Novelty and Usefulness Are Not Enough: What Matters More Is Creative Quality

Creativity is typically evaluated in terms of novelty and usefulness or effectiveness. I argue in this essay that these bases of evaluation are insufficient for meeting the challenges of contemporary life. Although creativity researchers and teachers of creativity once may have hoped that developing creativity would lead to intellectual integrity and societally positive outcomes, too often creativity today is based on lack of intellectual integrity and leads to negative and sometimes societally devastating outcomes. Creativity may help people to achieve self-actualization and good outcomes for themselves, but too often in current times, these outcomes are being achieved at the expense of other people’s well-being and even the other people’s lives. I suggest that creativity needs to be evaluated not only for novelty and usefulness, but also for creative quality in terms of creative integrity (internal coherence of ideas and external correspondence to reality) and positivity.