Creativity (55 page)

The selection process.
One limitation of this study is that most of the respondents are Caucasian Americans, Canadians, or Europeans, and few members of other ethnic groups or cultures ended up in the sample. For instance, only two African-Americans and a sprin
kling of Asians were represented. This would be a problem if the creative process varied fundamentally by ethnicity. My impression is that it does not, except that access to fields and domains, and the ways fields and domains operate, will vary by culture just as it varies in time and by social class within the same culture. This would be in accord with the conclusions of the Japanese psychologist Maruyama (e.g., 1980), according to which the variation in originality within cultures is much greater than the variation across them. In terms of the systems model to be introduced in ch
apter 2, I would say that the original contribution made by the
person
is likely to be similar across cultures, while the contributions of the
field
and the
domain
will bear the distinctive stamp of the culture in which the creative process takes place. The same is true of gender differences: Within any given discipline women will use mental processes similar to those men use to reach creative results, but the differences in socialization, training, and opportunities available to men and women in a given social system may impact on the frequency and kind of creative contributions made by the two genders.

The strategy of disproof.
The example of the single white raven and its implications for scientific epistemology obviously derive from Karl Popper’s arguments, which although discredited as a
history
of science (which Popper never claimed to be doing anyway), are still unsurpassed as the
logical foundations
of it (Popper 1959).

I accept stories at face value.
Acceptance of respondents’ reports—qualified by the usual skepticism a scientist must bring to the object of study—is the particular prejudice I bring to the interpretation of the data. Prejudice, which generally has pejorative connotations, is used here in the sense developed by the philosopher Jurgen Habermas, who argued that none of us could avoid being prejudiced. But by being reflective, we can to a certain extent overcome the biases that otherwise would follow from our prejudices (Habermas 1970; Robinson 1988).

During the heyday of Victorian optimism in the nineteenth century, it became a widely shared tacit assumption—or prejudice—that humankind, if not perfect, was well on its way to perfection. The great contribution of critical thinkers such as Marx or Freud has been to show that, on the contrary, human action was rife with selfishness, irrationality, and denial. Their insights have been expanded upon and refined by the perspectives of behaviorism, sociobiology, and countless other “isms.” The pessimism implied in these theories has further gained credibility as a result of the sen
seless evil that wars and ideologies have wrought in the last hundred years. So the new prejudice permeating our
culture is now 180 degrees removed from the previous one, and holds that every human action is self-seeking, irrational, and not to be trusted.

In my opinion, neither of these extreme positions is very useful. To reconcile the opposite poles of the dialectic, we must recognize that our behavior is largely determined by ancient genetic instructions designed for self-protection and self-replication, and by more recent cultural instructions we have learned uncritically from the cultural milieu. At the same time, it makes no sense to deny that new memes, or ideas that have emerged through time—such as the concepts of humanity, of democracy, of nonviolence—can and do direct behavior toward new goals. My own prejudice is that this relative
flexibility of human adaptation, or
creativity
, makes it possible to avoid the backward-looking pessimism of the currently accepted reductionistic explanations of behavior, and to entertain the hope for a genuine evolution of humankind.

The tendency of the social sciences to de-bunk human motivations
(together with many other wise observations), is discussed by Hannah Arendt (1956).

C
HAPTER
2

Creative insight.
A recent collection of papers that pretty much covers the subject of what insight consists of—but restricted to psychological, “inside the head” approaches—is the volume edited by Robert Sternberg (1995); see, e.g., Csikszentmihalyi and Sawyer (1995) on specifically creative insights. The
systems model
(sometimes called DIFI—for Domain, Individual, Field, Interaction framework) was originally developed by Csikszentmihalyi (1988a, 1990) and further elaborated in Feldman, Csikszentmihalyi, and Gardner (1994).

