Temporal Individual Differences and Creativity: An Exploratory Investigation

Creativity is a temporally laden construct. However, the role of time remains an understudied concept with creativity, especially with how people differ in the ways they think about time. We explore the role these individual differences, called temporal individual differences, have with creativity, offering initial hypotheses for four traits: time urgency, pacing style, temporal focus, and polychronicity. We examined whether these traits relate to creativity similarly across multiple domains, different conceptualizations of creativity, and whether these relationships are linear or curvilinear. Adults from Amazon's Mechanical Turk (N = 214) completed a number of temporal individual difference measures, three conceptualizations of creativity (self-perceptions, activity, and achievement), and Big Five traits. The results indicate that temporal traits did not differentially relate to creativity across domains, but did with regard to different conceptualizations of creativity. These relationships were both linear and curvilinear, depending on the temporal trait. The results highlight that temporal individual differences impact creativity in unique ways, warranting further investigation.