Creativity beyond the isolated mind: toward a biopsychosocial and sociotechnical perspective

Abstract

Creativity has traditionally been studied at different levels of analysis, focusing on neural mechanisms, cognitive abilities, individual characteristics, or environmental influences. Although each approach has provided important insights, none alone fully explains why the same factors may support creativity under some conditions but constrain it under others, or why creative potential is expressed differently across individuals, domains, developmental stages, and sociocultural contexts. Building on biopsychosocial, systemic, sociocultural, and interactionist approaches, this Perspective conceptualizes creativity as a multilevel, developmentally situated, and sociotechnically mediated phenomenon emerging from interactions among biological, psychological, sociocultural, and technological processes. The central proposition is that no single factor is inherently creative or uncreative; its contribution depends on how it interacts with other factors under particular conditions. The framework therefore shifts the unit of explanation from isolated determinants to changing configurations of relationships across levels. Four mechanisms, i.e., constraint, affordance, regulation, and feedback/selection, describe how these relationships may develop over time and generate testable predictions concerning differences across individuals, stages of the creative process, developmental periods, and levels of analysis. Evidence from neuroscience, psychology, sociocultural research, education, organizational studies, and generative artificial intelligence illustrates how apparently contradictory findings may partly reflect these differences. Methodologically, the framework calls for greater conceptual and measurement specificity and for ecological, longitudinal, multilevel, and interdisciplinary research. Rather than asking which factors universally increase creativity, it asks for whom, under which conditions, at which stage and level, and over what timescale particular factors support or constrain creative activity.