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CREATIVITY
FLOW AND THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DISCOVERY AND INVENTION
MIHALY CSIKSZENTMIHALYI
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CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
One: Setting the Stage
PART I
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
Two: Where Is Creativity?
Three: The Creative Personality
Four: The Work of Creativity
Five: The Flow of Creativity
Six: Creative Surroundings
PART II
THE LIVES
Seven: The Early Years
Eight: The Later Years
Nine: Creative Aging
PART III
DOMAINS OF CREATIVITY
Ten: The Domain of the Word
Eleven: The Domain of Life
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Twelve: The Domain of the Future
Thirteen: The Making of Culture
Fourteen: Enhancing Personal Creativity
Appendix A: Brief Biographical Sketches of the Respondents Who Were Interviewed for This
Study
Appendix B: Interview Protocol Used in the Study
Notes
References
Searchable Terms
About the Author
Other Books by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Copyright
About the Publisher
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The idea for this book emerged in a conversation with Larry Cremin, then
president of the Spencer Foundation. We agreed that it would be important to
study creativity as a process that unfolds over a lifetime, and that no systematic
studies of living creative individuals existed. With its customary vision, the
Spencer Foundation then financed a research project, which was to last four
years, to remedy this gap in our understanding. Without this grant the laborious
task of collecting, transcribing, and analyzing the lengthy interviews would have
been impossible.
The other contribution without which this book could not have been written
is the assistance of the ninety-one respondents whose interviews form the bulk of
the book. All of them are extremely busy individuals, whose time is literally
invaluable—thus I deeply appreciate their availability for the lengthy interviews.
It is indeed difficult to express my gratitude for their help, and I can only hope
that they will find the results were worth their time.
A number of graduate students helped with this project and often contributed
creatively to it. Several have written or coauthored articles about the project in
professional journals. Especially important were four of my students who have
been involved in the project since its inception and who have since earned their
doctorates: Kevin Rathunde, Keith Sawyer, Jeanne Nakamura, and Carol
Mockros. The others who took an active part are listed among the interviewers in
appendix A, which describes the sample.
While we collected and analyzed the data, I had many opportunities to
consult with fellow scholars whose specialty is creativity. I should mention at the
very least Howard Gardner, David Feldman, Howard Gruber, Istvan MagyariBeck, Vera John-Steiner, Dean Simonton, Robert Sternberg, and Mark Runco—
all of whom contributed, knowingly or not, to the development of ideas in this
book.
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Several colleagues helped with earlier drafts of the manuscript. I am
particularly glad to acknowledge the inspiration and critique of my old friend
Howard Gardner, of Harvard University. As usual, his comments have been
exactly on target. William Damon, of Brown University, made several excellent
suggestions that helped reorganize the contents of the volume. Benö Csapó, from
the University of Szeged, Hungary, brought a different cultural perspective to the
work.
Three chapters of the book were drafted while I was a guest of the
Rockefeller Foundation in its Italian Center at Bellagio. The rest were written
while I was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral
Sciences in Palo Alto, with support from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur
Foundation grant #8900078, and the National Science Foundation grant #SBR–
9022192. I am grateful to them for the opportunity to concentrate on the
manuscript without the usual interruptions—and in such glorious surroundings.
In the later stages of the work, Isabella Selega, who had the good grace to
consent to marry me some thirty years ago, oversaw the editing of the manuscript
and many other important details. She did the same when I wrote my doctoral
dissertation in 1965 on the same topic. It is difficult for me to admit how much of
whatever I have accomplished in the years in between I owe to her loving, if
critical, help.
None of the shortcomings of this book should be attributed to any of those
mentioned here, except myself. For whatever is good in it, however, I thank them
deeply.
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ONE
SETTING THE STAGE
This book is about creativity, based on histories of contemporary people who
know about it firsthand. It starts with a description of what creativity is, it
reviews the way creative people work and live, and it ends with ideas about how
to make your life more like that of the creative exemplars I studied. There are no
simple solutions in these pages and a few unfamiliar ideas. The real story of
creativity is more difficult and strange than many overly optimistic accounts have
claimed. For one thing, as I will try to show, an idea or product that deserves the
label “creative” arises from the synergy of many sources and not only from the
mind of a single person. It is easier to enhance creativity by changing conditions
in the environment than by trying to make people think more creatively. And a
genuinely creative accomplishment is almost never the result of a sudden insight,
a lightbulb flashing on in the dark, but comes after years of hard work.
Creativity is a central source of meaning in our lives for several reasons.
Here I want to mention only the two main ones. First, most of the things that are
interesting, important, and human are the results of creativity. We share 98
percent of our genetic makeup with chimpanzees. What makes us different—our
language, values, artistic expression, scientific understanding, and technology—
is the result of individual ingenuity that was recognized, rewarded, and
transmitted through learning. Without creativity, it would be difficult indeed to
distinguish humans from apes.
The second reason creativity is so fascinating is that when we are involved
in it, we feel that we are living more fully than during the rest of life. The
excitement of the artist at the easel or the scientist in the lab comes close to the
ideal fulfillment we all hope to get from life, and so rarely do. Perhaps only sex,
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sports, music, and religious ecstasy—even when these experiences remain
fleeting and leave no trace—provide as profound a sense of being part of an
entity greater than ourselves. But creativity also leaves an outcome that adds to
the richness and complexity of the future.
An excerpt from one of the interviews on which this book is based may give
a concrete idea of the joy involved in the creative endeavor, as well as the risks
and hardships involved. The speaker is Vera Rubin, an astronomer who has
contributed greatly to our knowledge about the dynamics of galaxies. She
describes her recent discovery that stars belonging to a galaxy do not all rotate in
the same direction; the orbits can circle either clockwise or counterclockwise on
the same galactic plane. As is the case with many discoveries, this one was not
planned. It was the result of an accidental observation of two pictures of the
spectral analysis of the same galaxy obtained a year apart. By comparing the faint
spectral lines indicating the positions of stars in the two pictures, Rubin noted
that some had moved in one direction during the interval of time, and others had
moved in the opposite direction. Rubin was lucky to be among the first cohort of
astronomers to have access to such clear spectral analyses of nearby galaxies—a
few years earlier, the details would not have been visible. But she could use this
luck only because she had been, for years, deeply involved with the small details
of the movements of stars. The finding was possible because the astronomer was
interested in galaxies for their own sake, not because she wanted to prove a
theory or make a name for herself. Here is her story:
It takes a lot of courage to be a research scientist. It really does. I
mean, you invest an enormous amount of yourself, your life, your time,
and nothing may come of it. You could spend five years working on a
problem and it could be wrong before you are done. Or someone might
make a discovery just as you are finishing that could make it all wrong.
