Dean K Simonton
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 90636 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Dean K Simonton |
| PRENOMES | Dean K |
| SOBRENOME | Simonton |
| ASSINATURA | SIMONTON D K |
| AFILIAÇÕES | University of California, Davis |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7709-7977 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 99 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 309 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 99 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 1975 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 9 |
Wallas's Four Creativity Stages, Campbell's Two‐Stage BVSR, and the Three‐Criterion Definition of Creativity
The Wallas four‐stages and Campbell's two‐stage Blind‐Variation and Selective‐Retention (BVSR) represent two classic stage conceptions of creative thought. However, these two stage conceptions can be integrated by taking advantage of a quantitative definition of personal creativity, which is taken as the multiplicative product of originality, utility, and surprise. The three parameters that underlie these criteria (initial probability, final util…
The Blind-Variation and Selective-Retention Theory of Creativity
This article provides an update on the blind-variation and selective-retention theory of creativity (BVSR), beginning with an overview of its historical development. That brief narrative is then followed by a more extensive summary of recent enhancements in BVSR’s conceptual foundations, including formal definitions of creative, sighted, and blind variations. These enhancements show that BVSR follows as a direct corollary of the three-criterion d…
Advancing Creativity Theory and Research
This manifesto, discussed by 20 scholars, representing diverse lines of creativity research, marks a conceptual shift within the field. Socio‐cultural approaches have made substantial contributions to the concept of creativity over recent decades and today can provide a set of propositions to guide our understanding of past research and to generate new directions of inquiry and practice. These propositions are urgently needed in response to the t…
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 (1…
Spontaneity in Evolution, Learning, Creativity, and Free Will
This chapter proposes that spontaneous variation has a central role in biological evolution, operant conditioning, creative thinking, and personal agency. But to support these advantageous outcomes, this spontaneity must be joined with some selection process or procedure that decides which alleles, behaviors, ideas, or choices are most adaptive or useful. The argument begins with spontaneous variations in evolutionary theory, and then turns to op…
Four Psychological Perspectives on Creativity
Creativity is a unique feature of human thinking and behavior that is essential to our species' survival, future progress, and even the rise and fall of civilizations. To understand this highly complex phenomenon, we need to adopt an interdisciplinary and multimethod approach. Because creativity happens at many different levels both intra‐ and interindividual, the psychological science of creativity currently lacks a strong paradigmatic coherence…
Psychopathology, adversity, and creativity
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 experien…
Taking the U.S. Patent Office Criteria Seriously
Although creativity has recently attracted considerable theoretical and empirical research, researchers have yet to reach a consensus on how best to define the phenomenon. To help establish a consensus, a definition is proposed that is based on the three criteria used by the United States Patent Office to evaluate applications for patent protection. The modified version uses the criteria of novelty, utility, and surprise. Moreover, creativity ass…
Consensus and contrasts in consumers' cinematic assessments
Motion pictures provide among the most conspicuous manifestations of worldwide popular culture. One specific manifestation of this universal presence appears in the cinematic assessments compiled and updated on Internet Web sites. This empirical inquiry investigated the consumer ratings that the Internet Movie Database used to determine the “Top-250” all-time great movies. Of particular interest was how these ratings depended on gender (male vs. …
Diversifying experiences enhance cognitive flexibility
The Cambridge Handbook of Creativity
The Cambridge Handbook of Creativity is a comprehensive scholarly handbook on creativity from the most respected psychologists, researchers and educators. This handbook serves both as a thorough introduction to the field of creativity and as an invaluable reference and current source of important information. It covers such diverse topics as the brain, education, business, and world cultures. The first section, 'Basic Concepts', is designed to in…
Little Science to Big Science Big Scientists to Little Scientists
(2010). Little Science to Big Science Big Scientists to Little Scientists? Gifted and Talented International: Vol. 25, No. 1, pp. 27-29
Research notes
Varieties of (Scientific) Creativity
Prior research supports the inference that scientific disciplines can be ordered into a hierarchy ranging from the "hard" natural sciences to the "soft" social sciences. This ordering corresponds with such objective criteria as disciplinary consensus, knowledge obsolescence rate, anticipation frequency, theories-to-laws ratio, lecture disfluency, and age at recognition. It is then argued that this hierarchy can be extrapolated to encompass the hu…
The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance
This book was the first handbook where the world's foremost 'experts on expertise' reviewed our scientific knowledge on expertise and expert performance and how experts may differ from non-experts in terms of their development, training, reasoning, knowledge, social support, and innate talent. Methods are described for the study of experts' knowledge and their performance of representative tasks from their domain of expertise. The development of …
