BELIEFS & CREATIVITY
Why it’s important to recognise that creative identity is (just) a belief
Welcome!
If you’ve been with us from the start, you will remember that:
Creativity is simply the act of bringing something into being, and we’re all doing it every single day.
Every single human being is creative, in varying degrees – it’s an evolutionary adaptation.
Humiliation is the nemesis of creativity, and we are programmed to avoid it.
There are many ways to rob humiliation of its power, one of the most powerful being resilience.
Creative identity is the extent to which we consider creativity to be an important part of who we are.
The extent to which we believe we are creative directly impacts our creative expression.
When we believe we are creative, we find opportunities to reinforce this aspect of our identity.
Having a growth mindset is a strong foundation for lifelong creativity.
All of these key points are essentially beliefs. If we don’t believe ourselves to be creative, or feel that our creative identity is a bit wobbly at a moment in time, it would be good to understand where beliefs come from and what we can do to change those that are limiting our ability to realise our full potential.
To get started, here’s another story from one of my research participants, the COVID Artist.
Losing my creativity
I believe that creativity is one of those things that we have as we grow up. Then you get to like our age, kind of like college and high school age, and your outlook changes. You understand that you need to get a job. You need a house to live in. You need to make money. If you don’t make money, you’re gonna be poor. It kind of kills your creativity a bit.
Creative activity dies when you become a teenager.
There are certain things that I struggle with, like believing in myself, and believing in other people and what they say to you. If they’ve said something negative, even if it’s a joke, you take it really hard. But then you won’t believe them when they tell you you’re doing really well. We’re so quick to criticise ourselves and think we’re not doing well enough, because there are always people who are doing better than us. You’re always thinking, “I want to talk like this. I want my exam to be like that. I wish I had the grade that they’ve got.”
For eight years or more, I didn’t look in the mirror and say, “You can’t wear that. That looks stupid, or you look funny.” You know, like, you don’t think about things like that. You don’t think about that when you’re younger, because no one ever says anything to you. No one’s ever told you, “Your face looks funny.” No one ever said, “Your outfit looks weird.” You never looked at someone across the street and thought, “Why are they looking at me like that? Are they talking about me? Are the people behind me laughing at me? Have I got something stuck to me, like?” It’s all part of growing up, and you come into the adult world, and I feel like creativity can be kind of linked to the way you view yourself. Because if you are very creative, and you’re really in touch with your creativity, it becomes part of your self-image. And you’re about being yourself because you’re just completely confident, and you’re okay with it.
When you start to lose creativity as you get older, you start to develop a sort of self-hatred for yourself. There are certain things I never would have said to myself when I was like eight or nine years old that I probably say to myself all the time now. I grew up being taller than everyone else, like, everyone else was always really small, and I was always really tall. I used to get picked out of the crowd for it. It didn’t make me sad at the time, but it does now. I was getting picked out because I was tall, and that made me look different.
There’s such pressure to be something other than what you are, like, there’s such pressure to be fit for boys, and such pressures to be a certain weight, or look a certain way, and do certain things. With girls, you have to have the perfect body, be skinny, and dress in a certain way. There’s all this pressure now about what you should look like.
I think as you get older, you start realising this, and also that everyone goes along with this, even if they say they don’t. It’s difficult to say where this pressure comes from. It just comes from all around. It comes from what you perceive other people might be thinking about you. And you take certain comments, and you turn them into something they’re not, comments like, “Oh, that really suits you for your size.” They might not have meant it how you took it, but if the comments are about something where you think you have an issue, you turn it into something else. I still do that.
For some things, the slightest comment could make me go off, although perhaps not as much nowadays. But it’s definitely one of those things when you lie there at night, trying to fall asleep, you start overthinking. “Oh, why did they say that?” It can be the littlest of things. I relate that to creativity in a way, because when you’re a kid, you just don’t care about that sort of stuff. It’s just not even a thought, you don’t even recognise it. You’re too busy, like, playing and messing about. I sometimes think about all the things I did as a kid, very creative things in a musical and art sense. Then I grew up, I left that bit of me behind, or it got replaced by things that shouldn’t be that important. Yeah, it’s sad. (by the COVID Artist).
What conclusions can we draw from this story?
As always, I’ll let you draw your own conclusions from this story. It just made me sad, really sad, and it made me realise that not expressing our innate creativity is something we come to learn from difficult experiences. We started out knowing we were creative, without knowing that we knew this. Then, as a result of a whole host of influences, some come to believe they aren’t creative. This is an important perspective. If we believed we were creative, and then we believed we weren’t, this means we can once again believe we are creative. These are just beliefs. They are not set in stone, although they often feel that way. They are things we created (or allowed to come into being), and they are therefore things we can uncreate and refashion and return ourselves to our natural state as innately creative beings. So, let’s talk beliefs.