That’s a very real possibility. I guess I have been lucky. Initially I went
into this [career] feeling very much that my role as an astronomer, as an
observer, was just to gather very good data. I just looked upon my role as
that of gathering valuable data for the astronomical community, and in
most cases it turned out to be more than that. I wouldn’t be disappointed
if it were only that. But discoveries are always nice. I just discovered
something this spring that’s enchanting, and I remember how fun it was.
With one of the postdocs, a young fellow, I was making a study of
galaxies in the Virgo cluster. This is the biggest large cluster near us.
Well, what I’ve learned in looking at these nearby clusters is that, in fact,
I have enjoyed very much learning the details of each galaxy.
I mean, I have almost gotten more interested in just their [individual
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traits], because these galaxies are close to us—well, close to us on a
universal scale. This is the first time that I have ever had a large sample
of galaxies all of which were close enough so that I could see lots of
little details, and I have found that very strange things are happening near
the centers of many of these galaxies—very rapid rotations, little discs,
all kinds of interesting things—I have sort of gotten hung up on these
little interesting things. So, having studied and measured them all and
trying to decide what to do because it was such a vast quantity of
interesting data, I realized that some of them were more interesting than
others for all kinds of reasons, which I won’t go into. So I decided that I
would write up first those that had the most interesting central properties
(which really had nothing to do with why I started the program), and I
realized that there were twenty or thirty that were just very interesting,
and I picked fourteen. I decided to write a paper on these fourteen
interesting galaxies. They all have very rapidly rotating cores and lots of
gas and other things.
Well, one of them was unusually interesting. I first took a spectrum of
it in 1989 and then another in 1990. So I had two spectra of these objects
and I had probably not measured them until 1990 or 1991. At first I
didn’t quite understand why it was so interesting, but it was unlike
anything that I had ever seen. You know, in a galaxy, or in a spiral or disc
galaxy, almost all of the stars are orbiting in a plane around the center.
Well, I finally decided that in this galaxy some of the stars were going
one way and some of the stars were going the other way; some were
going clockwise and some were going counterclockwise. But I only had
two spectra and one wasn’t so good, so I would alternately believe it
and not believe it. I mean, I would think about writing this one up alone
and then I would think that the spectra were not good enough, and then I
would show it to my colleagues and they would believe it and they could
see two lines, or they couldn’t, and I would worry about whether the sky
was doing something funny. So I decided, because the 1991 applications
for using the main telescopes had already passed, that in the spring of ’92
I would go and get another spectrum. But then I had an idea. Because
there were some very peculiar things on the spectrum and I suddenly…I
don’t know…months were taken up in trying to understand what I was
looking at. I do the thinking in the other room. I sit in front of this very
exotic TV screen next to a computer, but it gives me the images of these
spectra very carefully and I can play with them. And I don’t know, one
day I just decided that I had to understand what this complexity was that I
was looking at and I made sketches on a piece of paper and suddenly I
understood it all. I have no other way of describing it. It was exquisitely
clear. I don’t know why I hadn’t done this two years earlier.
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And then in the spring I went observing, so I asked one of my
colleagues here to come observing with me. He and I occasionally do
things together. We had three nights. On two of them we never opened the
telescope, and the third night was a terrible night but we got a little. We
got enough on this galaxy that it sort of confirmed it. But on the other
hand it really didn’t matter because by then I already knew that
everything was right.
So that’s the story. And it’s fun, great fun, to come upon something
new. This spring I had to give a talk at Harvard and of course I stuck this
in, and in fact it was confirmed two days later by astronomers who had
spectra of this galaxy but had not [analyzed them].
This account telescopes years of hard work, doubt, and confusion. When all
goes well, the drudgery is redeemed by success. What is remembered are the
high points: the burning curiosity, the wonder at a mystery about to reveal itself,
the delight at stumbling on a solution that makes an unsuspected order visible.
The many years of tedious calculations are vindicated by the burst of new
knowledge. But even without success, creative persons find joy in a job well
done. Learning for its own sake is rewarding even if it fails to result in a public
discovery. How and why this happens is one of the central questions this book
explores.
EVOLUTION IN BIOLOGY AND IN CULTURE
For most of human history, creativity was held to be a prerogative of supreme
beings. Religions the world over are based on origin myths in which one or more
gods shaped the heavens, the earth, and the waters. Somewhere along the line
they also created men and women—puny, helpless things subject to the wrath of
the gods. It was only very recently in the history of the human race that the tables
were reversed: It was now men and women who were the creators and gods the
figments of their imagination. Whether this started in Greece or China two and a
half millennia ago, or in Florence two thousand years later, does not matter much.
The fact is that it happened quite recently in the multimillion-year history of the
race.
So we switched our views of the relationship between gods and humans. It is
not so difficult to see why this happened. When the first myths of creation arose,
humans were indeed helpless, at the mercy of cold, hunger, wild beasts, and one
another. They had no idea how to explain the great forces they saw around them
—the rising and setting of the sun, the wheeling stars, the alternating seasons.
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Awe suffused their groping for a foothold in this mysterious world. Then, slowly
at first, and with increasing speed in the last thousand years or so, we began to
understand how things work—from microbes to planets, from the circulation of
the blood to ocean tides—and humans no longer seemed so helpless after all.
Great machines were built, energies harnessed, the entire face of the earth
transformed by human craft and appetite. It is not surprising that as we ride the
crest of evolution we have taken over the title of creator.
Whether this transformation will help the human race or cause its downfall is
not yet clear. It would help if we realized the awesome responsibility of this new
role. The gods of the ancients, like Shiva, like Yehova, were both builders and
destroyers. The universe endured in a precarious balance between their mercy
and their wrath. The world we inhabit today also teeters between becoming
either the lovely garden or the barren desert that our contrary impulses strive to
bring about. The desert is likely to prevail if we ignore the potential for
destruction our stewardship implies and go on abusing blindly our new-won
powers.
While we cannot foresee the eventual results of creativity—of the attempt to
impose our desires on reality, to become the main power that decides the destiny
of every form of life on the planet—at least we can try to understand better what
this force is and how it works. Because for better or for worse, our future is now
closely tied to human creativity. The result will be determined in large part by
our dreams and by the struggle to make them real.
This book, which attempts to bring together thirty years of research on how
creative people live and work, is an effort to make more understandable the
mysterious process by which men and women come up with new ideas and new
things. My work in this area has convinced me that creativity cannot be
understood by looking only at the people who appear to make it happen. Just as
the sound of a tree crashing in the forest is unheard if nobody is there to hear it,
so creative ideas vanish unless there is a receptive audience to record and
implement them. And without the assessment of competent outsiders, there is no
reliable way to decide whether the claims of a self-styled creative person are
valid.
According to this view, creativity results from the interaction of a system
composed of three elements: a culture that contains symbolic rules, a person who
brings novelty into the symbolic domain, and a field of experts who recognize
and validate the innovation. All three are necessary for a creative idea, product,
or discovery to take place. For instance, in Vera Rubin’s account of her
astronomical discovery, it is impossible to imagine it without access to the huge
amount of information about celestial motions that has been collecting for
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centuries, without access to the institutions that control modern large telescopes,
without the critical skepticism and eventual support of other astronomers. In my
view these are not incidental contributors to individual originality but essential
components of the creative process, on a par with the individual’s own
contributions. For this reason, in this book I devote almost as much attention to
the domain and to the field as to the individual creative persons.
