 Creativity is a salient feature of human behavior. We are all, at least to some extent, creative.
But there are two factors that determine the creative success of one individual with respect to another: individual characteristics (intelligence, personality, temperament, etc.) and environment, meaning the economic, historical, cultural and social context in which the individual grows, learns, and eventually acts.
Intelligence
There are many connections between intelligence and creativity, though there is no stable and constant cause-effect relation. In other words, it is easier to be creative if you’re intelligent, but that doesn’t mean you are very creative because you are very intelligent, and vice versa. Creativity requires other qualities besides intelligence.
Indeed, a strongly analytical type of intelligence can impede creativity. According to psychiatrist Silvano Arieti, it could lead to excessive rigidity and self-criticism: superior ability to deduce according the laws of logic and mathematics creates disciplined thinkers but not necessarily creative ones.
On the other hand, what is known as synthetic intelligence is a set of factors. In general terms, intelligence is the result of the conscious activity of the brain, with a prevalently adaptive function. It consists of a set of abilities connected to learning, reasoning, imagining, identifying problems and solving them.
Intelligence is essentially what humans use to interact effectively with the world around them by activating a broad range of appropriate behaviors and discovering new behaviors to respond effectively to new stimuli.
If describing intelligence is difficult, quantifying it is even more complicated. In fact, the value of the various tests that measure IQ is relative.
The first intelligence test was published by Alfred Binet in 1905, who designed it to identify children who required extra help in school. The test was improved by the German psychologist William Stern and later by the American Lewis Terman of Stanford University, who redubbed it the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale. The Stanford-Binet measures the relationship between biological and mental age, such that if a child of 10 obtains results on a par with the average 13-year-old, his IQ is 130.
In 1939, David Wechsler published the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS), later extending the test to children (Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children, or WISC). Today we use updated versions of both tests (WAIS-III e WISC-IV), which contain a battery of questions that measure general knowledge, verbal skills, the ability to read and interpret images and logical acumen. The results are not based on the subject’s age but on the difference between the individual’s score and the mean score. Clearly these results are influenced both the extent and quality of the individual’s education and by the degree of his or her integration into the culture that designed the test itself.
This doesn’t mean that if we all had the same education, we’d all be equally intelligent. What it means is that the deck is shuffled twice: the first time at the moment of conception, and the second during childhood (and to a lesser extent, adolescence).
DNA does matter: scholars place the percentage of its influence on intelligence between 40 and 80%. This of course leaves a percentage between 20 and 60% to the influence of the environment.
Environment weighs particularly heavy – up to 60% in the negative sense – on the intellectual development of children born into underprivileged families. Poor nutrition, partially or completely illiterate mothers, an absence of books in the home are all factors that lower a child’s IQ.
In short, genetic makeup gives every individual his or her potential degree of intelligence, but environment and education are what enable or impede that potential from being realized.
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The factors of success in individual creativity
Intelligence (DNA + environment)
Talent
Determination
Basic education
Specific skills
Absence of discrimination (race, gender, age, religion…).
| | Intelligence: beyond test results
One partial escape route from the cultural trap of intelligence testing has been posited by the American psychologist Howard Gardner, who in the early 1980s theorized the existence of multiple intelligences, each localized in a different area of the brain, each with the potential to achieve brilliant results in a particular field and/or relative to a specific task. There are seven different kinds of intelligence, or macro-areas identified by Gardner: linguistic, logical-mathematical, spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, musical, interpersonal and intrapersonal. Gardner later added two more – naturalistic intelligence and existential intelligence.
Indeed, intuition tells us that in the context of performing in a ballet, a dancer is much more intelligent than a Nobel Prize-winning physicist. Or that faced with surviving in the forest, a Bushman child is more intelligent than both (even if his performance on a Western intelligence test would be very poor).
Robert Sternberg, an American cognitive psychologist, hypothesized in the late ‘90s that the kind of intelligence that translates to success in life is comprised of three related but distinct abilities: analytical thought (the capacity to evaluate, analyze, compare and refute information), creative thought (the ability to invent and discover) and practical thought (the ability to understand situations, set goals and achieve them, cultivate awareness of and curiosity about the world, and lastly to choose the contexts that best allow one to express one’s analytical and/or creative abilities). From this viewpoint, the capacity to choose the profession that one would be best at is in itself a form of intelligence.
