The Wiley Handbook of Genius E-Book

Dean Keith Simonton

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 1595

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

With contributions from a multi-disciplinary group of expert contributors, this is the first handbook to discuss all aspects of genius, a topic that endlessly provokes and fascinates. * The first handbook to discuss all aspects of genius with contributions from a multi-disciplinary group of experts * Covers the origins, characteristics, careers, and consequences of genius with a focus on cognitive science, individual differences, life-span development, and social context * Explores individual genius, creators, leaders, and performers as diverse as Queen Elizabeth I, Simón Bolívar, Mohandas Gandhi, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Leo Tolstoy, John William Coltrane, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Martha Graham. * Utilizes a variety of approaches--from genetics, neuroscience, and longitudinal studies to psychometric tests, interviews, and case studies--to provide a comprehensive treatment of the subject

Leseprobe

The Wiley Handbook of Genius

Edited by

Dean Keith Simonton

This edition first published 2014 © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The Wiley handbook of genius / edited by Dean Keith Simonton.         pages cm     Includes bibliographical references and index.     ISBN 978-1-118-36740-7 (cloth)   1. Genius.    2. Genius–Handbooks, manuals, etc.    I. Simonton, Dean Keith.    II. Title: Handbook of genius.     BF412.W48 2014     153.9′8–dc23

2014000616

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover image: Top row, l-r: Einstein (©AF archive / Alamy ); Marie Curie (© Album / Superstock); Mozart (©FineArt / Alamy ). Bottom row, l-r: Frida Kahlo ( Lucas Vallecillos / age fotostock / SuperStock); Bobby Fischer (©INTERFOTO / Alamy ); Jimi Hendrix (©AF archive / Alamy ).

CONTENTS

List of Contributors

Preface

References

Part I Perspectives

1 The Genius in History

The Relationship between History and Genius

History and the Psychology of Genius

The Psychology of Genius: Theory Across History

The Psychology of Genius: Historical Methods

The Genius in History

Notes

References

2 The Psychobiography of Genius

Introduction

George W. Bush

John Lennon

Truman Capote

Implicit Prescriptions

References

3 Interviewing Highly Eminent Creators

Why Interview Eminent Creators?

Interview Research on Eminent Creators and Its Place in the Study of Creativity

Major Interview Studies of Eminent Creativity

Other Interview Research on Creativity

Best Practices for Interviewing Eminent Creators

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

References

4 Psychometric Studies of Scientific Talent and Eminence

Scientific Talent and Eminence Defined

Psychometric Investigations of Scientific Talent and Eminence

Summary and Future Directions

References

5 Historiometric Studies of Genius

Introduction

Illustrations

Conclusion

References

Part II Processes

6 The Neuroscience of Creative Genius

What Is Neuroscience?

What Tools from Neuroscience Can Be Used to Study Creativity?

What Is Creative Genius?

How Should a Neuroscientist Identify Subjects for Study?

What Kinds of Tasks Can Be Used to Assess Creativity Using Neuroimaging Tools?

What Have We Learned from Our Work So Far?

Conclusions

References

7 Artistic Genius and Creative Cognition

Introduction

Hypotheses

Visual Arts

Literary Arts

Musical Arts

Comparisons

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

References

8 Case Studies of Genius

Extraordinary Thinking As the Basis for Genius-Level Creativity

Genius-Level Creativity As the Expression of Ordinary Thought Processes

Continuity with the Past in Creative Thinking

Structure in the Creative Process

Cognitive Components of Creative Thinking: Edison's Invention of the Light Bulb

External Triggers to Creativity

The Ordinary Basis for Creative Thinking: Conclusions and Several Remaining Questions

A Final Question: What Then Is the Basis for Genius?