Creativity is the cultural equivalent of the process of genetic changes that
result in biological evolution, where random variations take place in the
chemistry of our chromosomes, below the threshold of consciousness. These
changes result in the sudden appearance of a new physical characteristic in a
child, and if the trait is an improvement over what existed before, it will have a
greater chance to be transmitted to the child’s descendants. Most new traits do
not improve survival chances and may disappear after a few generations. But a
few do, and it is these that account for biological evolution.
In cultural evolution there are no mechanisms equivalent to genes and
chromosomes. Therefore, a new idea or invention is not automatically passed on
to the next generation. Instructions for how to use fire, or the wheel, or atomic
energy are not built into the nervous system of the children born after such
discoveries. Each child has to learn them again from the start. The analogy to
genes in the evolution of culture are memes, or units of information that we must
learn if culture is to continue. Languages, numbers, theories, songs, recipes, laws,
and values are all memes that we pass on to our children so that they will be
remembered. It is these memes that a creative person changes, and if enough of
the right people see the change as an improvement, it will become part of the
culture.
Therefore, to understand creativity it is not enough to study the individuals
who seem most responsible for a novel idea or a new thing. Their contribution,
while necessary and important, is only a link in a chain, a phase in a process. To
say that Thomas Edison invented electricity or that Albert Einstein discovered
relativity is a convenient simplification. It satisfies our ancient predilection for
stories that are easy to comprehend and involve superhuman heroes. But Edison’s
or Einstein’s discoveries would be inconceivable without the prior knowledge,
without the intellectual and social network that stimulated their thinking, and
without the social mechanisms that recognized and spread their innovations. To
say that the theory of relativity was created by Einstein is like saying that it is the
spark that is responsible for the fire. The spark is necessary, but without air and
tinder there would be no flame.
This book is not about the neat things children often say, or the creativity all
of us share just because we have a mind and we can think. It does not deal with
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great ideas for clinching business deals, new ways for baking stuffed artichokes,
or original ways of decorating the living room for a party. These are examples of
creativity with a small c, which is an important ingredient of everyday life, one
that we definitely should try to enhance. But to do so well it is necessary first to
understand Creativity—and that is what this book tries to accomplish.
ATTENTION AND CREATIVITY
Creativity, at least as I deal with it in this book, is a process by which a symbolic
domain in the culture is changed. New songs, new ideas, new machines are what
creativity is about. But because these changes do not happen automatically as in
biological evolution, it is necessary to consider the price we must pay for
creativity to occur. It takes effort to change traditions. For example, memes must
be learned before they can be changed: A musician must learn the musical
tradition, the notation system, the way instruments are played before she can think
of writing a new song; before an inventor can improve on airplane design he has
to learn physics, aerodynamics, and why birds don’t fall out of the sky.
If we want to learn anything, we must pay attention to the information to be
learned. And attention is a limited resource: There is just so much information
we can process at any given time. Exactly how much we don’t know, but it is
clear that, for instance, we cannot learn physics and music at the same time. Nor
can we learn well while we do the other things that need to be done and require
attention, like taking a shower, dressing, cooking breakfast, driving a car, talking
to our spouse, and so forth. The point is, a great deal of our limited supply of
attention is committed to the tasks of surviving from one day to the next. Over an
entire lifetime, the amount of attention left over for learning a symbolic domain—
such as music or physics—is a fraction of this already small amount.
Some important consequences follow logically from these simple premises.
To achieve creativity in an existing domain, there must be surplus attention
available. This is why such centers of creativity as Greece in the fifth century
B.C., Florence in the fifteenth century, and Paris in the nineteenth century tended
to be places where wealth allowed individuals to learn and to experiment above
and beyond what was necessary for survival. It also seems true that centers of
creativity tend to be at the intersection of different cultures, where beliefs,
lifestyles, and knowledge mingle and allow individuals to see new combinations
of ideas with greater ease. In cultures that are uniform and rigid, it takes a greater
investment of attention to achieve new ways of thinking. In other words,
creativity is more likely in places where new ideas require less effort to be
perceived.
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As cultures evolve, it becomes increasingly difficult to master more than one
domain of knowledge. Nobody knows who the last Renaissance man really was,
but sometime after Leonardo da Vinci it became impossible to learn enough about
all of the arts and the sciences to be an expert in more than a small fraction of
them. Domains have split into subdomains, and a mathematician who has
mastered algebra may not know much about number theory, combinatorix,
topology—and vice versa. Whereas in the past an artist typically painted,
sculpted, cast gold, and designed buildings, now all of these special skills tend to
be acquired by different people.
Therefore, it follows that as culture evolves, specialized knowledge will be
favored over generalized knowledge. To see why this must be so, let us assume
that there are three persons, one who studies physics, one who studies music, and
one who studies both. Other things being equal, the person who studies both
music and physics will have to split his or her attention between two symbolic
domains, while the other two can focus theirs exclusively on a single domain.
Consequently, the two specialized individuals can learn their domains in greater
depth, and their expertise will be preferred over that of the generalist. With time,
specialists are bound to take over leadership and control of the various
institutions of culture.
Of course, this trend toward specialization is not necessarily a good thing. It
can easily lead to a cultural fragmentation such as described in the biblical story
of the building of the Tower of Babel. Also, as the rest of this book amply
demonstrates, creativity generally involves crossing the boundaries of domains,
so that, for instance, a chemist who adopts quantum mechanics from physics and
applies it to molecular bonds can make a more substantive contribution to
chemistry than one who stays exclusively within the bounds of chemistry. Yet at
the same time it is important to recognize that given how little attention we have
to work with, and given the increasing amounts of information that are constantly
being added to domains, specialization seems inevitable. This trend might be
reversible, but only if we make a conscious effort to find an alternative; left to
itself, it is bound to continue.
Another consequence of limited attention is that creative individuals are
often considered odd—or even arrogant, selfish, and ruthless. It is important to
keep in mind that these are not traits of creative people, but traits that the rest of
us attribute to them on the basis of our perceptions. When we meet a person who
focuses all of his attention on physics or music and ignores us and forgets our
names, we call that person “arrogant” even though he may be extremely humble
and friendly if he could only spare attention from his pursuit. If that person is so
taken with his domain that he fails to take our wishes into account we call him
“insensitive” or “selfish” even though such attitudes are far from his mind.
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Similarly, if he pursues his work regardless of other people’s plans, we call him
“ruthless.” Yet it is practically impossible to learn a domain deeply enough to
make a change in it without dedicating all of one’s attention to it and thereby
appearing to be arrogant, selfish, and ruthless to those who believe they have a
right to the creative person’s attention.