In 2000, Justin Kruger and Robert Dunning of Cornell University addressed the importance of knowing how to understand ourselves in relation to different contexts, calling it social intelligence. The two authors discovered that incompetent people tend to overestimate their own abilities and to underestimate those of other people. If they are trained to improve their objectively low skill level, only then can they recognize their initial incompetence in the area where they believed to excel. This theory, known as the Dunning-Kruger Effect, sparked great interest among business management scholars, and earned the authors an Ig Nobel Prize, given to research that “first makes people laugh, then makes them think”.
Around the same period, another American psychologist, Daniel Goleman, signaled the importance of emotional intelligence, which is the capacity to recognize one’s own emotional responses (fear, anxiety, anger, sadness) to environmental stimule and to then express them and orient them positively, to postpone gratification and govern impulses, to be empathetic and fit in socially, to listen, to work in a group, to not be influenced by prejudices.
Talent
Only by keeping in mind the interaction between DNA and environment can we address the issue of talent, intended as an individual ability to do something with natural ease, requiring less time and energy to obtain results decidedly superior to the average. This can assume various forms, such as musical talent, artistic or mathematical talent, even organizational talent.
The fact that “family vocations” exist – i.e. when several members of the same family excel at music, for example, or painting – seems to confirm the importance of the genetic factor. J.S. Bach’s father was an organist, his uncles were professional musicians, as were his sons. Even his daughters, despite the obstacles of the time, became singers or instrumentalists. Thomas Mann’s older brother was a writer, and so were his two sons. Eduardo de Filippo was the natural son of comic actor and playwright Eduardo Scarpetta and the brother of actors Titina e Peppino. Arthur Kornberg, winner of of Nobel for Medicine in 1959 for synthesizing DNA, was the father of Roger Kornberg, who won the same prize 47 years later for his work on RNA – and this is just one of six instances where the Nobel Prize was won by a father and later by his son.
Perhaps, though, it could be that growing up in an environment where an artistic or scientific discipline is an intimate and vital part of everyday life and expressed at high levels of excellence has a certain weight in terms of education and disposition that goes beyond DNA. For an ability to be fully developed, it is in fact essential that there exists the opportunity to measure oneself, starting in childhood, against people who are very good at something and to learn from them. While we can’t choose our parents, we would do well to at least choose good teachers.
Speaking of teachers, having talent becomes a handicap when it makes things so easy that dedicating oneself to further improvement seems useless and when children are praised, whether at home or in school, more for their natural ability to do something easily than for their commitment to doing it well. Recent studies in pedagogy explicitly recommend acknowledging and rewarding good performance with a “Good job, you worked hard and earned it” rather than “Good job, you’re really an exceptional kid”.
Talent is a gift that vanishes or transforms into a disadvantage if it is not oriented toward hard work and trained to withstand inevitable frustration.
The etymological roots of the word “talent”, from the Greek tàlanton and the Latin talèntum, originally referred to a scale for measuring weight, and by extension, to the object weighed, eventually morphing into the term for coins, since money was weighed in those days.
In the Gospel of Matthew there is a Parable of the Talents, and in Luke there is another very similar story that speaks of money as well. In both parables, a master about to depart on a journey leaves each of his servants a sum of money (different sums for Matthew, the same sum for Luke). Upon his return, he rewards the servants who used their money productively and punishes those who stashed it away for fear of losing it.
By metaphorical extension, the word “talent” has been associated with the most precious intellectual gifts: ingenuity, ability and inclination. These can be of great worth, or none at all. It depends entirely on how one uses them. To express them fully, one needs determination.
Determination
The inventor Thomas Edison famously said: Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration. Accordingly, a 'genius' is often merely a talented person who has done all of his or her homework. And Isaac Newton: If I have made any valuable discoveries, it is due more to patient attention than to any other talent. The writer Jean Genêt: Creation is not a light-hearted game. The creator commits to a terrible adventure, which is to take upon himself all of the dangers that his creatures run. E l'hair stylist Vidal Sassoon: The only place where success comes before work is in the dictionary.
