intervention program. Five research designs for outcome studies are presented, along with key issues such as bias assessment, treatment fidelity, treatment differentiation, feasibility, and acceptability in psychodrama research. Change process research is reviewed in light of the latest evidence and methods, highlighting eleven therapeutic change factors in psychodrama and discussing concepts such as moderation, mediation, and mechanisms of change. The final section addresses future directions, including nonverbal synchrony and physiological and neurobiological pathways in psychodrama research. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Mechanisms of Change and Creativity in Nature and Culture

Mechanisms of Change and Creativity in Nature and Culture
  • Arne Dietrich
  • Published online:
    03 April 2025
    Print publication:
    03 April 2025
  • This Element is about change. Specifically, it's about the underlying mechanisms that cause change to happen, both in nature and in culture; what types there are, how they work, where they can be found, and when they come into play. The ultimate aim is to shed light on two barbed issues. First, what kind of system of change is culture and, second, what kind of change in that system counts as creativity; that is, what are the properties of the mechanisms of change when we explore unknown regions of the cultural realm. To that end, a novel theoretical framework is proposed that is based on the concept of a sightedness continuum. A sightedness framework for the mechanisms of change can integrate the three mechanisms causing gradual, adaptive, and cumulative change – evolution, learning, and development – into a single dimension and provide a clear view of how they cause change.
Narrative Creativity

Narrative Creativity
  • An Introduction to How and Why
  • Angus Fletcher, Mike Benveniste
  • Published online:
    21 January 2025
    Print publication:
    30 January 2025
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  • Narrative creativity is a new, neuroscience-based approach to innovation, problem solving, and resilience that has proved effective in business executives, scientists, engineers, doctors, and students as young as eight. This Element offers a concise introduction to narrative creativity's theory and practice. It distinguishes narrative creativity from ideation, divergent thinking, design thinking, brainstorming, and other current approaches to cultivating creativity. It traces the biological origins of narrative creativity and explains why narrative creativity will always be mechanically impossible for computer artificial intelligences. It provides practical exercises, developed and tested in hundreds of classrooms and businesses, and validated independently by the US Army, for improving narrative creativity. It explains how narrative creativity contributes to technological innovation, scientific progress, cultural growth, and psychological well-being, and it describes how narrative creativity can be assessed. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Outsight

Outsight
  • Restoring the Role of Objects in Creative Problem Solving
  • Frédéric Vallée-Tourangeau
  • Published online:
    09 January 2025
    Print publication:
    30 January 2025
    • Element
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  • The way we understand creativity in psychology is built on a fundamental asymmetry between people and objects: people have thoughts, intentions, and the ability to act, while objects lack these qualities. However, despite this distinction, objects that are created communicate with their creator. During the process of creation, objects being formed by the creator take on certain characteristics and behave in certain ways, resulting in a kind of conversation between the person working on solving a problem and the results physically produced. In essence, while the traditional view focuses on the person's thoughts and intentions as the driving force of creativity, the dialogue between the creative individual and the evolving product of their work is overlooked. This Element proposes a methodology and theoretical vocabulary that restore the role of objects in the dynamic unfolding of creative problem solving. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Landscapes of the Imagination

Landscapes of the Imagination
  • Gerald C. Cupchik
  • Published online:
    05 December 2024
    Print publication:
    30 January 2025
  • The idea that imagination is everywhere in our lives, and that reality is an illusion, may sound absurd to the concrete mind. This book will try to convince you that imagination manifests in different 'phases,' encompassing even the most fundamental ideas about what is real (ontology) and what is true (epistemology). It is present in the contents (e.g., images) and the acts (e.g., fantasy) of our minds. Imagination helps us remove barriers through conscious planning and finds ways to fulfill unconscious desires. The many words related to imagination in the English language are part of a unified web and share a “family resemblance.” The first section of this book deals with imagination in everyday life, the second focuses on aesthetic imagination, and the third discusses scholarly approaches that incorporate both imagination types. The fourth section proposes a unified model integrating the diverse ways that imagination is manifested in our culture.
Connective Creativity

Connective Creativity
  • What Art Can Teach Us about Collaboration
  • Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick, Gordon Hoople
  • Published online:
    29 November 2024
    Print publication:
    19 December 2024
  • The story we often tell about artists is fiction. We tend to imagine the starving artists toiling alone in their studio when, in fact, creativity and imagination are often relational and communal. Through interviews with artistic collectives and first-hand experience building large scale installations in public spaces and at art events like Burning Man, Choi-Fitzpatrick and Hoople take the reader behind the scenes of a rather different art world. Connective Creativity leverages these experiences to reveal what artists can teach us about collaboration and teamwork and focuses in particular on the importance of embracing playfulness, cultivating a bias for action, and nurturing a shared identity. This Element concludes with an invitation to apply lessons from the arts to promote connective creativity across all our endeavors, especially to the puzzle of how we can foster more connective creativity with other minds, including other artificial actors.
Design Thinking and Other Approaches