In fact, creative people are neither single-minded, specialized, nor selfish.
Indeed, they seem to be the opposite: They love to make connections with
adjacent areas of knowledge. They tend to be—in principle—caring and
sensitive. Yet the demands of their role inevitably push them toward
specialization and selfishness. Of the many paradoxes of creativity, this is
perhaps the most difficult to avoid.
WHAT’S THE GOOD OF STUDYING CREATIVITY?
There are two main reasons why looking closely at the lives of creative
individuals and the contexts of their accomplishments is useful. The first is the
most obvious one: The results of creativity enrich the culture and so they
indirectly improve the quality of all our lives. But we may also learn from this
knowledge how to make our own lives directly more interesting and productive.
In the last chapter of this volume I summarize what this study suggests for
enriching anyone’s everyday existence.
Some people argue that studying creativity is an elite distraction from the
more pressing problems confronting us. We should focus all our energies on
combating overpopulation, poverty, or mental retardation instead. A concern for
creativity is an unnecessary luxury, according to this argument. But this position
is somewhat shortsighted. First of all, workable new solutions to poverty or
overpopulation will not appear magically by themselves. Problems are solved
only when we devote a great deal of attention to them and in a creative way.
Second, to have a good life, it is not enough to remove what is wrong from it. We
also need a positive goal, otherwise why keep going? Creativity is one answer to
that question: It provides one of the most exciting models for living.
Psychologists have learned much about how healthy human beings think and feel
from studying pathological cases. Brain-damaged patients, neurotics, and
delinquents have provided contrasts against which normal functioning may better
be understood. But we have learned little from the other end of the continuum,
from people who are extraordinary in some positive sense. Yet if we wish to find
out what might be missing from our lives, it makes sense to study lives that are
rich and fulfilling. This is one of the main reasons for writing the book: to
understand better a way of being that is more satisfying than most lives typically
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are.
Each of us is born with two contradictory sets of instructions: a conservative
tendency, made up of instincts for self-preservation, self-aggrandizement, and
saving energy, and an expansive tendency made up of instincts for exploring, for
enjoying novelty and risk—the curiosity that leads to creativity belongs to this
set. We need both of these programs. But whereas the first tendency requires little
encouragement or support from outside to motivate behavior, the second can wilt
if it is not cultivated. If too few opportunities for curiosity are available, if too
many obstacles are placed in the way of risk and exploration, the motivation to
engage in creative behavior is easily extinguished.
You would think that given its importance, creativity would have a high
priority among our concerns. And in fact there is a lot of lip service paid to it.
But if we look at the reality, we see a different picture. Basic scientific research
is minimized in favor of immediate practical applications. The arts are
increasingly seen as dispensable luxuries that must prove their worth in the
impersonal mass market. In one company after another, as downsizing continues,
one hears CEOs report that this is not an age for innovators but for bookkeepers,
not a climate for building and risking but for cutting expenses. Yet as economic
competition heats up around the globe, exactly the opposite strategy is needed.
And what holds true for the sciences, the arts, and for the economy also
applies to education. When school budgets tighten and test scores wobble, more
and more schools opt for dispensing with frills—usually with the arts and
extracurricular activities—so as to focus instead on the so-called basics. This
would not be bad if the “three Rs” were taught in ways that encouraged
originality and creative thinking; unfortunately, they rarely are. Students generally
find the basic academic subjects threatening or dull; their chance of using their
minds in creative ways comes from working on the student paper, the drama club,
or the orchestra. So if the next generation is to face the future with zest and selfconfidence, we must educate them to be original as well as competent.
HOW THE STUDY WAS CONDUCTED
Between 1990 and 1995 I and my students at the University of Chicago
videotaped interviews with a group of ninety-one exceptional individuals. The
in-depth analysis of these interviews helps illustrate what creative people are
like, how the creative process works, and what conditions encourage or hinder
the generation of original ideas.
There were three main conditions for selecting respondents: The person had
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to have made a difference to a major domain of culture—one of the sciences, the
arts, business, government, or human well-being in general; he or she had to be
still actively involved in that domain (or a different one); and he or she had to be
at least sixty years old (in a very few cases, when circumstances warranted, we
interviewed respondents who were a bit younger). A list of the respondents
interviewed thus far is in appendix A.
The selection process was slow and lengthy. I set out to interview equal
numbers of men and women who met our criteria. A further desideratum was to
get as wide a representation of cultural backgrounds as possible. With these
conditions in mind, I began generating lists of people who met these attributes. In
this task I availed myself of the best advice of colleagues and experts in different
disciplines. After a while the graduate students involved in the project also
suggested names, and other leads were provided by the respondents after each
interview, producing what is sometimes called a “snowball sample.”
When the research team agreed that the achievements of a person nominated
for the sample warranted inclusion, he or she was sent a letter that explained the
study and requested participation. If there was no response within three weeks or
so, we repeated the request, and then tried to contact the person by phone. Of the
275 persons initially contacted, a little over a third declined, the same number
accepted, and a quarter did not respond or could not be traced. Those who
accepted included many individuals whose creativity had been widely
recognized; there were fourteen Nobel prizes shared among the respondents (four
in physics, four in chemistry, two in literature, two in physiology or medicine,
and one each in peace and in economics). Most of the others’ accomplishments
were of the same order, even if they were not as widely recognized.
A few declined for health reasons, many more because they could not spare
the time. The secretary to novelist Saul Bellow wrote: “Mr. Bellow informed me
that he remains creative in the second half of life, at least in part, because he
does not allow himself to be the object of other people’s ‘studies.’ In any event,
he’s gone for the summer.” The photographer Richard Avedon just scrawled the
answer “Sorry—too little time left!” The secretary of composer George Ligeti
had this to say:
He is creative and, because of this, totally overworked. Therefore,
the very reason you wish to study his creative process is also the reason
why he (unfortunately) does not have the time to help you in this study.
He would also like to add that he cannot answer your letter personally
because he is trying desperately to finish a Violin Concerto which will
be premiered in the Fall. He hopes very much you will understand.
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Mr. Ligeti would like to add that he finds your project extremely
interesting and would be very curious to read the results.
Occasionally the refusal was due to the belief that studying creativity is a
waste of time. Poet and novelist Czeslaw Milosz wrote back: “I am skeptical as
to the investigation of creativity and I do not feel inclined to submit myself to
interviews on that subject. I guess I suspect some methodological errors at the
basis of all discussions about ‘creativity.’” The novelist Norman Mailer replied:
“I’m sorry but I never agree to be interviewed on the process of work.
Heisenberg’s principle of uncertainty applies.” Peter Drucker, the management
expert and professor of Oriental art, excused himself in these terms:
I am greatly honored and flattered by your kind letter of February
14th—for I have admired you and your work for many years, and I have
learned much from it. But, my dear Professor Csikszentmihalyi, I am
afraid I have to disappoint you. I could not possibly answer your
questions. I am told I am creative—I don’t know what that means…. I
just keep on plodding….
