Who’s the Most Creative of Them All?: Art Bias in Laypersons' Explicit and Implicit Beliefs

Often, creativity is associated with only artistic talent (known as the art bias) resulting in a failure to recognize it or its potential in non-artistic areas. The present study examined the art bias across artistic, scientific, business-oriented, and conventional occupations using implicit and explicit methods. In a mixed design, participants (N = 722) responded to one of six Implicit Association Tests (where two occupations were paired with creative and mundane words), explicit measures of bias towards creativity across occupations, and creative self-efficacy in the same occupations. Results indicated that artistic occupations (e.g., poet) were most likely to be implicitly and explicitly endorsed as creative compared to all other occupations. There was no difference in perceived creativity among scientific and business-oriented occupations; however, conventional ones were uniformly assessed as the lowest on creativity. Further, one’s creative self-efficacy in specific occupations contributed to explicit creativity bias across all four occupations. These results can aid the field of vocational psychology and direct future research on interventions that recognize and curb art bias.