Life values and creativity in future psychologists and managers: what differences?

With this study, we intend to describe comparatively the life values and the creative potential of 89 college students, 38 (42.7%) of Psychology and 51 (57.3%) of Management. The mean age is 20.16 years (SD = 3.133). The instruments used included the Life Values Inventory (Almeida, 2006) and the Test for Creative Thinking- Drawing Production (Ibérico Nogueira & Almeida, 2010), adapted for the Portuguese population. Considering the values variable, there are statistically significant differences in the values Achievement, Creativity, Economic Prosperity, Health and Responsibility in favor of future managers and Concern for Others in favor of future psychologists. Regarding the creativity levels there were not found statistically significant differences between the students of psychology and management. In fact, the average value of creativity is 18.62, well below the mean of the German population (31), the cultural context in which the TCT-DP was developed. No correlations were found between life values and creativity, except for Concern for Others, which negatively (and weakly) correlates with creativity (r = .23, p = .03). Considering the low levels of creative performance, it is important to alert to the need to promote, among students, the creative way of thinking, the generation of new ideas and the intention of assuming and risking a less conventional thinking style.