Presidential IQ, Openness, Intellectual Brilliance, and Leadership
Individual differences in intelligence are consistently associated with leader performance, including the assessed performance of presidents of the United States. Given this empirical significance, IQ scores were estimated for all 42 chief executives from George Washington to G. W. Bush. The scores were obtained by applying missing‐values estimation methods (expectation‐maximization) to published assessments of (a) IQ (Cox, 1926; n = 8), (b) Inte…
Putting the Gift Back into Giftedness
Although giftedness and talent are semantically linked to genetic endowment, some psychologists have questioned whether innate gifts really exist. Instead, these researchers argue that so-called giftedness or talent merely involves the acquisition of domain-specific expertise by means of deliberate practice. However, these arguments are deficient because they (a) exaggerate the empirical support for the extreme nurture position and (b) overlook t…
Creativity in Science
Psychologists, sociologists, philosophers, historians - and even scientists themselves - have often tried to decipher the basis for creativity in science. Some have attributed creativity to a special logic, the so-called scientific method, whereas others have pointed to the inspirations of genius or to the inevitable workings of the zeitgeist. Finally, some have viewed scientific breakthroughs as the product of chance, as witnessed in the numerou…
The “Best Actress” Paradox
Scientific creativity as constrained stochastic behavior
Psychologists have primarily investigated scientific creativity from 2 contrasting in vitro perspectives: correlational studies of the creative person and experimental studies of the creative process. Here the same phenomenon is scrutinized using a 3rd, in vivo perspective, namely, the actual creative products that emerge from individual scientific careers and communities of creative scientists. This behavioral analysis supports the inference tha…
Creative Development as Acquired Expertise
Creativity
Although many psychologists have expressed an interest in the phenomenon of creativity, psychological research on this topic did not rapidly expand until after J. P. Guilford claimed, in his 1950 APA presidential address, that this topic deserved far more attention than it was then receiving. This article reviews the progress psychologists have made in understanding creativity since Guilford's call to arms. Research progress has taken place on 4 …
Statistical Correlations, Nomothetic Principles, and Exceptions to the Rule
At the outset I should admit that I am more positively disposed toward Sulloway's (1996) magnum opus than is the author of the target article (see Simonton, 1997). My positive disposition stems from three sources—substantive, theoretical, and methodological. Concerning the first source, I am more receptive to the notion that birth order may bear some relation to various forms of exceptional achievement. Galton (1874) was the first behavioral scie…
Origins of Genius
How can we account for the sudden appearance of such dazzling artists and scientists as Mozart, Shakespeare, Darwin, or Einstein? How can we define such genius? What conditions or personality traits seem to produce exceptionally creative people? Is the association between genius and madness really just a myth? These and many other questions are brilliantly illuminated in The Origins of Genius. Dean Simonton convincingly argues that creativity can…
Strange Brains and Genius
Presidential IQ, Openness, Intellectual Brilliance, and Leadership
Individual differences in intelligence are consistently associated with leader performance, including the assessed performance of presidents of the United States. Given this empirical significance, IQ scores were estimated for all 42 chief executives from George Washington to G. W. Bush. The scores were obtained by applying missing‐values estimation methods (expectation‐maximization) to published assessments of (a) IQ (Cox, 1926; n = 8), (b) Inte…
Diversifying experiences enhance cognitive flexibility
Presidential Greatness
you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at
Scientific creativity as constrained stochastic behavior
Psychologists have primarily investigated scientific creativity from 2 contrasting in vitro perspectives: correlational studies of the creative person and experimental studies of the creative process. Here the same phenomenon is scrutinized using a 3rd, in vivo perspective, namely, the actual creative products that emerge from individual scientific careers and communities of creative scientists. This behavioral analysis supports the inference tha…
Sociocultural context of individual creativity
Presidential personality
Career landmarks in science
A conceptual framework is introduced for interpreting individual differences in the developmental location of the first, best, and last contributions of a creative career. Eight hypotheses are offered that specify how the placement of the 3 landmarks over the life span should vary according to both individual differences (in age at career onset, lifetime productivity, and eminence) and interdisci-plinary contrasts (resulting from the inherent cog…
Presidential style
Une analyse des informations tirees de la biographie de 39 presidents des Etats-Unis renseigne sur les styles de leadership et les facteurs qui leur sont associes
Age and outstanding achievement
This article examines, in four sections, the substantial literature on the longitudinal connection between personal age and outstanding achievement in domains of creativity and leadership. First, the key empirical findings are surveyed, with special focus on the typical age curve and its variations across disciplines, the association between precocity, longevity, and production rate, and the linkage between quantity and quality of output over the…
