Phenomena complexity, disciplinary consensus, and experimental versus correlational research in psychological science.

The target article ignores the crucial role of correlational methods in the behavioral and social sciences. Yet such methods are often mandated by the greater complexity of the phenomena investigated. This necessity is especially conspicuous in psychological research where its position in the hierarchy of the sciences implies the need for both experimental and correlational investigations, each featuring distinct assets.

Scientific Creativity: Discovery and Invention as Combinatorial.

Although scientific creativity has often been described as combinatorial, the description is usually insufficiently formulated to count as a precise scientific explanation. Therefore, the current article is devoted to elaborating a formalization defined by three combinatorial parameters: the initial probability p, the final utility u, and the scientist's prior knowledge of that utility v. These parameters then lead logically to an 8-fold typology involving two forms of expertise, two irrational combinations, and four "blind" combinations. One of the latter provides the basis for the definition of personal creativity as c=(1-p)u(1-v), that is, the multiplicative product of originality, utility, and surprise. This three-criterion definition then has six critical implications. Those implications lead to a discussion of various combinatorial processes and procedures that include a treatment of the No Free Lunch Theorems regarding optimization algorithms as well as the creativity-maximizing phenomena of mind wandering and serendipity. The article closes with a discussion of how scientific creativity differs from artistic creativity. Besides the obvious contrasts in the ideas entering the combinatorial processes and procedures, scientific combinations, products, and communities strikingly differ from those typical of the arts. These differences also imply contrasts in developmental experiences and personality characteristics. In sum, the formal combinatorial analysis enhances our understanding of scientific creativity.

A publication missing from Lewis M. Terman's CV? Ralph K. White's 1931 "The versatility of genius".

Lewis M. Terman's publication list is impressively long. Even a selective bibliography includes around three dozen articles and books (Watson, 1974). Yet by many standards of authorship assignment, one significant contribution is invariably omitted: the paper "The Versatility of Genius" nominally sole-authored by Ralph K. White in 1931. To see why, it is necessary to place this article in the context of two careers-Terman's and White's. Terman (1940) discussed White's (1931) key results in his overview of "Psychological Approaches to the Biography of Genius." In that article, Terman's appreciation for the study seems much greater than the author's own. No criticisms even mentioned. Furthermore, it has become apparent many decades later that White's inquiry into the versatility of genius remains the most rigorous empirical treatment of the subject-a subject that encompasses the fascinating topic of polymathy as well (Cassandro & Simonton, 2010). Hence, why not give White's (1931) inquiry the attention it deserves? Just add the reference to Terman's curriculum vita with an asterisk indicating White's mentor as covert coauthor! (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Intellectual Brilliance and Presidential Performance: Why Pure Intelligence (or Openness) Doesn't Suffice.

In recent years it has become popular on the internet to debate the IQ of the incumbent president of the United States. Yet, these controversies (and hoaxes) presume that IQ has some relevance to understanding the president's actual performance as the nation's leader. This assumption is examined by reviewing the empirical research on the intelligence-performance association in political leadership, with a special focus on U.S. presidents. The review starts by discussing at-a-distance assessment techniques, a method that has yielded reliable and valid measures of IQ, Intellectual Brilliance, and Openness to Experience; three correlated even if separable concepts. The discussion then turns to the reliable and valid measurement of presidential performance-or "greatness"-via successive surveys of hundreds of experts. These two lines of research then converged on the emergence of a six-predictor equation, in which Intellectual Brilliance plays a major role, to the exclusion of both IQ and Openness. The greatest presidents are those who feature wide interests, and who are artistic, inventive, curious, intelligent, sophisticated, complicated, insightful, wise, and idealistic (but who are far from being either dull or commonplace). These are the personal traits we should look for in the person who occupies the nation's highest office if we seek someone most likely to solve the urgent problems of today and tomorrow.

Can super smart leaders suffer from too much of a good thing? The curvilinear effect of intelligence on perceived leadership behavior.

