Creativity (54 page)

C
HAPTER
1

This book
is in many respects a sequel to two previous ones:
Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
, a study of the conditions that make life enjoyable and meaningful, and
The Evolving Self
, which deals with the evolutionary implications of human life and experience. The present volume describes and interprets the lives of a number of exceptional individuals who have found ways to make flow a permanent feature of their lives, and at the same time contribute to the evolution of culture.

This book also takes its place within the contemporary literature on creativity. I would like to mention here some of the work of colleagues that has influenced me, to set the context in which the present contribution belongs, and to provide a brief glimpse of the “state of the art” in the field of creativity research. I should make clear that this is not intended as a review of the by now immense literature in the field, but simply as an introduction to those active scholars and centers of scholarship that have, one way or the other, contributed to my thinking on the subject.

To make this picture as vivid as possible in my mind—and, hopefully, in the reader’s—I will start with a mental map of the locations
where research on creativity is currently vigorous, starting with the northwest corner of the United States and proceeding south, and then east and north, before moving to centers outside the United States.

I shall begin with Dean Keith Simonton at the University of California, Davis, who has pursued for several decades his historiometric studies of creativity. More than any single scholar, Simonton has written extensively about the quantitative trends correlated over time with creative achievements (e.g., Simonton 1984, 1990a).

Some of the earliest studies of the personality of creative people—mostly architects and artists—was done at the University of California, Berkeley, by D.W. McKinnon and his students. This line of work was continued by Frank Barron, and then by David Harrington at the University of California, Santa Cruz (MacKinnon 1962; Barron 1969; Harrington 1990).

At the Claremont Colleges in Southern California, Robert Albert and Mark Runco have been doing longitudinal studies of students presumed to be creative. Runco is also the founding editor of
The Creativity Research Journal
, one of the two journals that define the field (Albert 1983; Runco 1994).

At the University of New Mexico, Vera John-Steiner has followed the development of creative ideas by analyzing scientific notebooks, and has focused on the collaboration in groups that achieve breakthroughs (John-Steiner 1985).

Moving now to the Midwest, the University of Chicago has also had a long tradition of studying creativity in schools (Getzels and Jackson 1962), among artists (Getzels and Csikszentmihalyi 1976), and currently in a variety of different fields, as the present volume attests.

At Michigan State University, Robert Root-Bernstein and his team continue to mine the interviews with eminent scientists that Bernice Eiduson started collecting in 1958 (Eiduson 1962; Root-Bernstein 1989).

At Carnegie-Mellon University, Herbert Simon and his colleagues have experimented with computer programs that are supposed to reproduce the mental processes involved in creative discoveries (Langley, Simon, Bradshaw, and Zytkow 1987; Simon 1988).

Paul Torrance at the University of Georgia has been running a very productive laboratory for the study of creativity in children (Torrance 1962, 1988). In North Carolina, the Center for Creative Leadership has been applying knowledge to stimulate creativity in businesses and organizations.

At Columbia University in New York, Howard Gruber and his associates continue doing careful analyses of the lifelong creative work
of single individuals (Gruber 1981; Gruber and Davis 1988).

Further north in Buffalo, New York, The Center for Creative Studies supports research, consults with businesses, and publishes the other journal of the field,
The Journal of Creative Behavior
(Isaksen, Dorval, and Treffinger 1994; Parnes 1967).

Robert J. Sternberg at Yale University is one of the most influential and prolific theorists and researchers on human cognition, including creativity (e.g., Sternberg 1986, 1988).

As one would expect, the Boston area is rife with scholars involved in creativity research. First and foremost is Howard Gardner at Harvard, whose long-standing presence in the field was recently crowned with a masterful study of seven outstanding geniuses of our century (Gardner 1988, 1993). David Perkins at Project Zero has studied for a long time the cognitive processes involved in creative thinking (Perkins 1981; Weber and Perkins 1992). Also at Harvard is Teresa Amabile, who has studied extensively creativity in children and has begun to study creativity in businesses and orga
nizations (Amabile 1983, 1990). Next is David Feldman at Tufts University, who pioneered the study of prodigies and has developed the concept of domains in the study of cognitive development (Feldman 1980, 1994).

