Abstract:
This study used the new HEXACO personality inventory to explore personality differences in creative generation, particularly in connection with the new Honesty-Humility (HH) dimension, which has shown some promising connections with creativity in previous literature and may explain some contradictory results that have appeared in the Five Factor Model (FFM) creativity research with regards to the Agreeableness (A) subtrait, from which HH is derived. These avenues were explored through creative-generation story tasks judged by the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) program and human coders, as well as self-report (Creative Behavior Inventory) and psychometric (Guilford's Alternate Uses) measures. Participants were also given the full HEXACO personality inventory. Multiple regression analyses were conducted to look specifically at the patterns of correlation among LIWC ratings and human coding of participants’ stories, the CBI and AUT, and HEXACO trait scores, with a special concern for HH and A. In addition to the expected connections between Openness to Experience and all three measures of creativity, the analyses also showed the hypothesized negative connections between the AUT and HH, and nonsignificant correlations between A and both AUT and rated creativity. Further consistencies and inconsistencies with the previous literature, and suggestions for future research in this area are discussed.