References

9 Virtual Genius

Introduction

Background

Definition

Human Examples of Genius

Computer Examples of Genius

More Possibilities

Conclusions

References

Part III Attributes

10 Varieties of Genius

Types of Genius

Conclusions

References

11 Cognitive Disinhibition, Creativity, and Psychopathology

Creativity and Creative Genius

Cognitive Disinhibition

Creativity and Mental Disorders Associated with Disinhibition

The Shared Vulnerability Model of Creativity and Psychopathology

Conclusions

References

12 Openness to Experience

Openness and Personality Structure

Properties of Openness

Conceptualizing Openness

Case Studies of Personality and Genius

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Notes

References

13 Political and Military Geniuses

Measuring the Quality of Political and Military Leadership

Subject Selection in this Chapter

Measurement at a Distance

Methodology of the Current Chapter

Hypotheses of the Current Study

Method

Biographies

Results

Discussion

Acknowledgments

Notes

References

Part IV Origins

14 Genetics of Intellectual and Personality Traits Associated with Creative Genius

Classical Quantitative Genetic Models in Humans

Intelligence

Genetic and Environmental Influences on Intelligence

Personality and Psychopathology

Genetic and Environmental Influences on Personality and Psychopatholgy

Genetic Influences on Miscellaneous Traits Relevant to Creative Genius

Molecular Genetics and Genius

Emergenesis

Autism

An Aside on Distributions

Are Geniuses Black Swans, Dragon-Kings, or Hopeful Monsters?

The Relevance of Dragon-Kings and Hopeful Monsters to Our Understanding of the Emergence of Creative Genius

Note

References

15 Child Prodigies and Adult Genius

Globally Gifted Children

Unevenly Gifted Children

What Does Giftedness in Visual Art and Music Look Like?

How Much is Innate?

The Role of Families

The Social and Emotional Lives of Gifted Children

Implications for Education and Child Rearing

Childhood Giftedness and Adult Giftedness: No Straight Trajectory

References

16 Creative Genius

The Traditional View of the Nature of Talent and Creative Genius

A Review of the Expert-Performance Approach

Toward an Expert-Performance Account of Creative Contributions

Concluding Remarks

Acknowledgments

References

17 Cognitive Processes and Development of Chess Genius

Introduction

Previous Attempts to Explain the Existence of Remarkable Achievements in Young Chess Players

In Search of a New Model of the Development of Chess Expertise

Cognitive Processes Underlying Chess Expertise

Mathematical Simulation

Conclusions and Future Research

Notes

References

18 Diversifying Experiences in the Development of Genius and their Impact on Creative Cognition

Correlational Research

Experimental Research

Conclusion and Future Directions

References

Part V Trajectories

19 The Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth at Maturity

The Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth

Conceptualizing Talent Development

Cognitive Abilities

Interests

Conation

Emergence of Genius

Concluding Thoughts

Acknowledgments

Notes

References

20 Age and Scientific Genius

Introduction

Basic Life-Cycle Patterns and Classic Views

The New Literature: Variation over Time and Across Individuals

Discussion

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Notes

References

21 Musical Creativity over the Lifespan

Introduction

Characterizations of Genius

A Qualitative Sketch of Musical Creativity over the Lifespan

Methodological Issues

Theoretical Perspectives on Lifespan Creativity

Some Unresolved Issues and Future Directions

Conclusion: Wisdom Revisited

Notes

References

22 Literary Geniuses

The Study of Creative Writers

What Constitutes Literary Genius?

Career Trajectories

The Writer's Personality, Flow, and Emotions

The Dark Side of Literary Genius

Writers and Death

Conclusions

References

23 Lifetime Biopsychosocial Trajectories of the Terman Gifted Children

Early Characteristics

Lifelong Pathways

Intelligence and School Performance: An Early Life Advantage?

Conclusion: Lifelong Cumulative and Interactional Continuity

References

Part VI Contexts

24 Evaluating Excellence in the Arts

Canons

Rankings

Conclusions

Notes

References

25 The Systems Model of Creativity and Its Applications

A Brief History of the Concept of Creativity

Systems Model of Creativity

Systems Model of Creativity: Some Research Applications

Systems Model and Construction of Positive Psychology

References

26 Openness to Scientific Innovation

Introduction

Planck's Principle: Age and Receptivity

A Meta-Analytic Approach to Scientific Innovation

Heterogeneity of Effects

Initiators of Scientific Innovations

Conclusion

Notes

References

27 Prominent Modern Artists

Introduction

Dataset

Framework of Econometric Analysis

Location Matters: Peer Effects in the Artistic Clusters of Paris and New York

Artistic Styles and Implications for Creativity

Travel as an Inspiration

Democracy and Creativity

Conclusion

Notes

References

28 Genius in World Civilization

Introduction

The Meta-Inventions

Temporal and Geographic Distribution of Significant Figures and Events from 800 BCE to 1900

Conclusion

Notes

References

Part VII Prospects

29 Does Genius Science Have a Future History?

Will Empirical and Theoretical Research Continue to Advance?

