The Consensual Assessment Technique (CAT), developed by Amabile [Amabile, T.M. (1982). Social psychology of creativity: A consensual assessment technique. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 43, 997–1013], is frequently used to evaluate the creativity of productions. Judgments obtained with CAT are usually reliable and valid. However, notable individual differences in judgment exist. This empirical study shows that creativity judgments for advertisements vary, depending on (1) the level of two underlying components of creativity — originality and appropriateness, (2) the creative ability of the judges, i.e. variations in their ability to be original, and finally, (3) instructions or training that they received about the topic of creativity assessment. Effects of advertisements' appropriateness and judges' ability to be original on individual differences in creativity judgments are discussed.
Researchers have tended recently to adopt a consensual definition of creativity which emphasizes two criteria: creativity is the capacity to realize a production which is new and, at the same time, adapted to the context (e.g., Amabile, 1996, Lubart, 1994 and Sternberg and Lubart, 1995). The novelty of a production is characterized by its original and unexpected nature. Adaptation has been conceived in terms of appropriateness (e.g., Runco and Charles, 1993 and Runco et al., 2005), usefulness, value (e.g., Ford, 1996), or resolution with respect to problem constraints (e.g., Besemer & Treffinger, 1981).
In spite of its multidimensional nature, creativity has been mostly assessed as a unidimensional construct (Sullivan & Ford, 2005). Since two decades, Amabile's Consensual Assessment Technique (CAT; Amabile, 1982, Amabile, 1996 and Hennessey and Amabile, 1999) has been commonly used to evaluate creativity of productions in different domains (e.g., Hickey, 2001, Baer et al., 2004, Dollinger et al., 2004 and Lee et al., 2005). For Amabile (1982), the procedure requires selecting appropriate judges, which have some experience with the domain of endeavor, and asking them to assess independently productions relative to one another. Judges should not be given any specific criteria for creativity assessment; on the contrary, they are asked to use their own subjective understanding. Despite the obvious success of CAT, further research is needed to understand what characteristics of the productions, the judgment task, and of the judges themselves, could influence creativity assessment (Amabile, 1996). The main objective of the current research is to investigate the extent to which individual differences in creativity ratings of advertisements are due, first, to judges' differential reliance on two underlying dimensions of creativity — originality and appropriateness — and the integration of these in a global judgment of creativity; second, to characteristics of the judges — e.g. variations in their personal creative ability— and third, to different instructions that judges received about the topic of creativity.
