Vitality at Play: Unraveling the Fundamental Link between Curiosity and Creativity

ABSTRACT Past research holds that curiosity motivates creativity via two primary mechanisms—exploration and absorption. We propose that vitality is a more fundamental mechanism integrating them. According to the self‐determination theory, curiosity fuels vitality as it aligns with the natural inclination toward autonomy, competence, and relatedness. It is through enhanced vitality that curiosity further leads to exploration and absorption, which altogether lead to higher creativity. Considering that curiosity varies daily, we adopted a daily diary design over 10 consecutive workdays and tested the proposed effects at the within‐person level. The results confirmed that daily curiosity promotes creativity through elevated daily vitality and daily exploration and absorption. More importantly, when accounting for the effect of daily vitality, the mediating effect of exploration and absorption was no longer significant. The findings thus highlight vitality as a more fundamental mechanism responsible for the positive effect of curiosity on creativity, providing a refined understanding of how curiosity fuels creativity.