What are beliefs?
Both the Oxford English Dictionary and the APA Online Dictionary confirm that a belief is our acceptance that something exists or is true, and suggest that proof is not a necessary condition. Evidence, or at least our interpretation of that information, then strengthens that belief. There was a time when everyone believed the world was flat. When contradictory evidence became undeniable, we came to believe that the world was round. (I understand the correct term is an oblate spheroid - try getting that into a sentence before lunchtime!)
Beliefs can range from deep convictions to simple opinions. They are mental representations or cognitive models of how we expect the world to be and work, and how the things in it should behave and relate. They can be occurrent, that is, currently in our minds, or dispositional, held in the background. They are often deeply ingrained and form a dimension of our identity, who we consider ourselves to be. This makes change challenging.
Why do we have beliefs?
Beliefs help us navigate the world, develop expectations, make sense of experiences, and facilitate efficient decision-making and behaviour. Beliefs act as cognitive, energy-saving shortcuts, providing a framework for action, fostering social cohesion through shared values, and offering a sense of meaning, purpose, and psychological security. They act as templates for learning and navigation. They help to create a sense of identity and belonging. They encompass social norms, helping us to successfully manage social interaction. They give form to our values. They save us from harm. They help us formulate and strive for aspirations, goals, and ambitions. I could go on... In short, they enable us to live life. So, pretty important!
From the perspective of creative expression and creative identity, if we believe creativity has value, we will likely indulge in creative expression and come to believe we are creative. So, creative identity is a belief and, like all beliefs, open to adaptation.
How do beliefs come into being?
James Alcock is a professor emeritus of psychology at York University, Toronto, Canada, and the architect of a concept he calls the belief engine.It describes the brain’s automatic cognitive processes that are constantly assimilating sensory information, comparing it with memory, and generating or maintaining beliefs that enable us to make sense of the world. It functions as a pattern-seeking, meaning-making mechanism. It creates and maintains beliefs that underpin our version of ‘reality’, which overlays a more general version of ‘reality’. It often prioritises coherence over objective truth, which means that no matter how hard we believe something, it may not necessarily be true. Much of the belief engine’s activity happens outside of conscious awareness. Indeed, the filters through which this information passes are such that they may ignore that which is contradictory and amplify that which is confirmatory. Biased information gathering can then reinforce notions that are, from another’s perspective, patently untrue. In short, accepting something as true doesn’t make it so. And since beliefs are constructed, they can be deconstructed and reconstructed if there is sufficient will.
The belief engine comprises seven components. The function of the learning unit is to learn quickly from the association of two significant events. Professor Alcock offers the example of touching a hot stove and feeling pain. This learning generates a specific belief that hot stoves are to be treated with caution, which generalises to the belief about being wary of anything hot. However, evolution selects for reproductive success rather than reason or truth, which means that it cannot always be relied upon to be correct. The critical thinking unit is acquired through experience and explicit learning. It tests the output from the learning unit and attempts to ground it in reason and logic. The yearning unit creates beliefs around aspirations. The example he offers is that there is a general desire to reduce anxiety. Yearning unit beliefs, for example, the existence of life after death, might more effectively relieve anxiety about death than any rational beliefs. The input unit is just that, the means by which we receive information about our environment and make sense of it. It relies on prior beliefs about the value of received information. The emotional response unit governs our reaction to received experiential information. When a belief is constructed around an event that involved heightened arousal, a stronger belief can be laid down alongside a stronger memory. When similar events occur in the future, similar emotions are triggered, and beliefs are reinforced. The memory unit is again just that. It is where experience and its resultant beliefs reside. However, memory is a constructive process influenced by prior beliefs, values, and biases rather than a replica of actual events. Again, it cannot necessarily be trusted to provide an accurate record. Finally, the environmental feedback unit helps us function effectively in the ‘real’ world. When we act in accordance with a prior belief and the result broadly matches expectations, the belief is reinforced. Unanticipated consequences may cause us to question existing beliefs. Alternatively, we might challenge our interpretation and sustain the belief.
All in all, the belief engine is a very sophisticated piece of kit, but Professor Alcock suggests that it is inherently susceptible to what he calls magical thinking, where we put 2 and 2 together and get 5, and where we fervently believe something that might actually be nonsensical. This is an important point on which to leave the notion of the belief engine because it reminds us that an alternative definition of a belief is something we accept as true at this moment but which we might decide to reconsider in the future.
