Sure, I'm Creative—But Not in Mathematics!: Self-Reported Creativity in Diverse Domains

The degree to which creativity is domain-specific or domain-general remains hotly contested, but there is at least one area of agreement: people have different creativity profiles. In this study, we asked 241 students to give self-ratings of their creativity in different domains. These ratings were then studied for inter-correlations. We also examined how such self-assessments in diverse domains relate to other measures of cognitive ability and to creativity as measured with a personality scale. In general, if students viewed themselves as generally creative, they also viewed themselves as creative in different areas. The only area that was not correlated with general creativity ratings was mathematics.