The differences between writing a novel and inventing the light bulb or a new hairstyle are less than one might think. The creative processes that lie at the root of any invention or discovery are substantially alike. Starting with the identification of a problem, a potentiality or an opportunity, one begins assembling certain elements, which are then put in order to formulate hypotheses which are carefully elaborated. The underlying intention of any research is fully conscious, but the most important part – the part that generates new insights – is largely unconscious, and its duration is unpredictable. Some solutions that initially seem brilliant turn out to be wrong or unfounded or impracticable, such that sometimes one must have the courage to recognize that it’s time to start again from scratch.
In order to tolerate the pressure of creative endeavor, whether at the individual or group level, it is essential to develop the ability to overcome frustration, to continually re-motivate oneself, and to maintain direction and focus even in conditions of uncertainty and solitude. Over the course of this process, even when one is not literally alone but working in a group, it is easy to feel lost or disoriented.
It is equally essential to recognize that creative work has an obsessive component: it’s hard to stop. Those who supervise groups of creative individuals know that the problem is not making sure they work, but that they lose sight of the final goal. Determination is what enables creative people to govern, at least within certain limits, the tendency toward obsession and not be swept away by it.
Marcel Proust wrote that the real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes. He is talking about creative personality and temperament: the union of the strength of the self (i.e. resilience and perseverance) and the will to challenge tradition (dissatisfaction, impatience, unrest, the desire to push past boundaries).
Various studies have suggested that creativity is the fertile outcome of a form of mental maladjustment or disturbance. Indeed, the incidence of mental illness among poets, musicians and painters is higher than average.
Basic education
Clearly, the possession of basic skills acquired through education, which is essential for realizing one’s intelligence, is equally essential for being creative.
Likewise, it is clear that basic skills alone are not enough. In order for an individual’s creativity to be fully expressed, excellence in a specific skill is indispensable – that is, specialization in the field of application of a given creative activity – along with the opportunity to work in a favorable social environment.
Education and skill, however, do not necessarily derive from scholastic success. Victor Goertzel analyzed 400 eminent figures of our time and discovered that 60 percent of them had serious problems in school. This becomes understandable when correlated with the fact that a trait shared by creative people is a marked tendency toward anti-conformism and an intolerance for rules. Moreover Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, Winston Churchill, Walt Disney and, it would seem, Leonardo da Vinci as well were all dyslexic – that is, unable from an early age to translate a system of signs (the written word) into sound (the spoken word).
Einstein in particular had numerous scholastic misadventures. He was in conflict with his teachers in middle school, finding the German teaching system “disgusting”, and he failed to be admitted to Zurich Polytechnic despite excellent grades in math and physics.
Howard Gardner writes: Genuinely new or original activities can arise only when in an individual has mastered the field in which he works... We do not know, however, at which point in his development this originality will manifest itself, or if it is a choice accessible to anyone who has pursued an intellectual field to its highest levels... The first seeds of originality may however date back to an anterior past and reflect the temperament, personality or basic cognitive style of an individual: in this view, individuals would be identified very early as potential creators of original works… Further support of this point of view comes from numerous studies of the “creative” personality. These studies demonstrate that particularly creative individuals in a particular environment share certain personality traits such as the strength of the self and the will to challenge tradition; these traits also help explain the absence of a relationship between the quantitative measurements of creativity and the results of more conventional intelligence tests, at least above a certain IQ level.
Specific skills
Creativity is at once curious, informal, open and specialized. Creative people, be they scientists, painters, writers, designers, architects or musicians – pay a great deal of attention to the technical quality of what they produce: it’s the details that make the difference. Not surprisingly, another component of obsession is perfectionism.
Stylist Chiara Boni recounts how kids come to me with drawings of clothes. They’re beautiful to look at, but impossible to make. So I ask them, how does this cut you invented turn? How does this dress work in the back?
Without a deep knowledge of one’s subject and the rules that govern it, inventing something new is difficult: in order to surpass an existing rule and replace it with a new and better one, it is better to have fully internalized the existing rule first. From this standpoint, imitation can serve as an important learning tool (for example, writing or painting “in the style of…” as a means of developing one’s own).
