Method
Participants The same seven University of British
Columbia advanced undergraduate creative writing students
who participated in Study 2 also participated in Study 3.
They were highly familiar with each other’s writing, but
unfamiliar with each other’s art.
Materials Each creative writing student brought one piece
of covered art to the professor’s office. They were asked to
hide their signature and any other identifying feature. Before
the study, the paintings were examined to ensure that
signatures and other identifying features had been hidden.
Procedure The students were shown unsigned art done by
classmates. They were given a questionnaire and asked to
guess which classmate did which piece of art. As above, for
each answer they were also asked to state on a scale of 1-3
how certain they were that they had not encountered the
work before. If they had seen the piece before, or thought
they might have seen it before, their answer was not
included in the analysis. Less than 5% of scores were
discarded from the analysis.
Results
The mean proportion correct was .39 (SD = .27). The
proportion correct that would have been obtained on the
basis of random guesses is .17. This difference is
significant, t(6) = 2.2, p < 0.03, r = .67. Thus creative
writing students were able to identify above chance which
of their classmates created a given work in a domain other
than writing, specifically art.
Discussion and Conclusions
The experiments with artists and writers reported here
provide support for the hypothesis that different works by
the same creator exhibit a recognizable style or ‘voice’, and
that this recognizable quality even comes through in
different creative outlets. Art students were able to
distinguish significantly above chance which famous artists
created pieces of art they had not seen before. They also
correctly identified their classmates’ art significantly above
chance. Similarly, creative writing students correctly
identified significantly above chance passages by famous
writers that they had not encountered before, and correctly
identified their classmates’ writing significantly above
chance. Creative writing students additionally correctly
identified significantly above chance works of art produced
by classmates. (The opposite study, determining whether art
students correctly identify written passages generated by
their classmates, has not yet been carried out.)
The higher recognizability of artistic style (study 1) than
writer’s style (study 2) comes as a surprise. It cannot be
entirely due to the famous artists coming from a wider range
of eras and locales than the famous writers, for if that were
the correct explanation, the recognizability of classmates’
art in Study 1 and classmates’ writing in Study 2 should
have been comparable. Perhaps there are fewer constraints
on artists, i.e. fewer demands that the work ‘make sense’,
and it need not exhibit plot structure or character
development. Thus there may be more acceptable ways of
‘doing one’s own thing’. The analysis takes into account
that there were twice as many writers to choose from as
artists, but in future studies the number of famous artists and
writers will be the same, in order to make the studies as
comparable as possible.
The results support the hypothesis that creators have a
recognizable style. These findings are not predicted by
theories of creativity that emphasize chance processes or the
accumulation of expertise. If creative output is a matter of
chance or the acquisition of expertise, then what is the
source of this identifiable personal style? These findings are,
however, predicted by honing theory, according to which
personal style reflects the uniquely honed structure of an
individual’s worldview. The finding that creative writing
students were able to identify above chance which of their
classmates created a given work in a domain other than
writing, specifically art, supports the prediction that creators
hone a uniquely structured worldview that exhibits a style
that is recognizable not just within a domain but across
domains. Further experiments are underway to replicate
these findings with larger groups of participants, and adapt
the general procedure to study the recognizability of style
within and across domains using trained jazz musicians.
It is worth pointing out explicitly how this approach, and
in particular the investigation of recognizable cross-domain
style, differs from typical attempts to determine to what
extent higher cognition is domain-general versus domain-
specific, or modular. As mentioned in the introduction, it is
commonly assumed that this issue can be resolved by
determining to what extent ratings of expertise in one
domain are correlated with ratings of expertise in another.
An unspoken assumption here is that measurements of
expertise are all that is needed to detect any sort of quality
that might characterize or unify an individual’s creative or
intellectual ventures, and indeed that the outputs of higher
cognitive processes are objectively comparable. But the
reality is that while manifestations of higher cognition are
sometimes comparable, even quantitatively, often there is
little objective basis for comparison. The present results
suggest that higher cognition is domain general not in the
sense that expertise in one enterprise guarantees expertise in
another, but in the sense that there are multiple interacting
venues for creative exploration and self-expression open to
any individual, and through which that individual’s
worldview may be gleaned. It may be that our potential for
cross-domain learning is only just beginning to be exploited,
through ventures such as the Learning through the Arts
program in Canada, in which students, for example, learn
mathematics through dance, or learn about food chains
through the creation of visual art. It seems reasonable that if
knowledge is presented in compartmentalized chunks,
students end up with a compartmentalized understanding of
the world, while if knowledge were presented more