Why No Single Factor Makes Anyone Creative: The Science of Configurations

For decades, scientists hunting the roots of creativity have behaved like prospectors searching for a single vein of gold. Neuroscientists scanned brains for a creative hotspot, psychologists measured personality traits and cognitive abilities, and sociologists mapped the environments that nurture breakthrough ideas. Each approach produced genuine insights, yet none could explain a stubborn puzzle: why does the same factor—be it cognitive flexibility, intrinsic motivation, social support, or artificial intelligence—sometimes boost creative performance and sometimes suppress it? A new theoretical framework published in Frontiers in Cognition argues that the question itself has been wrong. According to Maria Adriana Neroni of Suor Orsola Benincasa University in Naples, creativity is not a property residing in any single factor at all. Instead, it emerges from changing configurations of relationships among biological, psychological, sociocultural, and technological processes, and no factor is inherently creative or uncreative on its own.

The framework builds on a biopsychosocial perspective but pushes it further than the familiar three-pillar model. Rather than treating biology, mind, and society as separate influences whose contributions can simply be added together, Neroni proposes that creativity arises from dynamic, interdependent relationships that shift across individuals, tasks, developmental stages, and historical moments. The unit of explanation, in this view, is not the isolated determinant but the evolving configuration of determinants. This distinction matters because the same ingredient can play radically different roles depending on who is using it, what stage of creative work they are in, and what technological or social environment surrounds them. The perspective draws on earlier systemic models, such as the influential account locating creativity in the relationship among person, domain, and field, and on sociocultural approaches that dissolved the boundary between mind and material world. What is new is the extension of this relational logic across all levels of analysis, from neural networks to algorithms.

The neuroscience section of the argument illustrates the problem vividly. Over the past two decades, creativity research has moved away from hunting for a discrete creative brain area toward network-based models. Attention has focused on interactions between the default mode network, which supports internally directed thought, episodic memory, and spontaneous associative processing, and the executive control network, which contributes to working memory, attentional regulation, and the evaluation of emerging ideas. A third system, the salience network, appears to coordinate shifts between internally and externally oriented processing. Studies of divergent thinking, in which people generate multiple unusual uses for everyday objects, have repeatedly found functional coupling between these networks, supporting the idea that creative thought depends on cooperation between idea generation and cognitive control.

Yet recent critiques caution against replacing one reductionism with another. As the framework notes, studies differ substantially in the tasks they use, how they score creativity, and the neural patterns they report, and individual differences in how people approach creative tasks are often overlooked. Evidence that the default mode and executive networks cooperate during divergent thinking does not establish a general neural system for creativity. A broader concern holds that creativity should not be treated as a single cognitive faculty with a dedicated neural substrate, because creative activities recruit very different combinations of cognitive, emotional, perceptual, motor, and domain-specific processes. Findings from lesion studies reinforce this picture: damage to anatomically distinct brain regions can alter fluency, flexibility, or originality, yet distinct sites may connect to common functional circuits, suggesting distributed systems rather than a creative command center. Genetic research tells a similar story. Associations between creative performance and dopaminergic gene variants exist, but creativity is a complex behavioral phenotype that cannot map directly onto individual genes; genetic influences operate indirectly through temperament, reward sensitivity, and neural plasticity, and their expression depends on developmental and environmental conditions.

Development itself dismantles the notion of a biologically fixed creative capacity. Lifespan research distinguishes creative potential, everyday creative behavior, domain-specific performance, and socially recognized achievement, each following different trajectories. Childhood offers neural plasticity and exploratory behavior that favor experimentation, but children lack accumulated domain knowledge, and whether their explorations yield outcomes judged creative depends on task, educational environment, materials, and evaluative criteria. Later adulthood may bring declines in processing speed alongside continued growth in expertise and semantic knowledge, changing the resource mix rather than simply raising or lowering creativity. Research on sex and gender drives the point home: recent meta-analyses find only minimal average gender differences in creative ability, and differences in variability cannot explain the much larger disparities in eminent creative achievement, which instead reflect educational opportunities, institutional barriers, professional networks, and systems of cultural recognition. The significance of any biological characteristic, the framework argues, depends on the developmental, social, and cultural conditions in which it operates.

Psychological research reveals the same conditionality. Executive functions such as working memory, inhibition, and cognitive flexibility can help maintain goals, suppress dominant responses, and shift perspectives, yet stronger executive control is not always beneficial. Control helps when a task demands evaluation, refinement, or adherence to constraints, while less constrained processing may better facilitate access to unusual associations during idea generation. Cognitive flexibility can restructure an ineffective representation, but constant shifting becomes counterproductive when creative work requires sustained elaboration. Metacognition offers a way to understand this coordination: creative activity requires not only generating ideas but assessing progress, selecting strategies, and deciding whether to continue exploring or change direction. Emotion follows the same pattern. Positive affect has been linked to broad attention and associative flexibility, while some negative states support persistence and analytical processing, but recent experimental work shows that cognitive reappraisal facilitated creativity particularly among individuals lower in openness to experience, demonstrating how an emotion-regulation strategy interacts with personality rather than acting universally.