…I hope you will not think me presumptuous or rude if I say that one
of the secrets of productivity (in which I believe whereas I do not
believe in creativity) is to have a VERY BIG waste paper basket to take
care of ALL invitations such as yours—productivity in my experience
consists of NOT doing anything that helps the work of other people but to
spend all one’s time on the work the Good Lord has fitted one to do, and
to do well.
The rate of acceptance varied among disciplines. More than half of the
natural scientists, no matter how old or busy they were, agreed to participate.
Artists, writers, and musicians, on the other hand, tended to ignore our letters or
declined—less than a third of those approached accepted. It would be interesting
to find out the causes of this differential attrition.
The same percentage of women and men accepted, but since in certain
domains well-known creative women are underrepresented, we were unable to
achieve the fifty-fifty gender ratio we were hoping for. Instead, the split is about
seventy-thirty in favor of men.
Usually in psychological research, you must make sure that the individuals
studied are “representative” of the “population” in question—in this case, the
population of creative persons. If the sample is not representative, what you find
cannot be generalized to the population. But here I don’t even attempt to come up
18
with generalizations that are supposed to hold for all creative persons. What I try
to do occasionally is to disprove certain widespread assumptions. The advantage
of disproof over proof in science is that whereas a single case can disprove a
generalization, even all the cases in the world are not enough for a conclusive
positive proof. If I could find just one white raven, that would be enough to
disprove the statement: “All ravens are black.” But I can point at millions of
black ravens without confirming the statement that all ravens are black.
Somewhere there may be a white raven hiding. The same lack of symmetry
between what is called falsification and proof holds even for the most sacred
laws of physics.
For the purposes of this book, the strategy of disproof is amply sufficient.
The information we collected could not prove, for instance, that all creative
individuals had a happy childhood, even if all the respondents had said that their
childhood had been happy. But even one unhappy child can disprove that
hypothesis—just as one happy child could disprove the opposite hypothesis, that
creative individuals must have unhappy childhoods. So the relatively small size
of the sample, or its lack of representativeness, is no real impediment to deriving
solid conclusions from the data.
It is true that in the social sciences statements are usually neither true nor
false but only claim the statistical superiority of one hypothesis over another. We
would say that there are so many more black ravens than white ravens that chance
alone cannot account for it. Therefore, we conclude that “most ravens are black,”
and we are glad that we can say this much. In this book I do not avail myself of
statistics to test the comparisons that will be reported, for a variety of reasons.
First of all, the ability to disprove some deeply held assumptions about creativity
seems to me sufficient, and here we are on solid ground. Second, the
characteristics of this unique sample violate most assumptions on which
statistical tests can be safely conducted. Third, there is no meaningful
“comparison group” against which to test the patterns found in this sample.
With a very few exceptions, the interviews were conducted in the offices or
homes of the respondents. The interviews were videotaped and then transcribed
verbatim. They generally lasted about two hours, although a few were shorter
and some lasted quite a bit longer. But the interviews are only the tip of the
iceberg as far as information about this sample is concerned. Most of the
respondents have written books and articles; some have written autobiographies
or other works that could be inspected. In fact, each of them left such an
extensive paper trail that to follow it all the way would take several lifetimes;
however, the material is extremely useful to round out our understanding of each
person and his or her life.
19
Our interview schedule had a number of common questions that we tried to
ask each respondent (a copy of it is in appendix B). However, we did not
necessarily ask the questions in the same order, nor did we always use exactly
the same wording; my priority was to keep the interview as close to a natural
conversation as possible. Of course, there are advantages and disadvantages to
both methods. I felt, however, that it would be insulting, and therefore
counterproductive, to force these respondents to answer a mechanically
structured set of questions. Because I hoped to get genuine and reflective
answers, I let the exchanges develop around the themes I was interested in,
instead of forcing them into a mold. The interviews are rich as well as being
comprehensive—thanks in large measure also to the excellent cadre of graduate
students who helped collect them.
When I started to write the book I was confronted with an embarrassment of
riches. Thousands of pages clamored for attention, yet I could not do justice to
more than a tiny fraction of the material. The choices were often painful—so
many beautiful accounts had to be dropped or greatly compressed. The
interviews I quote extensively are not necessarily those from the most famous or
even the most creative people but the ones that most clearly address what I
thought were important theoretical issues. So the choice is personal. Yet I am
confident that I have not distorted the meaning of any of the respondents or the
consensus of the group as a whole.
Even though the voice of some respondents is not represented by even a
single quotation, the content of their statements is included in the generalizations
that occasionally are presented, in verbal or numerical form. And I hope that
either I, my students, or other scholars will eventually tap those parts of this rich
material that I was forced to shortchange.
TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE?
Contrary to the popular image of creative persons, the interviews present a
picture of creativity and creative individuals that is upbeat and positive. Instead
of suspecting these stories of being self-serving fabrications, I accept them at
face value—provided they are not contradicted by other facts known about the
person or by internal evidence.
Yet many social scientists in the last hundred years have made it their task to
expose the hypocrisy, self-delusion, and self-interest underlying human behavior
traits that were never questioned scientifically before the end of the nineteenth
century. Poets like Dante or Chaucer were of course intimately acquainted with
20
the foibles of human nature. But it was not until Freud explained the possibility of
repression, Marx argued the power of false consciousness, and sociobiologists
showed how our actions are the outcome of selective pressures that we had
systematic insights into why our reports about ourselves may be so deceptive.
Unfortunately, the understanding for which we owe Freud and the rest of
those great thinkers an immense intellectual debt has been marred to a certain
extent by the indiscriminate application of their ideas to every aspect of
behavior. As a result, in the words of the philosopher Hannah Arendt, our
discipline runs the risk of degenerating into a “de-bunking enterprise,” based
more on ideology than evidence. Even the novice student of human nature learns
to distrust appearances—not as a sensible methodological precaution that any
good scientist would endorse but as a certainty in the dogma that nothing can be
trusted at face value. I can imagine what some sophisticated colleagues would do
with the following claim made by one of our respondents: “I have been married
for forty-four some years to someone I adore. He is a physicist. We have four
children, each of whom has a Ph.D. in science; each of whom has a happy life.”
They would probably smile with refined irony and see in these sentences an
attempt on the speaker’s part to deny an unhappy family life. Others would see it
as an attempt to impress the audience. Still others may think that this person’s
optimistic outburst is simply a narrative device that arose in the context of the
interview, not because it is literally true, but because conversations have their
own logic and their own truth. Or they would see it as the expression of a
bourgeois ideology where academic degrees and comfortable middle-class status
are equated with happiness.
But what if there is actual evidence that this woman has been married for
forty-four years, that despite her busy schedule as a leading scientist she brought
up four children who worked themselves into demanding professional careers,
and that she spends most of her free time with her husband at home or traveling?
