The 1960s-1970s were marked by a profound interest in creative thinking among Soviet psychologists and educators. They connected creativity to the country’s economic success in the approaching era of computerization and defined creative thinking as the ability to solve problems, make discoveries, and produce inventions. This definition of creativity led several Soviet institutions to work on the development of techniques and technologies for the control and cultivation of creative thinking in students. Such research first originated at the Laboratory of Programmed Instruction (LPO) of the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences and, later, in the 1970s, was also conducted at the Department of Psychology of Moscow State University (MSU) and the Council for Cybernetics.
This paper traces various attempts of Soviet psychologists to formalize problem-solving and write special teaching prescriptions to train creativity in students. I begin by showing how in the 1960s, the LPO worked to simulate thinking processes algorithmically. While in the 1960s, the LPO shared the cyberneticists’ belief in the omnipotence of algorithms, in the early 1970s, they came to realize that algorithms are too rigid to describe how humans solve problems. The growing skepticism about the applicability of algorithms to creative thinking led psychologists at MSU and the Council to employ heuristic programs to formalize creative thought. This paper draws on archival documents from the Soviet Academy of Sciences, State Archives of the Russian Federation as well as published work that appeared in Russian journals Issues of Psychology and Soviet Pedagogy in the 1960s-1970s.
