Defining diskarte: exploring cognitive processes, personality traits, and social constraints in creative problem-solving

Despite being part of Filipinos’ everyday experience, little research has been devoted to diskarte as a construct. This review aims to encourage theorizing about diskarte by framing it as creative problem-solving. I argue that there are parallelisms between diskarte and creativity; specifically, that diskarte involves the use of features present in creative ideation in order to respond to social problems. Hence, insights presented in this paper on diskarte are largely inspired by more than 70 years of creativity research. This paper further proposes that diskarte involves three elements: personality traits, cognitive processes, and social limitations. Cognitive processes include divergent thinking, cognitive flexibility, and making remote associations. Personality variables involve traits such as openness to experience and psychoticism. The role of social constraints in prompting the use of diskarte is also discussed. These insights are integrated into a proposed conceptual framework that can be utilized for future studies.