Considering Art Creative but Engineering Not as a Questionable Assumption

In retrospect, Cohen and MacKeith made a number of questionable assumptions that undermine that conclusion. To be fair, these assumptions were quite common among psychologists at the time and still persist to a significant degree among the public. One of these assumptions is that some activities, such as the arts, are inherently creative, whereas others, such as science or engineering, are not. Another assumption is that creativity is a function of one's ability to fantasize, which is to say, to "think outside the box" and imagine impossible things. Psychologists often capture this novelty-producing capacity as "divergent thinking."

Put these assumptions together and you get what seems to have been Cohen and MacKeith's train of thought: first, a fanciful imagination is of value to artistic fields of endeavor; second, the preference for fantasy therefore epitomizes creative imagination; and third, the creative value of make-believe play in childhood must thus lie in its impossible whimsies. By these tokens, the ordinary invention of imaginary worids, few of which were idealistic or impossibly magical and fantastic, simply didn't measure up.

What the researchers found instead was that most worldpkay, highly naturalistic as well as realistic, more obviously involved what psychologists call the "convergent thinking" of a problem-solving endeavor. Moreover, only some manifestations of worldplay involved artistic fantasy, a significant portion focusing on the elaborate rules and plausible models of organization and analysis rather than the sole production of novelty. Hence the researchers' gist that, while woridplay appeared to be "the most complex form of imaginative activity children are capable of," inventing paracosms as a child somehow inhibited creative development.

Michele Root-Bernstein, Inventing Imaginary Worlds, From Childhood Play to Adult Creativity Across the Arts and Sciences (2014)

• creativity
• engineering
• imagination
• science