Tullio De Mauro says: I don’t think it’s easy to imitate. But without imitation I wouldn’t learn the vocabulary of a language, nor would I understand the constructs with which to generate new sentences. Without imitation I wouldn’t have the possibility of changing the rules of a language. I have on my side, among others, the ancient, ingenious, creative Greeks, who liked to repeat the proverb: The art of a ceramicist lies in knowing how to make a bowl. Without knowing how to make a simple bowl, you will never be able to create splendidly decorated vases.
Mastery of a specific skill and a healthy respect for one’s field of endeavor (another trait shared by creative people) mark the clear boundary that separates creativity from transgression. Both disobey existing rules, but the goals and the results are very different.
Yet the common perception, with an assist from the media, is that “creativity” and “transgression” are synonymous, and elicit the same degree of admiring wonderment, as though transgression were an especially lively and spectacular form of creativity. No one would deny the fact that it is spectacular: the destruction of something, whether the demolition of a skyscraper or the Sex Pistols smashing their guitars onstage or the bombing of a city always has an element of the spectacular..
But while creativity always has a component of transgression, transgression rarely has a component of creativity.
If the Mona Lisa is an instance of creativity that totally broke the rules of portraiture and replaced them with new ones, and Duchamp’s mustachioed Mona Lisa also had a creative component, going around drawing mustaches on Renaissance portraits is simply a stupid idea.
Anyone can be good at transgression, incompetents included, as long as they have a sufficient dose of aggression or shamelessness. But to create something new, you need to know what you’re doing, be able to do it well, and have both a plan and a goal. It is informed skill that makes the difference.
Male and female creativity: is there a difference?
Until very recently in the developed Western world, access to education was lower for women than for men. This is still the case today in developing countries, where two thirds of the planet’s 875 million illiterate adults are female. In southern Asia, Africa and the Caribbean, males get an average of 1 to 2.5 years more schooling than females (Unicef, 2007). Yet in 2002, 40% of the world’s doctoral degrees were earned by women.
A few facts from Italy: in 1900, there were 250 women enrolled in all the country’s universities. In 1950, women constituted one quarter of the university population. In 1993, for the first time more women received university degrees than men. In 2006, women comprised 58% of college graduates and 66% of those with final scores higher than 106/110 (Miur, 2007).
Keeping these oppressive socio-cultural disadvantages in mind, it is not surprising that even in the recent past, female creativity was less fruitful than male creativity. There are good reasons for believing, with the progressive reduction of the educational gap between the sexes, that female creativity will produce surprising results in the near future.
Scientific skills, and more specifically mathematics, which according to the common wisdom are “genetically” the bane of all females, seem to be closely correlated with a given culture’s level of female emancipation.
To grasp the truth of this, let’s compare two sets of data, from the Gender Gap Index and the PISA test, as recent study from 2008 published in the prestigious journal Science has done.
The Gender Gap Index measures, country by country, gender discrimination on the basis of four variables: employment and economic opportunity, education, health and longevity, political representation and influence. The lower a country is in the rankings, the more its women are subjected to discrimination. In 2007, Italy ranked an embarrassing 84th place, after Bolivia, Indonesia, Cyprus and Kenya, dropping seven places from the previous year. In the first four places were Sweden, Norway, Finland and Iceland.
The PISA test (Program for International Student Assessment) periodically measures the cognitive abilities of 15-year-old students in thirty OECD countries in terms of literacy (defined as the ability to read and write and above all comprehend what one reads and writes), science mathematics and problem solving. Italy’s performance is equally abysmal in the PISA test, consistently ranking among the lowest five.
In the countries where gender discrimination is extremely low or non-existent, male and female performance in mathematics and science is practically the same – except in Iceland, where women perform better than men.
A charming anecdote illustrates how quickly things are changing. In February of 2006, Lawrence Summers, then the dean of Harvard University, stated that women are biologically disadvantaged, and that they are predisposed, more by nature than by social conditioning, to not invest all their energy in their careers. Because of these pronouncements, Summers was voted out of his position and forced to resign. A few months later, he was replaced by Catherine Drew Gilpin Faust, famous scholar of American history and the first female dean of Harvard after three centuries of male rule.
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