"Some Asian countries have recently announced new national slogans advocating creativity and innovation. Paradoxically, these slogans support Asians’ self-deprecating belief that they are not as creative as Westerners. To investigate whether this belief is true, especially in the management field, we review 29 articles across various levels of analysis of cultural differences in creativity and innovation. Our review demonstrates that collectivism, power distance, and uncertainty avoidance have had mixed results in influencing creativity and innovation" https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13602381.2018.1535380
The text above was taken from a paper titled "Cultural differences in creativity and innovation: are Asian employees truly less creative than western employees?". Also
interesting in this context is the paper published in the journal of Creative bheavior titled "Can
Creativity Beat Death?"
“One
theory for studying the relationship between creativity and symbolic
immortality is Terror Management Theory (TMT)....Human beings, like other
organisms, are driven by a self‐preservation instinct,
yet they are unique in their cognitive capacity to understand their finitude.
The conflict between one's mortality awareness and survival goals creates an
existential paradox, which may lead to experiencing severe anxiety, or terror.
The theory maintains that in order to defend oneself from this potential
terror, people invest in two interrelated psychological structures. The first
is a cultural worldview: a set of socially constructed and validated beliefs
that provide meaning, order, a set of principles to live by, and the promise of
either literal (i.e., promise of an after‐life) or symbolic
immortality to socially valued individuals. The second death‐anxiety
buffering structure is self‐esteem…According to
TMT, symbolic immortality may be achieved via long‐lasting
creative achievements in art or science…” https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/jocb.171
PS - Regarding immortality within the realm of science, please check the email (below) I dispatched to several thousand colleagues on October 27, 2016:
De: F. Pacheco Torgal
Enviado: 27 de Outubro de 2016 8:26
Assunto: Honor in the Academic Profession: How Professors Want to be Remembered by Colleagues
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/612675/summary
60 physicists of all ages working at a range of U.S. universities were interviewed in person by the author about multiple aspects of their careers, including the scientists’ aspirations, assessments of their achievements and failures, and conceptions of future and “immortalized” selves. Interviews from which the present work was drawn averaged 90 minutes in length...For the present work, attention is focused on a specific question asked of the respondents: “How would you like to be remembered by your colleagues?”
desires to be remembered by colleagues on principally professional terms increase as institutional prestige increases. By contrast, desires to be remembered on principally personal terms increase as institutional prestige declines...As age increases, desire to be remembered on principally professional terms declines; and the desire to be remembered on principally personal terms intensifies. What is more, as age increases, the percentage of scientists “not caring” about how colleagues remember them increases. The percentage of scientists not caring about how their colleagues remember them, combined with the percentage of those desiring remembrance in personal ways, is particularly striking in the eldest cohort, where the attenuation of professional emphases is most pronounced. Great scientific achievement—even in an era of modern science—has been connoted with “unlocking the mind of God”(Paul, 1980). In an absence of great achievement, morality preserves a route to salvation, identifying
how people can orient themselves to the “good” (Stets, 2010). In addition, it always marks sacrifice, as though to say: “Look at what I gave up, so that others could prosper.” By invoking claims to a moral status, a scientist—relegated to a location peripheral to the major activity at the center of science—provides an excuse as well as an explanation for not having fully realized one’s own ego. Remembered as “being good” by others in the profession thus becomes compensation for comparative failure...Morality, because it is the embodiment of virtue, is a protected status.