Design Thinking and Other Approaches
  • How Different Disciplines See, Think and Act
  • Nathan Crilly
  • Published online:
    10 June 2024
    Print publication:
    03 October 2024
  • Efforts to promote creativity often centre on encouraging people to engage in 'design thinking', 'systems thinking' and 'entrepreneurial thinking'. These different approaches are most often defined, taught and applied in mutual isolation, which has obscured what distinguishes them from each other, what they have in common and how they might be combined. These three approaches are also most often described in isolation from the approaches that characterize other disciplines, all of which are relevant to how problems are identified, framed and solved. These other approaches include 'computational thinking', 'engineering thinking', 'scientific thinking', 'evolutionary thinking', 'mathematical thinking', 'statistical thinking', 'geographical thinking', 'historical thinking', 'anthropological thinking' and many more. Examining these approaches as a set allows each of them to be better understood, and also reveals the connections and contrasts between them. Such comparisons provide the foundation for a more coordinated project to represent how different disciplinary approaches contribute to creative work.
Item Response Theory for Creativity Measurement

Item Response Theory for Creativity Measurement
  • Nils Myszkowski
  • Published online:
    16 February 2024
    Print publication:
    14 March 2024
  • Item-response theory (IRT) represents a key advance in measurement theory. Yet, it is largely absent from curricula, textbooks and popular statistical software, and often introduced through a subset of models. This Element, intended for creativity and innovation researchers, researchers-in-training, and anyone interested in how individual creativity might be measured, aims to provide 1) an overview of classical test theory (CTT) and its shortcomings in creativity measurement situations (e.g., fluency scores, consensual assessment technique, etc.); 2) an introduction to IRT and its core concepts, using a broad view of IRT that notably sees CTT models as particular cases of IRT; 3) a practical strategic approach to IRT modeling; 4) example applications of this strategy from creativity research and the associated advantages; and 5) ideas for future work that could advance how IRT could better benefit creativity research, as well as connections with other popular frameworks.
Visions and Decisions

Visions and Decisions
  • Imagination and Technique in Music Composition
  • Bruce Adolphe
  • Published online:
    26 January 2023
    Print publication:
    23 February 2023
  • This Element investigates the balance and interaction of imagination (visions) and technique (decisions) in the composition of music and includes current scientific research on dreams, the hypnagogic state, emotions, and feelings. It also includes thoughts of composers past and present, and examines how works start from visions in a range of music, comparing musical ideas and techniques to models in other creative disciplines. The Element elucidates aspects of musical discourse by imagining how Haydn, Mozart, and other composers would order falafel for takeout. This unorthodox approach emphasizes parallels between music and theater that are central to this Element.
Prophets at a Tangent

Prophets at a Tangent
  • How Art Shapes Social Imagination
  • Geoff Mulgan
  • Published online:
    25 January 2023
    Print publication:
    02 March 2023
  • This Element asks if the arts can help us imagine a better future society and economy, without deep social gulfs or ecological harm. It argues that at their best, the arts open up new ways of seeing and thinking. They can warn and prompt and connect us to a bigger sense of what we could be. But artists have lost their role as gods and prophets, partly as an effect of digital technologies and the ubiquity of artistic production, and partly as an effect of shifting values. Few recent books, films, artworks or exhibitions have helped us imagine how our world could solve its problems or how it might be better a generation or more from now. This Element argues that artists work best not as prophets of a new society but rather as 'prophets at a tangent'.
Slow Wonder

Slow Wonder
  • Letters on Imagination and Education
  • Peter O'Connor, Claudia Rozas Gómez
  • Published online:
    23 September 2022
    Print publication:
    27 October 2022
  • Slow wonder bears witness to the possibilities of the imagination. In a series of letters the authors playfully imagine alternatives to current orthodoxies that privilege technocratic approaches to education that have strangled discussion about what it might mean to make education good and right, or even beautiful. The authors position the imagination as a powerful site of resistance within education and academic life. They unpack their philosophical positionings through vignettes of their teaching practice, poetry written as reflective musings and discursive theoretical pieces, including letters they have written to others. They attempt to marry the poetic and the academic, the rational and the affective, to model a slow approach to wondering about the joy, beauty and possibilities of life. In this spirit, they contemplate new ways to think and live in education.
There's No Such Thing as Creativity

There's No Such Thing as Creativity
  • How Plato and 20th Century Psychology Have Misled Us
  • John Baer
  • Published online:
    10 June 2022
    Print publication:
    07 July 2022
  • Most people (including creativity researchers) act as if they believe that creativity is not simply a useful category or label but a real thing with its own essence (just as Plato would argue that an ideal triangle has an essence that is shared with all actual triangles). Most people (including creativity researchers) also believe that there is a set of general creativity-relevant skills that can be applied to most problems in ways that will lead to more creative outcomes. Creativity research now calls these beliefs into question. A domain-general misunderstanding of the nature of creativity-relevant skills and the equally mistaken belief that creativity exists independently of actual creative things and ideas have together hindered creativity theory, research, assessment, and training. A more domain-specific and nominalist understanding of creativity will free creativity researchers to make progress in areas where it is currently stymied.