Will the Phenomenon of Genius Continue to Exist?

Will the Science of Genius Ensure the Continued Existence of Genius?

References

Appendix

Index

End User License Agreement

List of Tables

Chapter 3

Table 3.1

Table 3.2

Table 3.3

Table 3.4

Table 3.5

Chapter 8

Table 8.1

Table 8.2

Chapter 13

Table 13.1

Table 13.2

Table 13.3

Table 13.4

Chapter 17

Table 17.1

Table 17.2

Table 17.3

Chapter 19

Table 19.1

Chapter 20

Table 20.1

Table 20.2

Table 20.3

Chapter 23

Table 23.1

Table 23.2

Chapter 24

Table 24.1

Table 24.2

Chapter 26

Table 26.1

Table 26.2

Table 26.3

Chapter 27

Table 27.1

Table 27.2

Table 27.3

Table 27.4

Table 27.5

Chapter 28

Table 28.1

Table 28.2

Table 28.3

Table 28.4

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Preface

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List of Contributors

Nancy C. Andreasen MD Ph.D. is the Andrew H. Woods Chair of Psychiatry at the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine, USA. She is a recipient of the President's National Medal of Science, awarded in part for her work on pioneering neuroimaging technologies and using them to study processes such as memory and creativity.

Laura C. Ball MA is a Ph.D. candidate in psychology at York University, Canada and is the Knowledge Translation and Implementation Coordinator at Waypoint Centre for Mental Health Care, Canada. She is interested in technologies of the self, feminist theory, historiography, and integrated knowledge translation. Her recent publications in this area include an article in History of Psychology titled “Genius without the ‘Great Man’: New Possibilities for the Historian of Psychology.”

Merim Bilalić is a professor in the Department of General Psychology and Cognitive Science at Alpen Adria University Klagenfurt, Austria. He received his D.Phil. from Oxford University, UK in 2006. He is interested in cognitive and neural mechanisms in expertise, and his work on the Einstellung effect won the British Psychological Society's Award for the Outstanding Doctoral Research Contribution to Psychology in 2008. He has published on cognitive aspects of expertise in Cognitive Psychology and Cognition, on their neural implementation in Journal of Experimental Psychology: General and Journal of Neuroscience, and on individual differences in Intelligence and Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

Thomas J. Bouchard, Jr. earned his Ph.D. in psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, USA. He spent most of his career at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, USA, where he is professor emeritus in the Department of Psychology. His research and teaching career spans social psychology, industrial/organizational psychology, individual differences, evolutionary psychology, and behavior genetics. His current research interests are in the domains of social attitudes, personality, and values.

Stacey L. Bridges is an instructor at East Central University in Oklahoma City, USA.

Guillermo Campitelli is a senior lecturer at Edith Cowan University, Australia. He investigates individual differences in performance, judgments, and decisions with the ultimate goal of advancing knowledge to help individuals, organizations, and societies maximize performance, improve the quality of judgments, and make rational and adaptive decisions. His recent article “Deliberate Practice: Necessary but not sufficient,” published in Current Directions in Psychological Science, exemplifies his extensive research in chess. expertise.

Shelley H. Carson Ph.D. is an associate of the Department of Psychology and lecturer in extension at Harvard University, USA where she conducts research and teaches courses on creativity, abnormal psychology, and resilience. Her work on creativity has been published in national and international peer-reviewed science journals and has been highlighted in national media, including the Discovery Channel, CNN, and National Public Radio. She is also author of the award-winning book Your Creative Brain: Seven Steps to Maximize Imagination, Productivity, and Innovation in Your Life and co-author of Almost Depressed: Is My or My Loved One's Unhappiness a Problem?