Brilliant.
One of the prejudices of our times is that a person who acts in unusual ways or who is involved in the arts must be creative. For instance, in advertising companies the department in charge of designing and producing the ads is usually called
creative
, and those who work in it are known as the
creatives
. While certainly there are many advertising artists who are genuinely creative, their frequency is not necessarily greater than that of creative accountants, technicians, or librarians working in the same companies. They might, however, be more
brilliant
, in the sense used here.

Personal creativity.
In psychological and educational circles, what is referred to as creativity is almost always of this kind. Tests that measure fluency or flexibility of thought, or teachers’ rating of the originality of children’s drawings, do not measure creativity as I use the term in this book, but only the tendency to produce unusual responses, which
may or may not lead to what I call here genuine creativity. Among psychologists, Howard Gruber has argued often and eloquently that we just confuse matters by applying the term “creative” to clever children and to glib test-takers (e.g., Gruber and Davis 1988).

Leonardo
’s character has been often dissected (e.g., Reti 1974); for
Newton
’s see Westfall (1980) and Stayer (1988), and for Thomas
Edison,
Wachorst (1981). It is not that these and other great geniuses were tragically flawed; rather, outside their particular range of accomplishments they were just ordinary—in other words, outside of their work they failed to display that brilliance which popular opinion is so anxious to attribute to them.

Genius.
Among scientists of this century, a few—for instance Richard Feynman and John von Neumann—have gained a reputation among their peers as being geniuses. This reputation seems to be based not so much on the importance of their contributions, as on the exceptional facility with which they could see and solve problems that their peers had a much more difficult time comprehending. Usually individuals who are thought to be geniuses also have unusual, sometimes photographic memory. It is probable that such persons have rare neurological talents. Nevertheless, such talents alone do
not guarantee creativity. Geniuses also often cultivate personal mannerisms that set them apart from their peers, and that impress their audience as being signs of uniqueness (e.g., Feynman playing the bongo drums, or Picasso earnestly endeavoring to play out in his own life the erotic fantasies of the bourgeoisie).

Fluctuations in the attribution of creativity.
Brannigan (1981) was one of the first sociologists who explored systematically the way in which a new discovery or invention had to be legitimized by recognized authorities before it could be seen as valid. He argues, for instance, that Columbus’s discovery of America would have remained a relatively trivial event, and not even counted as a “discovery,” except for the official recognition bestowed on it by the administrators of the Spanish king, by cartographers, by the Church, by scholars, and so on. Kosoff (1995) develops the same idea even
farther—perhaps too far, inasmuch as he views creativity exclusively as a process of attribution and impression management, neglecting entirely the substantive contribution of the person.

Golden years of the Renaissance.
For the list of artworks completed in Florence during the first quarter of the fifteenth century and an evaluation of their quality, see, for example, Burckhardt (1926). The discussion that follows relies heavily on the remarks on the period found in Hauser (1951) and Heydenreich (1974).

Hauser.
The quote is from Hauser (1951, p. 41). A similar conclusion is reached by Heydenreich, who writes about the same historical period (1974, p. 13): “the patron begins to assume a very important role: in practice, artistic production arises in large measure from his collaboration.” The same argument holds for creative production in other domains as well.

Extrasomatic instructions.
I am basing my ideas here mostly on the work of Fausto Massimini. An example of extrasomatic instructions are the laws contained in the various political constitutions that the two hundred or so sovereign nations of the world have adopted. Massimini and Calegari (1979) analyzed these constitutions as if they were chromosomes containing a great number of genetic instructions; specific laws are nested in the constitutions as genes are in the chromosome. They also show that it is possible to trace groups of laws to their original “ancestral strains” i
n the Magna Charta, and more recent documents like the U.S. Constitution. In other words, information coded in memes rather than genes has begun to direct human behavior (see also Massimini 1979, 1993; Csikszentmihalyi and Massimini, 1985).

Creativity and age.
The relationship between age and creative
achievements in various domains was first studied by Lehman (1953) and Dennis (1966). For more recent studies, see Over (1989) and Simonton (1988, 1990c).