By the bye, I italicised ‘reality’ because it is itself the subject of vigorous ongoing debate about beliefs – just what exactly is reality? I was asked this question in my viva because I emphasised the importance of installing an authentic definition of creativity, rather than the corrupted version adopted within the psychology of creativity. I recognised the question for the black hole that it threatened to be, indicated that I had put philosophical considerations outside the scope of my research, and looked pointedly at my other examiner for the next question. Close call!
Also by the bye, constructing beliefs is an act of creativity. They didn’t exist beforehand, and now they do. They have been brought into being and are thus, by definition, creative.
Five perspectives on changing our beliefs
From a psychological perspective, adopting and changing beliefs centres on how we evaluate and interpret new experiences and information. It is a quasi-economic transaction where we compare the potential value and utility of embracing a new belief or modifying an existing belief against retaining the old one. From a sociological perspective, beliefs serve to maintain social order, prevailing social norms, and the ongoing equilibrium and predictability of society. This is what socialisation is designed to do. Here are five perspectives on changing beliefs.
The economic perspective came to prominence in the 18th century. Mathematician Daniel Bernoulli suggested that we are all fundamentally risk-averse. He proposed the concept of expected utility, where the benefit of taking a particular action, when the outcome is uncertain, is its subjective value rather than its expected monetary value. Jeremy Bentham, the father of the utilitarian movement, considered that the quest for pleasure and the avoidance of pain lay at the heart of our assessments of utility. (Oh, how I hated political philosophy at university!) This makes the adoption and modification of beliefs a conscious, reasoned decision based on net value. Value can be objectively measured as well as subjectively felt. In other words, we are more likely to adopt a new belief or modify an existing one when we feel the outcome takes us to a better position.
Renowned American psychologist Leon Festinger proposed the notion of cognitive dissonance, the unpleasant mental and emotional state that occurs when we simultaneously hold two or more contradictory beliefs, or when our actions don’t reconcile with our beliefs. In this state, we are highly aware of it and strongly of the need to do something about it. For instance, although I say we’re all creative, some readers might believe the complete opposite. If my argument has been persuasive, this might generate feelings of discomfort or dissonance. Relief can only come from ditching one belief or the other.
Social psychologist Daryl Bem developed his self-perception theory, in part to offer an alternative to cognitive dissonance. He suggests that we develop beliefs by considering our own past behaviours and trying to determine what they say about us. For example, perhaps some of us considered our past creative failures and constructed the belief that we are not remotely creative. This is the same process that we use to infer beliefs about other people.
British philosopher Jonathan Glover introduced the idea of belief systems theory. It suggests that beliefs do not exist in isolation. They are always part of a larger system of beliefs, and individual beliefs must be considered in this context. This means we cannot adopt a new belief or change an existing one by focusing solely on that one belief. We have to consider it in relation to associated beliefs. This feels particularly significant from the perspective of creative identity. Believing that we are creative is just one aspect of a wider belief system associated with creative expression. For instance, if we are to believe we are creative, we may also need to believe that we can generate ideas, challenge convention, and make things happen.
Finally, Herbert Kelman developed the idea of social influence, where we adjust our beliefs (and behaviours) to ensure they are consistent with the social spaces we occupy and the beliefs of the influential people within them. He suggested three states. Compliance is where we seem to agree with the beliefs of others but actually keep quiet about what we actually believe. Identification is where we are influenced by someone we consider personally significant, such as a parent or role model. Internalisation is where we unconditionally assimilate beliefs, adopt them as our own, and demonstrate both public and private agreement. My aspiration is that everyone will internalise the belief that we are all creative!
Beliefs and creativity
So, what does all this mean for beliefs and creativity? Well, if we ever find ourselves saying, or thinking, “I’m not creative,” it’s important to recognise that this is a belief, not a fact. You might think I’m splitting hairs here. However, this is an important distinction. A belief, as we noted earlier, is something we accept as being true. When the belief becomes deeply ingrained from a personal perspective, it becomes self-evident and may quietly appear to have become a fact. Since beliefs guide thoughts and behaviours, we might easily find ourselves avoiding what we see as creative expression or keeping quiet about a great idea (not recognising that most everything we do is creative in one way or another). And because beliefs often operate outside conscious awareness, we might not even realise we no longer notice creative opportunities. However, Professor Alcock confirms that our belief engine is not infallible. It prefers coherence to truth. The moment we recognise, and then accept, that the ‘I’m not creative’ belief is just that, a belief, is the moment we can do something about changing it. That belief will almost certainly be part of a wider belief system and, like Jenga, we can progressively remove the bricks until the entire edifice crumbles. We can replace that self-limiting belief with one that enables: ‘I am creative.’ And we can set about building a new belief system with a solid creative identity at its heart.