And that her children appear contented with their lives, visit her often, and are in
frequent contact with the parents? Should we not relent and admit, however
grudgingly, that the meaning of the passage is closer to what the speaker intended
than to the alternative meanings I attributed to the imaginary critic?
Let me present a passage from another interview that also illustrates the
optimism that is typical of these accounts. This is from the sculptor Nina Holton,
married to a well-known (and also creative) scholar.
I like the expression “It makes the spirit sing,” and I use it quite often.
Because outside my house on the Cape we have this tall grass and I
watch it and I say “It is singing grass, I hear it singing.” I have a need
21
inside me, of a certain joy, you see? An expression of joy. I feel it. I
suppose that I am glad to be alive, glad that I have a man whom I love
and a life that I enjoy and the things which I work on which sometimes
make my spirit sing. And I hope everybody has that feeling inside. I am
grateful that I have a spirit inside me which often sings.
I feel that I do things that make a difference to me and give me great
satisfaction. And I can always discuss things with my husband, and we
find great parallels, you see, of when he has an idea when he works on
something and when we come together and discuss our days and what we
have been doing. Not always but often. It is a great bond between us.
And also he has been very interested in what I am doing and so in a way
he is very much involved in my world. He photographs the things which I
do and he is very, very much interested. I can discuss everything with
him. It is not like I am working in the dark. I can always come to him and
he will give me some advice. I may not always take it, but still there it is.
Life feels rich with it. It does.
Again, a cynical reading might lead one to conclude that, well, it must be
nice for a two-career couple to have a good time while being creative, but isn’t it
common knowledge that to achieve anything new and important, especially in the
arts, a person must be poor and suffering and tired of the world? So lives like
these either represent only a small minority of the creative population, or they
must not be accepted at face value, even if all the evidence suggests their truth.
I am not saying that all creative persons are well-off and happy. Family
strain, professional jealousies, and thwarted ambitions were occasionally
evident in the interviews. Moreover, it is probable that a selection bias has
affected the sample I have collected. Focusing on people beyond sixty years of
age eliminated those who may have led a more high-risk lifestyle and thus died
early. Some of the individuals we asked to participate and who did not respond
or refused may have been less happy and less adjusted than those who accepted.
Two or three of those who initially agreed to be interviewed became so infirm
and despondent that after the appointment was made they asked to be excused.
Thus the individuals who ended up as part of the sample are skewed in the
direction of positive health, physical and psychological.
But after several years of intensive listening and reading, I have come to the
conclusion that the reigning stereotype of the tortured genius is to a large extent a
myth created by Romantic ideology and supported by evidence from isolated and
—one hopes—atypical historical periods. In other words, if Dostoyevsky and
Tolstoy showed more than their share of pathology it was due less to the
requirements of their creative work than to the personal sufferings caused by the
22
unhealthful conditions of a Russian society nearing collapse. If so many
American poets and playwrights committed suicide or ended up addicted to
drugs and alcohol, it was not their creativity that did it but an artistic scene that
promised much, gave few rewards, and left nine out of ten artists neglected if not
ignored.
Because of these considerations, I find it more realistic, if more difficult, to
approach these interviews with an open skepticism, keeping in mind the bias in
favor of happiness these people display and what we have learned about the
human tendency to disguise and embellish reality. Yet at the same time, I am
ready to accept a positive scenario when it appears to be warranted. It seems to
me a risk worth running because I agree with these sentiments of the Canadian
novelist Robertson Davies:
Pessimism is a very easy way out when you’re considering what life
really is, because pessimism is a short view of life. If you look at what is
happening around us today and what has happened just since you were
born, you can’t help but feel that life is a terrible complexity of problems
and illnesses of one sort or another. But if you look back a few thousand
years, you realize that we have advanced fantastically from the day when
the first amoeba crawled out of the slime and made its adventure on land.
If you take a long view, I do not see how you can be pessimistic about
the future of man or the future of the world. You can take a short view
and think that everything is a mess, that life is a cheat and a deceit, and of
course you feel miserable. And I become very much amused by some of
my colleagues, particularly in the study of literature, who say the
pessimistic, the tragic view, is the only true key to life—which I think is
just self-indulgent nonsense. It’s very much easier to be tragic than it is to
be comic. I have known people to embrace the tragic view of life, and it
is a cop-out. They simply feel rotten about everything, and that is terribly
easy. And if you try to see things a little more evenly, it’s surprising what
complexities of comedy and ambiguity and irony appear in it. And that, I
think, is what is vital to a novelist. Just writing tragic novels is rather
easy.
Davies’s critique applies more broadly, and not just to the literary field. It is
equally easy to explain creativity in a way that only exposes, debunks, reduces,
deconstructs, and rationalizes what creative persons do, while ignoring the
genuine joy and fulfillment their life contains. But to do so blinds us to the most
important message we can learn from creative people: how to find purpose and
enjoyment in the chaos of existence.
23
I did not, however, write this book to prove a point. The findings I discuss
emerged from the data. They are not my recycled preconceptions, nor those of
anyone else. It is the extraordinary people whose voices fill these pages who tell
the story of the unfolding of creativity. Its plot cannot be reduced to glib
definitions or superficial techniques. But in its richness and complexity, it is a
story that reveals the deep potentials of the human spirit. Having introduced some
of the themes that the following chapters will develop, it is now time to get on
with the show.
24
P ART 1
THE CREATIVE P ROCESS
25
TWO
WHERE IS CREATIVITY?
The answer is obvious: Creativity is some sort of mental activity, an insight that
occurs inside the heads of some special people. But this short assumption is
misleading. If by creativity we mean an idea or action that is new and valuable,
then we cannot simply accept a person’s own account as the criterion for its
existence. There is no way to know whether a thought is new except with
reference to some standards, and there is no way to tell whether it is valuable
until it passes social evaluation. Therefore, creativity does not happen inside
people’s heads, but in the interaction between a person’s thoughts and a
sociocultural context. It is a systemic rather than an individual phenomenon.
Some examples will illustrate what I mean.
When I was a graduate student I worked part-time for a few years as an
editor for a Chicago publishing house. At least once a week we would get in the
mail a manuscript from an unknown author who claimed to have made a great
discovery of one sort or another. Perhaps it was an eight-hundred-page tome that
described in minute detail how a textual analysis of the Odyssey showed that,
contrary to received opinion, Ulysses did not sail around the Mediterranean.
Instead, according to the author’s calculations, if one paid attention to the
landmarks, the distances traveled, and the pattern of the stars mentioned by
Homer, it was obvious that Ulysses actually traveled around the coast of Florida.
Or it might be a textbook for building flying saucers, with extremely precise
blueprints—which on closer inspection turned out to be copied from a service
manual for a household appliance. What made reading these manuscripts
depressing was the fact that their authors actually believed they had found
something new and important and that their creative efforts went unrecognized
26
only because of a conspiracy on the part of philistines like myself and the editors
of all the other publishing houses.
