Is relational theory a better answer to the psychology of creativity in the lights of cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural approaches?

This lead article attempts to challenge the five prevalent dichotomies in the psychology of creativity: individuals versus society, Big C versus little c, evolutionary versus revolutionary, domain generality versus domain specificity, and product versus process. They may obscure the nature and dynamic of creativity by underestimating the way we measure creativity and limiting the aspiration to develop creative potentials. To overcome these limitations, a new relational perspective, rooted in Vygotsky and Dewey’s theory of aesthetics, is proposed to re-conceptualize creativity and to re-examine the developmental trajectory of creativity. It looks into how individual creativity relates to a culture and a society, how Big C achievement connects to everyday creativity, how evolutionary creativity associates with revolutionary creativity, how domain general and domain specific creativity interacts with each other, and how the creative product implicates the creative process. In this commentary, we will first have a critical analysis to these five dichotomies of creativity and then we will discuss how the relational perspective offers and extends a cross-disciplinary and intercultural approach to the study of creativity.