David Cope is currently Dickerson Professor Emeritus at the University of California at Santa Cruz, USA. He is primarily known for his work in computer composition in musical styles and is the creator of Experiments in Musical Intelligence. His own music includes nine symphonies, four operas, many symphonic poems, and chamber music of various kinds. These works have been performed extensively around the world. His books include New Directions in Music (7th ed.), Techniques of the Contemporary Composer, Computers and Musical Style, Experiments in Musical Intelligence, The Algorithmic Composer, Virtual Music, and Computer Models of Musical Creativity. He is also published four novels (Death of Karlin Mulrey, Not by Death Alone, Death by Proxy, and Mind Over Death), two books of short stories (Of Blood and Tears and My Gun is Loaded), and a book of 2,000 haiku called Comes the Fiery Night. His algorithmic art has been exhibited in several venues as well. He currently lives with his wife in Santa Cruz, California, and Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi was born in Fiume, Italy (now Rijeka, Croatia), to Hungarian parents. He left Italy in 1956 to study in the United States. He received a Ph.D. in human development from the University of Chicago, USA in 1965 and started teaching at a nearby college. During this time, he developed the basic model of the flow experience. In 1970 Mihaly returned to the University of Chicago, where he became chair of the Department of Psychology. In 1999 he accepted an offer to teach at the Claremont Graduate University in California, USA where he started the first doctoral program in positive psychology.

Rodica Ioana Damian earned her Ph.D. in social-personality psychology from the University of California, Davis, USA in 2013. She is currently a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA working with Dr Brent Roberts. Her research program is aimed at understanding the role of environmental antecedents on personality development and downstream consequences for achievement and creativity. In recognition of her research, Dr Damian has been awarded the Provost's Dissertation Year Fellowship and the Social Sciences Dean's Doctoral Fellowship for Excellence Award by the University of California, Davis, USA and the Frank X. Barron Award by the Society for the Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, Division 10 of the American Psychological Association.

Katherine A. Duggan is a graduate student at the University of California, Riverside, USA. She is interested in the relationships between personality, sleep, and health across the lifespan. A Chancellor's Distinguished Fellowship Award recipient, Duggan has uncovered some of the first evidence for lifespan associations between sleep and health.

K. Anders Ericsson is Conradi Eminent Scholar at Florida State University, USA. He studies expert performance and how expert performers attain their superior performance by acquiring complex cognitive mechanisms through extended deliberate practice. He has edited the Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance and The Development of Professional Expertise.

Jeff Fajans MA is a doctoral student in positive organizational psychology at Claremont Graduate University, USA. His research focuses on creativity, innovation, and how mobile technologies can be leveraged as positive developmental interventions to achieve enhanced outcomes such as well-being, creative performance, and learning.

Gregory J. Feist is currently associate professor of psychology in personality at San José State University, USA and director of the MA program in research and experimental psychology. He has also taught at the College of William & Mary and the University of California at Davis. He received his Ph.D. in 1991 from the University of California at Berkeley and his undergraduate degree in 1985 from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. He is widely published in the psychology of creativity, the psychology of science, and the development of scientific talent. One major focus of his work is establishing the psychology of science as a healthy and independent study of science, along the lines of the history, philosophy, and sociology of science. His major efforts toward this end are publishing a book entitled Psychology of Science and the Origins of the Scientific Mind, which was awarded the 2007 William James Book Prize by the Division of General Psychology, American Psychological Association (APA); being the founding president of the newly formed “International Society for the Psychology of Science and Technology”; and being the founding editor-in-chief of a new peer-reviewed journal, Journal of Psychology of Science & Technology.

Howard S. Friedman is distinguished professor of psychology at the University of California, Riverside, USA. He has received the James McKeen Cattell Fellow Award from the Association for Psychological Science, a career award for applied research. His latest book is The Longevity Project: Surprising Discoveries for Health and Long Life from the Landmark Eight-Decade Study, which summarizes his 20-year scientific study of the pathways to health and long life. This book won first place in the Wellness category in the Books for A Better Life awards competition. Friedman has also received many teaching awards, including most recently the national Elizabeth Hurlock Beckman Award, for “inspiring students to make a difference in the community.” http://www.psych.ucr.edu/faculty/friedman/index.html

Victor Ginsburgh, is honorary professor of economics at ECARES, Université libre de Bruxellles, Belgium and is also affiliated to CORE, Université catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium. He has written and edited many books and is the author of over 180 papers in applied and theoretical economics, including industrial organization and general equilibrium analysis. His recent work includes economics of the arts, wines, and languages; he has published over 70 papers on these topics, some of which appeared in American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy, Games and Economic Behavior, Journal of Economic Perspectives, Economic Journal, Journal of the European Economic Association, Empirical Studies of the Arts, and the Journal of Cultural Economics. He is coeditor (with David Throsby) of the two volumes of the Handbook of the Economics of Art and Culture.