Social and cultural environments do not merely facilitate or inhibit individual creativity; they help shape the possibilities people encounter, the forms of novelty they recognize, and the outcomes that acquire value. Ideas about originality, usefulness, authorship, and innovation vary across societies and historical periods, and recent reviews caution against treating Western and Eastern cultures as homogeneous categories. Multicultural experience has been associated with greater cognitive flexibility, but exposure alone is insufficient; its effects depend on openness, language competence, domain knowledge, and the quality of intercultural engagement. In education, the long-standing debate over whether schooling stifles creativity through standardization or provides the knowledge needed for creative development remains unresolved, and the framework argues the opposition between structure and freedom is too simple. Structure can limit exploration when rigid, but it also supplies the knowledge, strategies, and feedback needed to develop an idea. Autonomy encourages exploration but may be less useful when learners lack the metacognitive skills to evaluate and refine what they generate.

Organizational research adds further layers. Psychological safety, autonomy, and diversity can support creativity, but none guarantees it; actor-context relationships can be synergistic, compensatory, inhibitory, or characterized by diminishing returns. Conditions that increase individual idea generation do not necessarily improve collective innovation, because teams must coordinate expertise, manage disagreement, and select among alternatives. Digital environments complicate the picture further. Recommendation systems and platform architectures shape what information people encounter and which ideas become visible, sometimes expanding access to diverse material while reinforcing particular patterns of attention and popularity. Generative artificial intelligence makes technology’s role even more direct, participating in ideation, recombination, evaluation, and production rather than merely providing access to information.

The evidence on human-AI collaboration illustrates the framework’s central claim with striking clarity. One influential study found that access to generative AI improved evaluations of individual creative stories, particularly among less creative writers, but simultaneously increased similarity across outputs and reduced collective diversity. Another line of research compared large language models used as ghostwriters, taking the primary role in content generation, versus sounding boards providing feedback on human-generated material. Sounding boards improved outcomes for non-experts, while ghostwriting provided no comparable advantage and was detrimental to expert users, possibly by anchoring subsequent human contributions. A separate experiment found that participants produced less creative poetry when given an AI-generated poem to edit than when writing independently, but this disadvantage disappeared when the system supported iterative co-creation with human and AI alternately contributing, and the co-creative configuration preserved higher creative self-efficacy. A meta-analysis of human-AI collaboration found substantial variation in outcomes depending on the relative strengths of humans and machines and how their contributions were combined. The same technology, in other words, can benefit individual performance while constraining diversity at the collective level.

From this configurational account, the framework derives four mechanisms—constraint, affordance, regulation, and feedback or selection—that describe how relationships across levels develop over time. Constraints can limit exploration but also reduce an unmanageable search space and focus attention. Affordances are relational possibilities for action that emerge between a person and their environment, such as an AI system enabling rapid generation of alternatives whose usefulness depends on the user’s expertise and evaluative skills. Regulation encompasses metacognitive monitoring, cognitive control, motivation, and emotion at the individual level, and feedback, norms, and collaboration at the institutional level. Feedback and selection make creative activity recursive, as products are accepted or rejected and systems amplify some outputs while overlooking others. The framework yields testable propositions: the effect of any creativity-related factor should vary with conditions, factors supporting one phase of creative activity should not necessarily support another, the same intervention can have opposite effects at different levels, and the impact of opportunities or constraints should change across development. Rather than asking which factors universally increase creativity, researchers should now ask for whom, under which conditions, at which stage and level, and over what timescale particular factors support or constrain creative activity—a question that demands ecological, longitudinal, multilevel, and interdisciplinary research designs capable of following creative processes as they unfold in the real world.

Subject of Research: A biopsychosocial and sociotechnical framework explaining creativity as a configurational phenomenon across biological, psychological, cultural, and technological levels

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

Article References: Neroni, M. A. (2026). Creativity beyond the isolated mind: toward a biopsychosocial and sociotechnical perspective. Frontiers in Cognition, 5, Article 1893765. https://doi.org/10.3389/fcogn.2026.1893765

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fcogn.2026.1893765

Keywords: creativity, neuroscience, biopsychosocial, generative AI, cognitive flexibility, default mode network, executive control, sociocultural, developmental psychology, organizational creativity, human-AI collaboration, metacognition