Incentive Effects in Children's Creativity

WARD, WILLIAM C.; KOGAN, NATHAN; and PANKOVE, ETHEL. Incentive Effects in Children's Creativity. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1972, 43, 669-676. The effect of a concrete incentive on children's ideational productivity was examined. Following baseline assessment on the first 2 of 4 creativity tasks, the 191 Ss were randomly assigned to control and incentive conditions, the most important involving the offer of a penny for each response. Reliability, intertask generality, and separation from IQ in the present low SES sample were highly comparable to findings on middle-class children. Incentives increased the number of ideas relative to controls but did not affect the relative ordering of individuals. These data provide evidence for the situational invariance of individual differences in creativity in children, and for the greater importance of capacity than of motivational variables in accounting for such differences.