Morality as a domain.
Whether it will ever be a tightly structured domain or not, morality at long last is receiving the attention it deserves from psychologists. Until recently, under the influence of Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg, most scholars confined themselves to studying moral judgments, and how children learned to make them. The newly developing domain attempts to study actual moral behavior(e.g., Damon 1995; Gilligan, Ward, and Taylor 1988).

Scarcity of attention.
The argument suggests that, contrary to general belief, what limits creativity is not the lack of good new memes (i.e., ideas, products, works of art), but the lack of interest in them. The constraint is not in the supply but in the demand. This again is one of the consequences of the aforementioned limits on attention. Unfortunately, most attempts to enhance creativity are focused on the supply side, which may not only not work but is likely to make life more miserable for a greater number of neglected geniuses. We still have very little formal knowledge abou
t how to enhance the demand side of creativity, although obviously entrepreneurs and philanthropists have always had good practical knowledge in this matter.

A creative person must convince the field.
Everyone who studies
creativity has remarked on this requirement (e.g., Simonton refers to it
as persuasion
[1988, p. 417]). But usually the necessity of “selling” one’s ideas is seen as something that comes after the creative process ends and is separate from it. In the systems model, the acceptance of a new meme by the field is seen as an essential part of the creative process. For a recent set of papers that take seriously the importance of the social context, see Ford and Gioia (1995).

The number of students in theoretical physics at the University of Rome.
These are the numbers I remember mentioned by my friend Nicola Cabibbo, who took over the chair of physics in Rome around that time. A similar fate awaited the field of sociology in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when in the aftermath of the student unrests and the Vietnam War huge numbers of students in the United States decided to major in sociology. I was then teaching in the department of sociology and anthropology at Lake Forest College, and in a few years the number of majors increased from less than ten to over
a hundred. Other institutions experienced similar bursts of interest in the domain. One consequence was that in order to accommodate the tenfold increase in students, colleges hired teachers who were often not well trained and had only a faint grasp of the domain. This, in turn, resulted in a chaotic confusion that almost wrecked the field. A similar point was made by Robert LeVine concerning child development research, where in the same period the expansion of the field brought in a great number of poorly trained academics who embraced uncritically the then fashionable cognitivis
t theories of Piaget and Chomsky (LeVine 1991). Unassimilated novelty can be as dangerous for the survival of a domain as no novelty at all.

The Romanian government.
A former student who spent several months in Transylvania collecting ethnographic material in the 1980shas described the efforts of the Romanian Ministry of Culture, whose representatives tried to retrain Hungarian, Szekler, Moldavian, and German villagers to weave, decorate, and sing songs according to Romanian patterns instead of using their traditional forms of artistic expression. Such policies are the cultural equivalent of “ethnic cleansing”; here it is not the phenotype of the genes that is being killed but only the foreign memes.

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3

Or for artists.
A good example are two Renaissance painters who worked for the Medicis, Filippo Lippi (1406-1469) and Giovanni Angelico (1400-1455). They both started out as friars and became
famous for their exquisitely spiritual paintings of saints and Madonnas. Lippi, however, abandoned the monastery and became a riotous drunkard and libertine—he eventually eloped with a nun and had a child with her. At one point his patron, Cosimo de’Medici, decided to lock him up in his studio to make sure he finished a canvas he had been paid to do, but Filippo escaped anyway at night by knotting bed sheets together and lowering himself from the window to join a party. But no matter how dissolute his behavior, he continued all his life to paint sweet religious pictures. Giovanni, on the ot
her hand, remained a meek monk who prayed devotedly for divine inspiration every time he took up the brush. After he died, people started referring to him as Beato Angelico, although he was never officially canonized by the Church. From the work the two men left behind one might have surmised they were identical twins, rather than persons with diametrically opposite temperaments.