What does this mean in practical terms?
I’m afraid I’m going to have to be a tease again and leave potential answers to this question to the next post. Rest assured, however, I have lots of very practical ideas to share. Suffice to say that changing our beliefs is both easier and harder than I make it sound. Easier because, on the surface of it, changing a belief is little more than changing the language we use when we talk to ourselves. Harder because beliefs get comfortable when they take up residence, and eviction takes conviction.
Key takeaways
Beliefs about personal creativity come under sustained attack during our teenage years, with lifelong consequences.
A belief is simply something we hold to be true (whether it is or not).
Beliefs are mental models that help us navigate the physical and social world we inhabit.
The belief engine is neural hardware and software that converts received information into beliefs.
It may be sophisticated and clever, but it is prone to making mistakes, resulting in magical thinking.
Expected utility is one basis for belief construction.
Cognitive dissonance encourages us to address any contradictory beliefs we might hold.
Interpretation of past behaviour is another basis for belief construction.
Beliefs do not sit in isolation – they form part of a broader, coherent belief system.
There is a strong social influence to adopt the beliefs of those with whom we share a social space.
Changing beliefs is simultaneously straightforward and challenging.
Building a solid creative identity starts with a single belief: I am creative!
Call to action
Think of a time when you changed a belief and reflect on what you did, the challenges you faced and overcame, how it made you feel, and what the outcome was. You can do this in your head, but once again, I would recommend recording your thoughts as part of your journey to build a stronger creative identity
Next time
We’ll look at some of the practical things you can do to change beliefs that might be standing in the way of you strengthening your creative identity and realising your full potential in life, work, and play. Until then, here’s a quick story from my own experience.
Four small words
My first foray into cross-country running was in my first year of secondary school. I was fairly light on my feet when I was a lad and managed to come third on my first outing around The Common. The winner, a boy called James, took an early lead and then outdistanced the rest of the field, but not before I was able to appreciate the grace and economy with which he ran. “I’ll never be that good,” I thought. I didn’t know it at the time, but that was the start of the belief construction process. From Professor Alcock’s perspective, my learning unit associated two facts, the experience of running and the outcome of coming third, and developed the beginnings of a belief: “I’ll never be as good as James.”
Another couple of runs, with similar outcomes, a second and another third, and the belief was reinforced. I don’t remember running being important to me at the time, but I guess it was. Then came the fourth outing. James was a bit under the weather that day – he had a cold or something, but he wasn’t bad enough to stay off school. This time, instead of tearing away into the distance, he eked out a short lead but only enough that I spent the entire run studying his technique from relatively close quarters. I didn’t know then that my default is in the growth mindset territory. In the bus on the way home that evening, I organised the gathered information and realised there were a series of things I might do to change my running style, and the self-limiting belief was not so hard-wired as to resist my imagination creating pictures of me racing ahead of James. Imagine my disappointment when, next run, I still came second. However, it was a close-run thing. I forced James to sprint the last 50 yards or so, and he wasn’t under the weather this time.
Before the next run, as we stood shivering in the late October afternoon waiting for the starting whistle, I closed my eyes and saw myself putting an early lead on James, maintaining that distance, and coming home in first place. “I can do this,” I thought to myself. And so it was. From there, I never looked back. The winning margin increased incrementally with each run. And a new belief began to percolate into my consciousness: I am a runner. Four small words. After all these years, the belief remains, although my body has long since stopped obeying instructions!
That’s it for this week. Thanks for reading. Please recommend and share, and remember:
A solid creative identity is all you need to be creative for the rest of your life.
Till next time, be bold!
Alisdair.
Notes
Alcock on beliefs: https://www.waterstones.com/book/belief/james-e-alcock/9781633884038
Belief Engine: https://skepticalinquirer.org/1995/05/the-belief-engine
Bem on self-perception: https://doi.org/10.1016/0022-1031(65)90026-0
Bentham on the quest for pleasure: ISBN 9781978106222
Bernoulli on risk aversion: https://doi.org/10.2307/1909829
Festinger on cognitive dissonance. ISBN 978-0804709118
Glover on belief systems: https://jonathanglover.org/conflicts/ii-belief-systems
Goldman on occurrent and dispositional beliefs: https://archive.org/details/theoryofhumanact0000gold
Kelman on social influence: https://web.archive.org/web/20200306055009/https://scholar.harvard.edu/hckelman/files/Compliance_identification_and_internalization.pdf
We Are Our Beliefs: https://www.psychologytoday.com/sg/blog/belief/201802/we-are-our-beliefs