The riddle of creativity

Abstract

One of the chief avowed objectives of modern education is the encouragement of creativity, originality, inventiveness, ingenuity, innovation, new ideas, novel solutions, and fresh approaches to old problems, all directed toward socially useful ends. Is this sort of creativity synonymous with high test intelligence? Ordinary observation suggests that creativity and intelligence are positively correlated, but only moderately. Guilford (4, p. 445) states: . .. I believe that creativity and creative productivity extend well beyond the domain of Thurstone (7, p. 56, or 8, pp. 1920) writes: If genius represents extremely high gifts for creative thinking, then it is not synonymous with intelligence. To be extremely intelligent is not the same as to be gifted in creative work. This may be taken as a hypothesis. To call persons in the upper 1 per cent of the intelligence-test-score distribution or even potential geniuses is likely to be misleading, since the man on the street usually thinks of genius in terms of the Merriam-Webster College Dictionary's sixth definition, extraordinary power of invention or origination of any kind. He has in mind the accomplishments of Edison and Napoleon, not the presumed potentialities of young John Doe, whose Stanford-Binet IQ is 180. Many John Does do not fulfill their childhood promise so far as creativity is concerned; they become highly intelligent and even profound adults, learning far more than less bright individuals, but do not produce important originals. Some psychologists assume that high-IQ persons would be conspicuously creative if their dormant powers were allowed to unfold naturally, that high test intelligence is a definite indicator of latent creative ability, and that low intelligence precludes any really significant origi-