Abstract
This study addresses the research gap regarding human Productive Creativity, defined as the generation of ideas that are both unique and socially communicable. We use the "Picture Task," an online tool where participants visually represent words using fifteen geometric icons (lines and circles). The Productive Creativity score is the mathematical product of Uniqueness—defined as the inverse prevalence of a word within a random pool of 200 submissions—and Clarity—the number of correct guesses by five independent judges. We conducted two experiments with native English-speaking US residents via Prolific (Experiment 1: N=229; Experiment 2: N=1547). Validation against traditional measures revealed a weak correlation with the Unusual Uses Task (r = 0.10, p = 0.12) and a significant negative correlation with the Biographical Inventory of Creative Behaviors (r = −0.22, p < 0.001). These findings identify the Picture Task as a distinct measure of communicable creativity that captures dimensions absent in traditional divergent thinking or self-report scales. Experiment 1 revealed a robust inverse relationship between the two dimensions (r = −0.392, p < 0.001), with a 40% reduction in Clarity when moving from common to unique ideas. Experiment 2 demonstrated that while individual and competitive incentives increased Uniqueness, they simultaneously decreased Clarity, resulting in a null effect on overall Productive Creativity. Our "trade-off" model accounts for these "backfire" effects, where the clarity penalty outweighs gains in originality. Promotion of Productive Creativity requires balancing these competing dimensions rather than maximizing uniqueness alone, explaining the null incentive effects frequently observed in behavioral literature.