Foreign influence and national achievement
Foreign Influence and National Achievement: The Impact of Open Milieus on Japanese Civilization Input from alien cultures might stimulate exceptional national achievements. This hypothesis was tested by applying generational time-series analysis to a society whose history shows tremendous variation in its receptiveness to the external world ( viz., Japan between 580 and 1939). After required controls and data transformations were introduced, the …
Motivation and Personality
Varieties of (Scientific) Creativity
Prior research supports the inference that scientific disciplines can be ordered into a hierarchy ranging from the "hard" natural sciences to the "soft" social sciences. This ordering corresponds with such objective criteria as disciplinary consensus, knowledge obsolescence rate, anticipation frequency, theories-to-laws ratio, lecture disfluency, and age at recognition. It is then argued that this hierarchy can be extrapolated to encompass the hu…
Presidents' wives and First Ladies
Putting the Best Leaders in the White House
you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at
Leaders of American psychology, 1879–1967
Building on previous work in the metasciences, this article examines 69 eminent psychologists who helped make the United States a center of disciplinary activity. After measuring professional eminence (occupying the American Psychological Association presidency and posthumous reputation), creative output (using both citation indicators and a content analysis of titles), and career development (aspects of graduate training and institutional affili…
Dispositional attributions of (presidential) leadership
The vice-presidential succession effect
Artistic creativity and interpersonal relationships across and within generations
Thematic fame, melodic originality, and musical zeitgeist
Presidential greatness and personality
McCann (1992) offered a new set of equations that predict presidential greatness. He explicitly argued that his new equations contradict the attributional model put forward by Simonton (1986c, 1987b). However, several conceptual and statistical problems may undermine the force of his argument
Multiple discovery and invention
Independent Discovery in Science and Technology
Social determinists have argued that the occurrence of independent discoveries and inventions demonstrates the inevitability of techno-scientific progress. Yet the frequency of such multiples may be adequately predicted by a probabilistic model, especially the Poisson model suggested by Price. A detailed inquiry reveals that the Poisson distribution can predict almost all the observed variation in the frequency distribution of multiples collected…
Creative productivity, age, and stress
The determinants of creative productivity were specified in the form of six hypotheses. Using a multivariate cross-sectional time-series design with several controls, the lives and works of 10 classical composers were analyzed into consecutive 5-year age periods. Two independent measures of productivity were operationalized (works and themes), with each measure subdivided into major and minor compositions according to a citation criterion. It was…
Cross-sectional time-series experiments
In the past, statistical analyses for time-series experiments have usually operated with a single-case model, thereby limiting the general applicability of the designs. In this article, alternative analytical procedures are developed for cross-sectional time-series in which the sample size is large
Galton's Problem, Autocorrelation, and Diffusion Coefficients
The linked pair solution to Galton's problem is examined from the per spective of the autocorrelation problem in economics. The estimated de grees of freedom, but not the correlations, are shown to be inflated due to diffusional and historical associations. An alternate form of the linked pair method is derived from the Orcutt-James solution to the autocorrelation problem. This technique permits unrestricted sampling of societies along a diffusio…
Interdisciplinary Creativity Over Historical Time
The interdisciplinary relationships among 15 kinds of creative achievement were examined over 130 generations of European history (controlling for linear, quadratic, and cubic time trends). A P-technique factor analysis located three major interdisciplinary clusters: (a) discursive (science, philosophy, literature, and music), (b) presentational (painting, sculpture, and architecture), and (c) rationalism-mysticism (physical science and general p…
Creativity, Task Complexity, and Intuitive versus Analytical Problem Solving
Using 40 Ss the relative effectiveness of intuitive and analytical problem solving was determined as a function of creativity and task complexity. A three-way analysis of variance yielded a significant three-way interaction between thinking mode (intuition or analysis), task complexity, and creativity (as measured by the Barron-Welsh Art Scale). More creative Ss found intuition more effective for a complex task, analysis on the simple task; this …
Galton's Problem, Autocorrelation, and Diffusion Coefficients
The linked pair solution to Galton's problem is examined from the per spective of the autocorrelation problem in economics. The estimated de grees of freedom, but not the correlations, are shown to be inflated due to diffusional and historical associations. An alternate form of the linked pair method is derived from the Orcutt-James solution to the autocorrelation problem. This technique permits unrestricted sampling of societies along a diffusio…
Sociocultural context of individual creativity
Age and Literary Creativity
Research on the relation between age and creative achievement could be improved by using: (a) cross-cultural and transhistorical data, and (b) multivariate rather than bivariate analyses. A sample of 420 literary creators was drawn from histories, anthologies, and biographical dictionaries of Western, Near Eastern, and Far Eastern literatures. The modal productive age was then regressed on field and civilization categorical variables, longevity, …