Fernand Gobet is professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Liverpool, UK. His main research interest is the psychology of expertise and talent, which he has studied in numerous domains including board games, physics, computer programming, music, sport, business, language acquisition, nursing, and physiotherapy. His research combines experimental methods with computational modelling. He has coauthored six books, including Psychologie du Talent et de l'Expertise and Foundations of Cognitive Psychology.

David M. Greenberg is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Cambridge, UK where he researches individual differences in musical engagement, including the emotional, cognitive, and social implications of strong musical experiences.

Christiane Hellmanzik is assistant professor of economics at the University of Hamburg, Germany. Her research focuses on applied microeconomics, in particular agglomeration, peer effects, “superstars,” and migration. She holds a BSc in economics from the University of Maastricht, an MA in economics from University College Dublin, and a Ph.D. in economics from Trinity College Dublin, Ireland.

Wendy Johnson graduated in mathematics from Occidental College in Los Angeles, USA. She spent many years as a consulting casualty actuary in the San Francisco Bay Area before entering the doctoral program in psychology at the University of Minnesota, USA, completing her degree in 2005. Her research focuses on individual differences in mental abilities, personality, academic achievement, and later-life health, emphasizing transactions between genetic and environmental influences. She is currently in the Department of Psychology and Centre for Cognitive Ageing and Cognitive Epidemiology at the University of Edinburgh, UK.

Benjamin F. Jones is an associate professor at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, USA, where he also directs the Kellogg Innovation and Entrepreneurship Initiative, and is a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. His research focuses largely on innovation and creativity, with recent work investigating the role of teamwork in innovation and the relationship between age and invention. He also studies global economic development, including the roles of education, climate, and national leadership in explaining the wealth and poverty of nations. His research has appeared in journals such as Science, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and the Quarterly Journal of Economics and has been profiled in media outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, the Economist, and The New Yorker.

James C. Kaufman is a professor of educational psychology at the University of Connecticut, USA. He is the author or editor of 25 books either published or in press, including Creativity 101 and is the editor of the APA journal Psychology of Popular Media Culture and the current president of APA's Division 10 (Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts).

Harrison J. Kell is a postdoctoral fellow at the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth at Vanderbilt University, USA. He received his Ph.D. in psychology from Rice University, USA in 2011. He is interested in how individual differences predict human performance, broadly construed, and how basic knowledge about human psychological diversity can be better utilized in the developmental sciences, in applied settings, and for developing policy. His research interests in human potential are illustrated in two recent articles in Psychological Science: “Who Rises to the Top? Early Indicators” and “Creativity and Technical Innovation: Spatial Ability's Unique Role.” The former underscores the importance of assessing the full range of human potential for understanding creativity and the latter highlights neglected talent currently being missed.

Aaron Kozbelt is professor of psychology at Brooklyn College, USA and The Graduate Center of the City University of New York, USA. His research foci lie at the intersection of creativity and cognition in the arts, particularly on the nature of the creative process in visual art, archival analyses of lifespan creativity trajectories and self-evaluation in classical composers, and the psychological basis of skilled artistic drawing. He is the author of over 60 journal articles and book chapters on these and other topics and serves on several editorial boards. He has been the recipient of the American Psychological Association Division 10 Daniel Berlyne Award for Creativity Research and the International Association of Empirical Aesthetics Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten Award for Creativity Research and his research has been funded by the National Science Foundation.

David Lubinski is professor of psychology at Vanderbilt University, USA and co-director of the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth, a planned 50-year longitudinal study of over 5,000 intellectually talented participants begun in 1971. His research interests are in modeling the development of exceptional intellectual talent over the life span (with cognitive, affective, and conative assessments) and uncovering factors that enhance and attenuate for this population learning and work accomplishments as well as creativity. He is president of the International Society for Intelligence Research (2013) and a trustee for the Society for Multivariate Experimental Psychology, and he has served as associate editor for the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. In 1996, he received the APA's Early Career Award (psychometrics/applied individual differences) and the George A. Millar Outstanding Article in General Psychology Award; in 2006, he received the Distinguished Scholar Award from the National Association for Gifted Children.