Some years ago the scientific world was abuzz with the news that two
chemists had achieved cold fusion in the laboratory. If true, this meant that
something very similar to the perpetual motion machine—one of the oldest
dreams of mankind—was about to be realized. After a few frenetic months during
which laboratories around the world attempted to replicate the initial claims—
some with apparent success, but most without—it became increasingly clear that
the experiments on which the claims were based had been flawed. So the
researchers who at first were hailed as the greatest creative scientists of the
century became somewhat of an embarrassment to the scholarly establishment.
Yet, as far as we know, they firmly believed that they were right and that their
reputations had been ruined by jealous colleagues.
Jacob Rabinow, himself an inventor but also an evaluator of inventions for
the National Bureau of Standards in Washington, has many similar stories to tell
about people who think they have invented perpetual motion machines:
I’ve met many of these inventors who invent something that cannot
work, that is theoretically impossible. But they spent three years
developing it, running a motor without electricity, with magnets. You
explain to them it won’t work. It violates the second law of
thermodynamics. And they say, “Don’t give me your goddamn
Washington laws.”
Who is right: the individual who believes in his or her own creativity, or the
social milieu that denies it? If we take sides with the individual, then creativity
becomes a subjective phenomenon. All it takes to be creative, then, is an inner
assurance that what I think or do is new and valuable. There is nothing wrong
with defining creativity this way, as long as we realize that this is not at all what
the term originally was supposed to mean—namely, to bring into existence
something genuinely new that is valued enough to be added to the culture. On the
other hand, if we decide that social confirmation is necessary for something to be
called creative, the definition must encompass more than the individual. What
counts then is whether the inner certitude is validated by the appropriate experts
—such as the editors of the publishing house in the case of far-out manuscripts,
or other scientists in the case of cold fusion. And it isn’t possible to take a
middle ground and say that sometimes the inner conviction is enough, while in
other cases we need external confirmation. Such a compromise leaves a huge
loophole, and trying to agree on whether something is creative or not becomes
impossible.
27
The problem is that the term “creativity” as commonly used covers too much
ground. It refers to very different entities, thus causing a great deal of confusion.
To clarify the issues, I distinguish at least three different phenomena that can
legitimately be called by that name.
The first usage, widespread in ordinary conversation, refers to persons who
express unusual thoughts, who are interesting and stimulating—in short, to people
who appear to be unusually bright. A brilliant conversationalist, a person with
varied interests and a quick mind, may be called creative in this sense. Unless
they also contribute something of permanent significance, I refer to people of this
sort as brilliant rather than creative—and by and large I don’t say much about
them in this book.
The second way the term can be used is to refer to people who experience
the world in novel and original ways. These are individuals whose perceptions
are fresh, whose judgments are insightful, who may make important discoveries
that only they know about. I refer to such people as personally creative, and try
to deal with them as much as possible (especially in chapter 14, which is
devoted to this topic). But given the subjective nature of this form of creativity, it
is difficult to deal with it no matter how important it is for those who experience
it.
The final use of the term designates individuals who, like Leonardo, Edison,
Picasso, or Einstein, have changed our culture in some important respect. They
are the creative ones without qualifications. Because their achievements are by
definition public, it is easier to write about them, and the persons included in my
study belong to this group.
The difference among these three meanings is not just a matter of degree. The
last kind of creativity is not simply a more developed form of the first two. These
are actually different ways of being creative, each to a large measure unrelated to
the others. It happens very often, for example, that some persons brimming with
brilliance, whom everyone thinks of as being exceptionally creative, never leave
any accomplishment, any trace of their existence—except, perhaps, in the
memories of those who have known them. Whereas some of the people who have
had the greatest impact on history did not show any originality or brilliance in
their behavior, except for the accomplishments they left behind.
For example, Leonardo da Vinci, certainly one of the most creative persons
in the third sense of the term, was apparently reclusive, and almost compulsive in
his behavior. If you had met him at a cocktail party, you would have thought that
he was a tiresome bore and would have left him standing in a corner as soon as
possible. Neither Isaac Newton nor Thomas Edison would have been considered
28
assets at a party either, and outside of their scientific concerns they appeared
colorless and driven. The biographers of outstanding creators struggle valiantly
to make their subjects interesting and brilliant, yet more often than not their
efforts are in vain. The accomplishments of a Michelangelo, a Beethoven, a
Picasso, or an Einstein are awesome in their respective fields—but their private
lives, their everyday ideas and actions, would seldom warrant another thought
were it not that their specialized accomplishments made everything they said or
did of interest.
By the definition I am using here, one of the most creative persons in this
study is John Bardeen. He is the first person to have been awarded the Nobel
prize in physics twice. The first time it was for developing the transistor; the
second for his work on superconductivity. Few persons have ranged as widely
and deeply in the realm of solid state physics, or come out with such important
insights. But talking with Bardeen on any issue besides his work was not easy;
his mind followed abstract paths while he spoke slowly, haltingly, and without
much depth or interest about “real life” topics.
It is perfectly possible to make a creative contribution without being brilliant
or personally creative, just as it is possible—even likely—that someone
personally creative will never contribute a thing to the culture. All three kinds of
creativity enrich life by making it more interesting and fulfilling. But in this
context I focus primarily on the third use of the term, and explore what is
involved in the kind of creativity that leaves a trace in the cultural matrix.
To make things more complicated, consider two more terms that are
sometimes used interchangeably with creativity. The first is talent. Talent differs
from creativity in that it focuses on an innate ability to do something very well.
We might say that Michael Jordan is a talented athlete, or that Mozart was a
talented pianist, without implying that either was creative for that reason. In our
sample, some individuals were talented in mathematics or in music, but the
majority achieved creative results without any exceptional talent being evident.
Of course, talent is a relative term, so it might be argued that in comparison to
“average” individuals the creative ones are talented.
The other term that is often used as a synonym for “creative” is genius.
Again, there is an overlap. Perhaps we should think of a genius as a person who
is both brilliant and creative at the same time. But certainly a person can change
the culture in significant ways without being a genius. Although several of the
people in our sample have been called a genius by the media, they—and the
majority of creative individuals we interviewed—reject this designation.
29
THE SYSTEMS M ODEL
We have seen that creativity with a capital C, the kind that changes some aspect
of the culture, is never only in the mind of a person. That would by definition not
be a case of cultural creativity. To have any effect, the idea must be couched in
terms that are understandable to others, it must pass muster with the experts in the
field, and finally it must be included in the cultural domain to which it belongs.
So the first question I ask of creativity is not what is it but where is it?
The answer that makes most sense is that creativity can be observed only in
the interrelations of a system made up of three main parts. The first of these is the
domain, which consists of a set of symbolic rules and procedures. Mathematics
is a domain, or at a finer resolution algebra and number theory can be seen as
domains. Domains are in turn nested in what we usually call culture, or the
symbolic knowledge shared by a particular society, or by humanity as a whole.