Although researchers predominately test for linear relationships between variables, at times there may be theoretical and even empirical reasons for expecting nonlinear functions. We examined if the relation between intelligence (IQ) and perceived leadership might be more accurately described by a curvilinear single-peaked function. Following Simonton's (1985) theory, we tested a specific model, indicating that the optimal IQ for perceived leadership will appear at about 1.2 standard deviations above the mean IQ of the group membership. The sample consisted of midlevel leaders from multinational private-sector companies. We used the leaders' scores on the Wonderlic Personnel Test (WPT)-a measure of IQ-to predict how they would be perceived on prototypically effective leadership (i.e., transformational and instrumental leadership). Accounting for the effects of leader personality, gender, age, as well as company, country, and time fixed effects, analyses indicated that perceptions of leadership followed a curvilinear inverted-U function of intelligence. The peak of this function was at an IQ score of about 120, which did not depart significantly from the value predicted by the theory. As the first direct empirical test of a precise curvilinear model of the intelligence-leadership relation, the results have important implications for future research on how leaders are perceived in the workplace. (PsycINFO Database Record

Giving Credit Where Credit's Due: Why It's So Hard to Do in Psychological Science.

More than a century of scientific research has shed considerable light on how a scientist's contributions to psychological science might be best assessed and duly recognized. This brief overview of that empirical evidence concentrates on recognition for lifetime career achievements in psychological science. After discussing both productivity and citation indicators, the treatment turns to critical precautions in the application of these indicators to psychologists. These issues concern both predictive validity and interjudge reliability. In the former case, not only are the predictive validities for standard indicators relatively small, but the indicators can exhibit important non-merit-based biases that undermine validity. In the latter case, peer consensus in the evaluation of scientific contributions is appreciably lower in psychology than in the natural sciences, a fact that has consequences for citation measures as well. Psychologists must therefore exercise considerable care in judging achievements in psychological science-both their own and those of others.

Reverse engineering genius: historiometric studies of superlative talent.

Although genius has been defined in the dictionary as requiring an IQ above 140, this definition depends on an arbitrary methodological decision made by Lewis Terman for his longitudinal study of more than 1500 intellectually gifted children, a study that occupies four of the five volumes of Genetic Studies of Genius. Yet, only the second volume, by Catharine Cox, studied bona fide geniuses, by applying historiometric methods to 301 highly eminent creators and leaders. After defining historiometric research, I examine the difference between historical genius and intellectual giftedness with respect to heterogeneous intellects, personality differences, and early development and show that the actual relation between IQ and genius is small and heavily contingent on domain-specific assessment, the operation of traits like persistence and openness to experience, and the impact of diversifying experiences, including both developmental adversity and subclinical psychopathology. Hence, the dictionary definition of "genius" has minimal, if any, justification. If, using historiometric methods, one works backward from recognized geniuses, such as those studied by Cox, one might not obtain the kind of sample that Terman obtained for his longitudinal study. The two methods produce two distinct subgroups of the larger population.

Psychopathology, adversity, and creativity: diversifying experiences in the development of eminent African Americans.

Symptoms associated with mental illness have been hypothesized to relate to creative achievement because they act as diversifying experiences. However, this theory has only been tested on predominantly majority-culture samples. Do tendencies toward mental illness still predict eminent creativity when they coexist with other diversifying experiences, such as early parental death, minority-status, or poverty? These alternative diversifying experiences can be collectively referred to as examples of developmental adversity. This conjecture was tested on a significant sample of 291 eminent African Americans who, by the nature of their status as long-term minorities, would experience more developmental adversity. Replicating majority-culture patterns, African American artists showed higher mental illness rates than African American scientists. Yet the absolute percentages were significantly lower for the African Americans, regardless of profession. Furthermore, mental illness predicted higher eminence levels only for the African American artists, an effect that diminished when controlling for developmental adversity. Because the latter predicted eminence for both artists and scientists, the "madness-to-genius" link probably represents just 1 of several routes by which diversifying experiences can influence eminence. The same developmental ends can be attained by different means. This inference warrants further research using other eminent creators emerging from minority culture populations.

The Mad-Genius Paradox: Can Creative People Be More Mentally Healthy But Highly Creative People More Mentally Ill?

The persistent mad-genius controversy concerns whether creativity and psychopathology are positively or negatively correlated. Remarkably, the answer can be "both"! The debate has unfortunately overlooked the fact that the creativity-psychopathology correlation can be expressed as two independent propositions: (a) Among all creative individuals, the most creative are at higher risk for mental illness than are the less creative and (b) among all people, creative individuals exhibit better mental health than do noncreative individuals. In both propositions, creativity is defined by the production of one or more creative products that contribute to an established domain of achievement. Yet when the typical cross-sectional distribution of creative productivity is taken into account, these two statements can both be true. This potential compatibility is here christened the mad-genius paradox. This paradox can follow logically from the assumption that the distribution of creative productivity is approximated by an inverse power function called Lotka's law. Even if psychopathology is specified to correlate positively with creative productivity, creators as a whole can still display appreciably less psychopathology than do people in the general population because the creative geniuses who are most at risk represent an extremely tiny proportion of those contributing to the domain. The hypothesized paradox has important scientific ramifications.