Robert R. McCrae is retired from the National Institute on Aging, where he conducted research on personality structure, development, and assessment. He is coauthor (with Paul T. Costa, Jr.) of Personality in Adulthood: A Five-Factor Theory Perspective. He lives in Baltimore, Maryland, USA.

Alexander S. McKay is a graduate student in experimental psychology at California State University at San Bernardino, USA. His research interests include creativity, personality, and ethics.

Charles Murray is the W.H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, USA. His books include Losing Ground, The Bell Curve (with Richard J. Herrnstein), Human Accomplishment, and Coming Apart.

Jeanne Nakamura is associate professor of psychology, Claremont Graduate University, USA, where she codirects the positive psychology program and the Quality of Life Research Center. Her BA and Ph.D. were received from the University of Chicago, USA. She studies positive functioning in a lifespan-developmental context, including engagement and creativity, mentoring and good work, and aging well. She is the coauthor of Good Mentoring and Creativity and Development and coeditor of Applied Positive Psychology.

Kanchna Ramchandran Ph.D. is a post-doctoral fellow at the Carver College of Medicine, University of Iowa, USA and an expert in neuroeconomics.

E.J. Reedy is a Ph.D. student in managerial economics at Northwestern University, USA and a Research Fellow at the Kauffman Foundation. He has been significantly involved in the coordination of the Kauffman Foundation's entrepreneurship and innovation data-related initiatives, including serving as a principal investigator with the Kauffman Firm Survey. His research has focused on business dynamics, high-growth entrepreneurship, and the intersections of great scientific and entrepreneurial achievement. Prior to joining the Kauffman Foundation, Reedy was a senior analyst at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City and had extensive experience in non-profit management. He has been a consultant to the National Science Foundation and published in journals including the Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences and been featured in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and elsewhere in the international media.

William Todd Schultz is a professor of psychology at Pacific University in Oregon, USA. In 2005 he edited the groundbreaking Handbook of Psychobiography, and he now curates the Inner Lives series. He is the author of three books: Tiny Terror: Why Truman Capote Almost Wrote Answered Prayers, An Emergency in Slow Motion: The Inner Life of Diane Arbus, and Torment Saint: The Life of Elliott Smith. Schultz lives in Portland, Oregon.

Dean Keith Simonton earned his Ph.D. from Harvard University, USA and is currently Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Davis, USA. His more than 460 publications (including a dozen books) concentrate on genius, creativity, leadership, talent, and aesthetics. His honors include the William James Book Award, the Sir Francis Galton Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Study of Creativity, the Rudolf Arnheim Award for Outstanding Contributions to Psychology and the Arts, the Distinguished Scientific Contributions to Media Psychology Award, the George A. Miller Outstanding Article Award, the Theoretical Innovation Prize in Personality and Social Psychology, the E. Paul Torrance Award for Creativity from the National Association for Gifted Children, three Mensa Awards for Excellence in Research, and the Joseph B. Gittler Award for “the most scholarly contribution to the philosophical foundation of psychological knowledge” from the American Psychological Foundation.

Robert J. Sternberg is professor of human development at Cornell University, USA.

Peter Suedfeld was born in Hungary. Shortly after the end of World War II his father and he immigrated to the United States, where he performed his military service and completed his education (Ph.D., Princeton University, 1963). After teaching at several US institutions, he moved to the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada as head of the Department of Psychology, and later served as dean of graduate studies. Now emeritus, he continues his research, which focuses on how people adapt during and after challenging experiences such as experimental sensory deprivation, spaceflight, polar deployment, decision-making under high stress, and ethnic persecution.

Frank J. Sulloway is an adjunct professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, USA. The recipient of a MacArthur Award (1984–1989), he has focused his research on personality development and family dynamics, especially as they relate to creative achievement. He has also conducted research in evolutionary psychology, on the evolution of Darwin's finches (including reproductive success, anti-predator responses, and adaptive divergence), and in the history of science (Darwin, Freud, and revolutionary innovations).

