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Group-Centered Societies Have Just as Much Creativity

What does culture have to do with creativity? The answer could be “a lot”. For decades, psychologists trying to understand the roots of creative imaginations have looked at the ways in which two different types of cultures can come to have an effect over its artistic and________output. Individualistic cultures encourage people to be unique and to________their own interests even if doing so comes at a cost to the group overall. Collectivistic cultures are based on relationships and duties to other people. These types of cultures often________the individual’s wants for the needs of those who are close to them or for those in their community.

Individualism has long been thought to have a creative________. Individualists________social convention, the logic goes, and that pushback supports innovation. For instance, around the world, individualistic cultures have more patents than collectivistic cultures do.________, a new study suggests that these ideas about culture and creativity could be off base. People in collectivistic cultures actually do better with a particular type of creative thinking than those in individualistic cultures. And the findings overall reveal the shortcomings of thinking about innovation too________.

The new work comes from comparing communities in different parts of China. Though it scores high, as a nation, on measures of cultural________, China’s 1.4 billion people are more than just a single culture. People from areas north of the Yangtze River tend to be more________, open to strangers and self-confident, whereas people along the river and farther south are often more inter-dependent, partial to friends over strangers and likely to try harder to________.

In the new creativity study, researchers investigated innovation with these two groups in mind. The team used a drawing test that had been created by psychologists. They gave kids a sheet of paper with just a few basic elements printed on it: some dots here, squiggles (弯曲的线条) there, and a rectangle that suggested a drawing frame. The children got 15 minutes to use the elements already on the page to draw whatever they wanted. They could get “adaptive creativity” points for doodling in ways that connected the squiggles and lines into an original and________image. In addition, a judge checked whether the children chose to incorporate a small shape that could be found just outside the rectangular. This element was easy to________, so those who included this outside-the-box detail could get points for “boundary-breaking creativity.”

The researchers gave the test to 683 middle school students from north and south of the Yangtze River. When the scientists got the scores back, they discovered that there were no differences in the children’s overall creativity. When they broke down the results into components, they found that students from collectivistic regions scored________in adaptive creativity while those from individualistic areas did better in boundary-breaking creativity.

The findings are also a warning against cultural chauvinism (极端民族主义). Western countries have tended to lead the way in innovation—at least as defined by the metrics (指标) we Westerners have created. Perhaps we have been________China’s adaptive creativity. For example, while the country may not have invented the assembly line, it is largely thanks to the________its people have made to this system that the country has such a thriving manufacturing sector today.