Quantifying creativity: can measures span the spectrum?

Because the cognitive neuroscientists have become increasingly interested in the phenomenon of creativity, the issue arises of how creativity is to be optimally measured. Unlike intelligence, which can be assessed across the full range of intellectual ability creativity measures tend to concentrate on different sections of the overall spectrum. After first defining creativity in terms of the three criteria of novelty, usefulness, and surprise, this article provides an overview of the available measures. Not only do these instruments vary according to whether they focus on the creative process, person, or product, but they differ regarding whether they tap into "little-c" versus "Big-C" creativity; only productivity and eminence measures reach into genius-level manifestations of the phenomenon. The article closes by discussing whether various alternative assessment techniques can be integrated into a single measure that quantifies creativity across the full spectrum.

The Personality of a Nonperson: Gauging the Inner Skinner.

B. F. Skinner is consistently rated as one of the most important figures in the history of psychology. Much has been said about his character, some of it strongly negative. Yet little is known about what kind of man he really was. Drawing on information from published sources, archival material, and people who knew him, we used "blind" raters to assess Skinner's score on the Big Five personality factors. We found that Skinner was a highly conscientious man and highly open to experience. He was also somewhat neurotic and somewhat extraverted but neither agreeable nor disagreeable. The resulting personality profile was compared with meta-analytic results concerning scientists versus nonscientists, creative scientists versus noncreative scientists, and artists versus nonartists. In general, Skinner's personality profile was consistent with findings regarding those of other notable scientists.

Creative thought as blind-variation and selective-retention: combinatorial models of exceptional creativity.

Both positive and negative comments are discussed with the aim of stimulating future theoretical and empirical research on BVSR models of creativity, including combinatorial models.

Creative thought as blind-variation and selective-retention: combinatorial models of exceptional creativity.

Campbell (1960) proposed that creative thought should be conceived as a blind-variation and selective-retention process (BVSR). This article reviews the developments that have taken place in the half century that has elapsed since his proposal, with special focus on the use of combinatorial models as formal representations of the general theory. After defining the key concepts of blind variants, creative thought, and disciplinary context, the combinatorial models are specified in terms of individual domain samples, variable field size, ideational combination, and disciplinary communication. Empirical implications are then derived with respect to individual, domain, and field systems. These abstract combinatorial models are next provided substantive reinforcement with respect to findings concerning the cognitive processes, personality traits, developmental factors, and social contexts that contribute to creativity. The review concludes with some suggestions regarding future efforts to explicate creativity according to BVSR theory.

Eminence, IQ, physical and mental health, and achievement domain : Cox's 282 Geniuses revisited.

Catharine Cox published two studies of highly eminent creators and leaders, the first in 1926 as the second volume of Terman's landmark Genetic Studies of Genius and the second in 1936 as a coauthored article. The former publication concentrated on the relation between IQ and achieved eminence, and the latter focused on early physical and mental health. Taking advantage of unpublished data from the second study, we examined, for the first time, the relationships among achieved eminence, IQ, early physical and mental health, and achievement domain. The correlation and regression analyses showed, for these 282 individuals, that eminence is a positive function of IQ and that IQ is a positive function of mental health and a negative function of physical health, implying an indirect effect of physical and mental health on eminence. Furthermore, levels of early physical and mental health vary across 10 specific domains of achievement.

Applying the Psychology of Science to the Science of Psychology: Can Psychologists Use Psychological Science to Enhance Psychology as a Science?

Added to the already tremendous diversity of subdisciplines of psychological science is the psychology of science. Although research on the psychology of science began in 1874, the field has seen a substantial expansion of activity in recent years. One particular subset of this research literature has special importance: namely, inquiries into the psychology of doing great science. These investigations may be assigned into four groups: cognitive, differential, developmental, and social. Each of these deal with critical questions that can, if answered, contribute directly to the improvement of psychology as a science. Potential applications include (a) the identification of scientific talent in psychology, (b) the education of future investigators in psychological science, and (c) the evaluation of psychology's progress as a scientific endeavor.