Paul Thagard is professor of philosophy and director of the cognitive science program at the University of Waterloo, Canada. His many books include The Brain and the Meaning of Life and The Cognitive Science of Science.

Bruce A. Weinberg is professor of economics at the Ohio State University, USA and research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and the Institute for the Study of Labor, Bonn, Germany. His work on science and innovation studies how creativity varies over the life cycle and how an individual's own creativity is affected by the presence of other important innovators. He has also studied migration of innovators, trends in innovative competitiveness across countries, and the economic impacts of innovation. His research has been supported by the Federal Reserve, the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and the Templeton Foundation and has been published in journals including the American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy, the Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences, and Science. He has advised policy makers at a variety of levels and has received extensive international media coverage.

Robert W. Weisberg is professor of psychology and director of graduate training at Temple University, USA. His research focuses on the cognitive processes underlying creative thinking. He has published numerous books and papers presenting case studies of creative thinking at the highest levels as well as experimental investigations of creative thinking in the laboratory.

Sheila Weyers of the Université catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium has a degree in philosophy and is interested in aesthetics and its relations with art history. She has published on movies, including remakes, and on the art historian de Piles; she is now working on canons. Her papers appeared in Artibus et Historiae, the Journal of Cultural Economics, Annales d'Histoire de l'Art et d'Archéologie, Poetics and Empirical Studies in the Arts.

Ellen Winner is professor and chair of psychology at Boston College, USA and senior research associate at Project Zero, Harvard Graduate School of Education, USA. She directs the Arts and Mind Lab, which focuses on cognition in the arts in typical and gifted children. She is the author of over 100 articles and four books: Invented Worlds: The Psychology of the Arts, The Point of Words: Children's Understanding of Metaphor and Irony, Gifted Children: Myths and Realities (translated into six languages and winner of the Alpha Sigma Nu National Jesuit Book Award in Science), and is coauthor of Studio Thinking 2: The Real Benefits of Visual Arts Education. She served as president of APA's Division 10, Psychology and the Arts, in 1995–1996, and in 2000 received the Rudolf Arnheim Award for Outstanding Research by a Senior Scholar in Psychology and the Arts from Division 10. She is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association (Division 10) and of the International Association of Empirical Aesthetics.

Preface

Genius is certainly not an esoteric or obscure topic. Its broad interest can be easily demonstrated using the now-standard “Google test.” Just google the word and see how many websites pop up. The last time I did so, about 330,000,000 sites emerged. To be sure, few of these can be considered scientific treatments of the subject. On the contrary, the term is often used for its marketing potential. One of my favorite T-shirts reads “Guinness, Gaelic for Genius.” Hence, a better reflection of its status might be obtained using Google Scholar, in which case we get about 1,040,000 results – a still impressive figure. It is also gratifying to find a few of my own contributions to the subject show up in the output. After all, I have been studying genius ever since I started working on my doctoral dissertation over 40 years ago! Admittedly, I did not use “genius” in the title of every publication that emerged since then. Because genius assumes many different forms, it is often possible to use a more specific term as the subject of research – like greatness, eminence, achievement, creativity, talent, or leadership. Indeed, over the past four decades, I have studied the phenomenon as it appears in science and technology, philosophy, painting and sculpture, poetry and drama, music, opera, cinema, politics, and even war – from scientific to military genius and (almost) everything between.

Among the works listed on the initial page of the Google Scholar output is the first classic contribution to the subject: Galton's (1869) Hereditary Genius. Subsequent book-length treatments with “genius” somewhere in the main title include Lombroso's (1891) The Man of Genius, Ellis's (1904) A Study of British Genius, Cox's (1926) The Early Mental Traits of Three Hundred Geniuses, Bowerman's (1947) Studies in Genius, Becker's (1978) The Mad Genius Controversy, Ehrenwald's (1984) The Anatomy of Genius, Hershman and Lieb's (1988) The Key to Genius, Eysenck's (1995) Genius, Howe's (1999) Genius Explained, my own 1999 Origins of Genius (Simonton, 1999), Miller's (2000) Insights of Genius, Galenson's (2005) Old Masters and Young Geniuses, Sawyer's (2007) Group Genius, and Ness's (2013) Genius Unmasked. To this list might be added Murray's (1989) edited volume on Genius: A History of the Idea. Hence, genius has been a popular subject of scholarly inquiry for well over a century.