Ideological Diversity and Creativity
Using political fragmentation and imperial instability as indicators, an earlier study attempted to show that cultural diversity has a positive influence on personal creative development. This paper re-examines that hypothesis by first introducing ideological diversity as a more direct indicator and then testing for relationships using cross-lagged correlation analysis. With data extending over 122 generations (20-year periods) of Western history…
Biographical determinants of achieved eminence
Ranked eminence of creators and leaders was hypothesized to be a function of both substantive (developmental and productive) variables and methodological artifacts. Cox's sample of 301 geniuses was reexamined using multiple-regression techniques. The results indicated that ranked eminence is (a) a curvilinear inverted-U function of education for creators but a negative linear function for leaders, (b) a positive linear function of versatility for…
The Causal Relation between War and Scientific Discovery
Using cross-lagged correlation analyses as the basis for causal inference, the relationship between war and scientific discovery and invention was explored in seven European nations. Measures of war duration and scientific productivity were generated using 14 or 16 quarter-century periods, or "generations," as the unit of analysis within each nation. The analyses indicated statistically significant associations for England and Russia (war encoura…
Philosophical eminence, beliefs, and zeitgeist
The Sociopolitical Context of Philosophical Beliefs
This paper applies a quasi-experimental design to the problem of the causal relation between intellectual and political movements. A sample of 122 consecutive “generations” (or 20-year periods) was drawn from European history (540 B.C. to 1900 A.D.). A cross-lagged correlation analysis indicated the following intergenerational influences: (1) political fragmentation has a positive impact on the emergence of empiricism, skepticism-criticism-fideis…
Women's Fashions and War
Previous research has suggested that the fashion changes in women's dress may be influenced by contemporary political context. This suggestion was tested for European women from 1797 to 1936. International war was found to induce women to wear the short “Empire” mode, whereas international peace was found to encourage the long “Hour Glass” mode. By comparison, intranational war apparently nurtures the short Hour Glass mode, while intranational pe…
Creative productivity, age, and stress
The determinants of creative productivity were specified in the form of six hypotheses. Using a multivariate cross-sectional time-series design with several controls, the lives and works of 10 classical composers were analyzed into consecutive 5-year age periods. Two independent measures of productivity were operationalized (works and themes), with each measure subdivided into major and minor compositions according to a citation criterion. It was…
Eminence, creativity, and geographical marginality
Cross-sectional time-series experiments
In the past, statistical analyses for time-series experiments have usually operated with a single-case model, thereby limiting the general applicability of the designs. In this article, alternative analytical procedures are developed for cross-sectional time-series in which the sample size is large
Intergenerational Stimulation, Reaction, and Polarization
It is suggested that Ghuman (1977) ignored studies which found significant, although only moderate, relationships between field dependence and personality variables. Secondly, it is suggested that his measures may have been insensitive in detecting relationships between field dependence and personality variables
Independent Discovery in Science and Technology
Social determinists have argued that the occurrence of independent discoveries and inventions demonstrates the inevitability of techno-scientific progress. Yet the frequency of such multiples may be adequately predicted by a probabilistic model, especially the Poisson model suggested by Price. A detailed inquiry reveals that the Poisson distribution can predict almost all the observed variation in the frequency distribution of multiples collected…
Time series analysis of literary creativity
Reply to Algina and Swaminathan
Was Napoleon a Military Genius? Score
Carlyle's “Great Man” theory and Tolstoy's “Zeitgeist” theory provide two alternative explanations of historical events. Yet a quantitative study of the military career of Napoleon and his contemporaries demonstrates that both views account for a significant percentage of the variance in military success during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars
To the Editors, Social Studies of Science Davis, 13 February 1979 Dear Sirs
Reply to Algina and Swaminathan
Multiple discovery and invention
Thematic fame and melodic originality in classical music
In order to understand the foundation of eminence in cultural activities, an attempt was made at learning why some works creators produce are more famous than others. This paper specifically investigates the differential fame of 5,046 themes by 10 eminent composers of classical music. Hypotheses derived from past research in creativity and esthetics were tested using a computerized content analysis. The results show that (a) the fame of a musical…
Thematic fame, melodic originality, and musical zeitgeist
Land battles, generals, and armies
Psychology (89 obras) · Social Psychology (75 obras) · Social Psychology (43 obras) · Creativity in Education and Neuroscience (37 obras) · Creativity (32 obras) · Sociology (32 obras) · Epistemology (30 obras) · Political science (27 obras) · Developmental psychology (26 obras) · Philosophy (25 obras)