And finally, closing the circle of this imaginary map of the United States, at the University of Maine in Orono, psychologist Colin Martindale applies historiographical methods to the waxing and waning of creativity in the arts; his work is similar to Simonton’s in California (Martindale 1989, 1990).

Of researchers outside the United States, I have had the good fortune of exchanging many ideas with István Magyari-Beck from Budapest, who has argued for some time that we need a new discipline of “creatology” to avoid the current, often parochial, one-dimensional approaches to the topic (Magyari-Beck 1988, 1994). The perspectives of Fausto Massimini of the University of Milan have had a deep influence on my understanding of cultural evolution (Massimini 1993; Massimini, Csikszentmihalyi, and Delle Fave 1988), as well as many other issues. In Israel, Roberta Milgram continues the psychometr
ic tradition of creativity testing developed by Torrance (Milgram 1990).

Of course, I must repeat that these references are only the tip of the iceberg and include only those investigators who are active in the field and whose work I know firsthand.

We share 98 percent of our genetic makeup with chimpanzees.
The estimates of how much of our genetic makeup we share with the chimps varies from 94 to 99 percent (Dozier 1992, Diamond 1992).

Creativity in history.
Although people have been creative all through history, they seldom realized it. For instance, for many centuries Egyptian civilization continued to lead in the arts and in technology, yet their ideology stressed extreme faithfulness to tradition. In medieval Europe many saints and philosophers broke new ground in lifestyle and in ways of thinking, yet they tended to attribute their inventions to having rediscovered God’s will, rather than to their own ingenuity. According to traditional Christian thought, only God was creative; men were created but coul
d not create. Creativity was a very minor concern of psychology until very recently. In 1950, when J. P. Guilford became president of the American Psychological Association, he gave his inaugural lecture on the importance of studying creativity in addition to intelligence. Ironically, Guilford’s involvement with the subject came as a result of funding from the Department of Defense. During World War II the air force decided that intelligence tests were not sufficient to select the best pilots, those who could respond innovatively to emergency situations. Thus the needs of warfare spurred Guilford’s research in
originality and flexibility, which in turn stimulated decades of study in creativity (Feldman 1994, pp. 4-7).

Thirty years of research.
I first started studying creativity in 1962, with my doctoral dissertation on the creative process in a group of art students. Many journal articles resulted, and the book
The Creative Vision
, which introduced new concepts and methods to the study of creativity, especially the focus on “problem finding” (Getzels and Csikszentmihalyi 1976). The “systems view” of creativity is something I developed much later, in 1988, and have elaborated since with the cooperation of students and colleagues, especially David Feldman of Tufts University and Howard Gardner of Harvard (
Csikszentmihalyi 1988; Feldman, Csikszentmihalyi, and Gardner 1994; Gardner 1994).

Cultural evolution.
That creativity is to cultural evolution as genetic mutation is to biological evolution is an idea I first encountered in reading Donald T. Campbell’s essay on the evolution of knowledge(Campbell 1960). An earlier introduction to this way of thinking came from Teilhard de Chardin’s speculative but stimulating epic,
The Phenomenon of Man
(Teilhard 1965).

The concept of a
meme,
analogous at the cultural level to a gene on the biological level, was adopted from Richard Dawkins (1976). These issues are further discussed in Csikszentmihalyi (1993, 1994).

Creativity with a small c.
Just at the present time, a debate rages in the field concerning the definition of creativity—see the last 1995issue of the
Creativity Research Journal
. At question is whether an idea
or product needs social validation to be called creative, or whether it is enough for the person who has the idea to feel that it is creative. This is an old conundrum, which almost half a century ago Morris Stein (1953) tried to resolve by dividing the phenomenon into
subjective
and
objective
phases. Despite its antiquity, the question is still unresolved, and strong arguments have been advanced on both sides. My preference would be to approach creativity as a subjective phenomenon, but unfortunately I see no realistic way of doing so. No matter how much we admire the personal ins
ight, the subjective illumination, we cannot tell whether it is a delusion or a creative thought unless we adopt some criterion—of logic, beauty, or usefulness—and the moment we do so, we introduce a social or cultural evaluation. Hence I was led to develop the systemic perspective on creativity, which relocates the creative process outside the individual mind.