Yet something is strikingly missing in all of the above titles: the word “handbook.” Indeed, a Handbook of Genius has never been published, at least not in any of the principal languages of science. This omission can be verified by conducting yet another Google search, which now elicits nothing – no edited volume containing authoritative chapters covering key aspects of the phenomenon. What makes this absence even more astonishing is the obvious abundance of handbooks concerning closely related topics, such as creativity, leadership, talent, and giftedness. As an example, four different creativity handbooks were published between 1989 and 2010, or about two per decade. Any “handbook of genius” thus remains conspicuously absent from the bookshelves.

Consequently, when Andrew Peart at Wiley Blackwell asked me to consider editing just such a handbook, I jumped at the chance. Opportunity does not knock that often. Because I had already written chapters for previous Wiley Blackwell handbooks, I had prior experience working with them. More importantly, this new project seemed an ideal way to culminate my own research by bringing it together with the best work conducted by my contemporaries. Furthermore, the fact that such a handbook was long overdue was proven by how easy it was to recruit expert contributors. The first-pass acceptance rate for my invitations was nearly perfect! The outcome is this volume containing substantially more than two dozen chapters. These chapters have been organized into seven parts.

Part I deals with the various perspectives on genius. After a treatment of the role of genius in history – both as a discipline and as a phenomenon – the next four chapters discuss the main scientific methods for studying genius, namely, psychobiography, face-to-face interview, psychometric measurement, and historiometric analysis. Because I wrote the last chapter, I decided to use it as a transition linking the first four chapters with virtually all of the chapters that follow. It may be noted that one major mainstream method is missing, namely laboratory experiments. For reasons too obvious to mention, it is extremely rare for world-acclaimed geniuses to volunteer to serve as experimental participants in some professor's lab!

Part II turns to the individual processes that underlie the works of geniuses. The mind–brain sciences have experienced a substantial growth in recent years, so it may not surprise anyone that the first chapter is devoted to the neuroscience of genius. The next two chapters concentrate on specific examples of creative genius in order to decipher the cognitive and related processes underlying their contributions. This part closes with a chapter that raises a fascinating question: If computer programs can simulate the musical creativity of recognized geniuses, such as J. S. Bach, Ludwig van Beethoven, and Scott Joplin, does this indicate that genius is far more ordinary than people imagine? Readers probably do not need to be reminded that it was not long ago that a computer chess program beat Gary Kasparov, an undeniable chess genius (Hsu, 2002). Without a doubt, nothing mystical would be required.

The foregoing conclusion might be interpreted as saying that geniuses are just like the rest of us. Yet this interpretation is wrong. Geniuses tend to feature some personal characteristics that make them identifiably different. This conclusion is established in the chapters making up Part III, which all concern the attributes of geniuses. Although genius is often associated with exceptional intelligence – and frequently defined as a superlative IQ – other individual-difference variables are involved as well (see also Simonton, 2011). At the same time, there is no such thing as a single generic type of genius. Instead, genius comes in different flavors depending on the domain of achievement.

The obvious next question concerns the origins of genius, the central subject of Part IV. Although the issue about whether genius is born or made goes back centuries, Francis Galton (1874) was the first to formulate the question in scientific research. Not surprisingly, the chapters span the full range of treatments, from genetic factors to environmental influences. This discussion must necessarily include the critical relation between child prodigies and adulthood genius. Although prodigies are often loosely referred to as geniuses in the popular media, that designation may add more confusion than enlightenment.

The last remark suggests the need to understand the trajectories of genius, the focus of the five chapters in Part V. Actually, these chapters form a kind of intellectual sandwich. The middle three chapters all use historiometric methods to study the course of a creative career in three domains, namely, science, music, and literature. On the outside are chapters that report the results of the two most ambitious psychometric longitudinal studies ever conducted. Although the last two chapters use very different methods, they both introduce the important issue of life expectancies – the terminal point of the trajectory.

Up to this point, genius has been treated as an entirely individualistic phenomenon. Yet as pointed out long ago, genius takes place in a larger sociocultural milieu (Candolle, 1873; Kroeber, 1944). This point is well demonstrated in the chapters in Part VI that in various ways treat contexts