Creativity in context: Thematic profile analysis reveals the explanatory power of themes and culture in creative ideas

The world faces formidable challenges that demand creative solutions tailored to specific socio-cultural contexts. We introduce thematic profile analysis, a computational method that combines topic modeling with large language models to situate creative ideas within context-dependent and culturally specific semantic spaces. A thematic profile quantifies the semantic distance between an individual’s creative ideas and themes from a corpus. Analyzing 18,414 ideas from 3,213 participants across 74 nationalities, we found that an individual’s thematic profile strongly predicted human creativity ratings (R = .58-.79). Thematic content was critical to creativity, with certain themes being more important to avoid or explore in one culture (e.g., Mexican) than another (e.g., U.S.A.). Thematic profile analysis enabled novel quantitative comparisons of themes across cultures - revealing substantial differences and similarities – providing a robust tool for capturing the context-dependency and cultural specificity of creativity.