I realize that to do so goes against a powerful axiom of the times. These days we take it for granted that every person has a right to be creative, and that if an idea seems surprising and fresh to you, it should be counted as creative even if nobody else thinks so. With apologies to the Zeitgeist, I will try to demonstrate why this is not a very useful assumption.

Attention is a limited resource.
Many psychologists have remarked on the fact that every intentional act must be attended to, and that the capacity to pay attention is limited (e.g., Hasher and Zacks 1979; Kahneman 1973; Simon 1969; Treisman and Gelade 1980). In my opinion, this fact is one of the most fundamental constraints on human behavior, which explains a great variety of phenomena ranging from why we strive so hard to acquire labor-saving devices to why we become resentful if we feel our friends don’t pay enough attention to us (Csikszentmihalyi 1978, 1990; Csikszentmihalyi and Csik
szentmihalyi 1988).

Creative people are often considered odd.
Studies of the traits widely ascribed to creative people include “impulsive,”“nonconformist,”“makes up the rules as he or she goes along,”“likes to be alone,” and “tends not to know own limitations.” The least typical traits of creative people include “is practical,”“is dependable,”“is responsible,”“is logical,”“is sincere” (MacKinnon 1963; Sternberg 1985; Westby and Dawson 1995).

Two contradictory sets of instructions.
Until about thirty-five years ago, the leading psychological theories, such as behaviorism and psychoanalytic theory, assumed that human behavior was directed exclusively by “deficit needs,” such as the desire to feed, have sex, and so on. More recently, under the influence of “humanistic” psycholo
gists like Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers, the importance of positive drives for self-esteem and self-actualization began to be taken more seriously (e.g., Maslow 1971; Rogers 1951). It is interesting to note that this shift was greatly helped by studies of laboratory monkeys and rats, who turned out to be as motivated to do work by the chance to explore and experience novelty as they were by the opportunity of getting food. These findings suggested the existence of “exploratory drives” and a “need for competence,” which changed forever the deficit-driven picture of human behavi
or (White 1959). See also Csikszentmihalyi (1975, 1990, 1993).

Creativity in danger of being stifled.
A good short summary of this problem was given by Gerhardt Casper, president of Stanford University, in a speech given at the Industry Summit of the World Economic Forum at Stanford, on September 18, 1994: “Government and industry seem to be increasingly preoccupied with the search for technology transfer shortcuts,” he said, instead of “support of original investigations of the first rank and the investment in education and training that goes with it…. We can readily purchase mediocrity, which will lead to nothing other than more mediocrity.”

Extracurricular activities.
The importance of activities outside the classroom in stimulating talented teenagers, and in keeping their motivation focused, was apparent in a recent longitudinal study (Csikszentmihalyi, Rathunde, and Whalen 1993). Inner-city youth depend even more on “nurturing settings” outside the school where they can experience a sense of responsibility together with freedom (Heath and McLaughlin 1993). Recently, Root-Bernstein, Bernstein, and Garnier (1995) have shown that creative scientists report significantly wider interests and more physical and artis
tic activities (painting, drawing, writing poetry, walking, surfing, sailing, etc.) than their less creative peers.

Exceptional individuals.
Given the advanced age of some of the respondents, a few have passed away between the time of the interview and the present writing. John Bardeen, Kenneth Boulding, James Coleman, Robertson Davies, Linus Pauling, and Jonas Salk are no longer with us. In the text I write about all respondents as if in an extended present, which is of course appropriate considering that the impact of these individuals’ lives will continue in the memory of the culture for a long time to come.