The second component of creativity is the field, which includes all the
individuals who act as gatekeepers to the domain. It is their job to decide
whether a new idea or product should be included in the domain. In the visual
arts the field consists of art teachers, curators of museums, collectors of art,
critics, and administrators of foundations and government agencies that deal with
culture. It is this field that selects what new works of art deserve to be
recognized, preserved, and remembered.
Finally, the third component of the creative system is the individual person.
Creativity occurs when a person, using the symbols of a given domain such as
music, engineering, business, or mathematics, has a new idea or sees a new
pattern, and when this novelty is selected by the appropriate field for inclusion
into the relevant domain. The next generation will encounter that novelty as part
of the domain they are exposed to, and if they are creative, they in turn will
change it further. Occasionally creativity involves the establishment of a new
domain: It could be argued that Galileo started experimental physics and that
Freud carved psychoanalysis out of the existing domain of neuropathology. But if
Galileo and Freud had not been able to enlist followers who came together in
distinct fields to further their respective domains, their ideas would have had
much less of an impact, or none at all.
So the definition that follows from this perspective is: Creativity is any act,
idea, or product that changes an existing domain, or that transforms an existing
domain into a new one. And the definition of a creative person is: someone
whose thoughts or actions change a domain, or establish a new domain. It is
important to remember, however, that a domain cannot be changed without the
explicit or implicit consent of a field responsible for it.
30
Several consequences follow from this way of looking at things. For
instance, we don’t need to assume that the creative person is necessarily different
from anyone else. In other words, a personal trait of “creativity” is not what
determines whether a person will be creative. What counts is whether the novelty
he or she produces is accepted for inclusion in the domain. This may be the result
of chance, perseverance, or being at the right place at the right time. Because
creativity is jointly constituted by the interaction among domain, field, and
person, the trait of personal creativity may help generate the novelty that will
change a domain, but it is neither a sufficient nor a necessary condition for it.
A person cannot be creative in a domain to which he or she is not exposed.
No matter how enormous mathematical gifts a child may have, he or she will not
be able to contribute to mathematics without learning its rules. But even if the
rules are learned, creativity cannot be manifested in the absence of a field that
recognizes and legitimizes the novel contributions. A child might possibly learn
mathematics on his or her own by finding the right books and the right mentors,
but cannot make a difference in the domain unless recognized by teachers and
journal editors who will witness to the appropriateness of the contribution.
It also follows that creativity can be manifested only in existing domains and
fields. For instance, it is very difficult to say “This woman is very creative at
nurturing” or “This woman is very creative in her wisdom,” because nurturance
and wisdom, although extremely important for human survival, are loosely
organized domains with few generally accepted rules and priorities, and they
lack a field of experts who can determine the legitimacy of claims. So we are in
the paradoxical situation that novelty is more obvious in domains that are often
relatively trivial but easy to measure; whereas in domains that are more essential
novelty is very difficult to determine. There can be agreement on whether a new
computer game, rock song, or economic formula is actually novel, and therefore
creative, less easy to agree on the novelty of an act of compassion or of an insight
into human nature.
The model also allows for the often mysterious fluctuations in the attribution
of creativity over time. For example, the reputation of Raphael as a painter has
waxed and waned several times since his heyday at the court of Pope Julius II.
Gregor Mendel did not become famous as the creator of experimental genetics
until half a century after his death. Johann Sebastian Bach’s music was dismissed
as old-fashioned for several generations. The conventional explanation is that
Raphael, Mendel, and Bach were always creative, only their reputation changed
with the vagaries of social recognition. But the systems model recognizes the fact
that creativity cannot be separated from its recognition. Mendel was not creative
during his years of relative obscurity because his experimental findings were not
that important until a group of British geneticists, at the end of the nineteenth
31
century, recognized their implications for evolution.
The creativity of Raphael fluctuates as art historical knowledge, art critical
theories, and the aesthetic sensitivity of the age change. According to the systems
model, it makes perfect sense to say that Raphael was creative in the sixteenth
and in the nineteenth centuries but not in between or afterward. Raphael is
creative when the community is moved by his work, and discovers new
possibilities in his paintings. But when his paintings seem mannered and routine
to those who know art, Raphael can only be called a great draftsman, a subtle
colorist—perhaps even a personally creative individual—but not creative with a
capital C. If creativity is more than personal insight and is cocreated by domains,
fields, and persons, then creativity can be constructed, deconstructed, and
reconstructed several times over the course of history. Here is one of our
respondents, the poet Anthony Hecht, commenting on this issue:
Literary reputations are constantly shifting. Sometimes in trifling,
frivolous ways. There was a former colleague of mine who, at a recent
meeting of the English Department, said that she thought it was now no
longer important to teach Shakespeare because among other things he had
a very feeble grasp of women. Now that seems to me as trifling an
observation as can be made, but it does mean that, if you take this
seriously, nobody’s place in the whole canon is very secure, that it’s
constantly changing. And this is both good and bad. John Donne’s
position was in the nineteenth century of no consequence at all. The
Oxford Book of English Verse had only one poem of his. And now, of
course, he was resurrected by Herbert Grierson and T. S. Eliot and he’s
one of the great figures of seventeenth-century poetry. But he wasn’t
always. This is true of music, too. Bach was eclipsed for two hundred
years and rediscovered by Mendelssohn. This means that we are
constantly reassessing the past. And that’s a good, valuable, and indeed
necessary thing to do.
This way of looking at things might seem insane to some. The usual way to
think about this issue is that someone like van Gogh was a great creative genius,
but his contemporaries did not recognize this. Fortunately, now we have
discovered what a great painter he was after all, so his creativity has been
vindicated. Few flinch at the presumption implicit in such a view. What we are
saying is that we know what great art is so much better than van Gogh’s
contemporaries did—those bourgeois philistines. What—besides unconscious
conceit—warrants this belief? A more objective description of van Gogh’s
contribution is that his creativity came into being when a sufficient number of art
experts felt that his paintings had something important to contribute to the domain
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of art. Without such a response, van Gogh would have remained what he was, a
disturbed man who painted strange canvases.
Perhaps the most important implication of the systems model is that the level
of creativity in a given place at a given time does not depend only on the amount
of individual creativity. It depends just as much on how well suited the
respective domains and fields are to the recognition and diffusion of novel ideas.
This can make a great deal of practical difference to efforts for enhancing
creativity. Today many American corporations spend a great deal of money and
time trying to increase the originality of their employees, hoping thereby to get a
competitive edge in the marketplace. But such programs make no difference
unless management also learns to recognize the valuable ideas among the many
novel ones, and then finds ways of implementing them.
For instance, Robert Galvin at Motorola is justly concerned about the fact
that in order to survive among the hungry Pacific Rim electronic manufacturers,
his company must make creativity an intentional part of its productive process.
He is also right in perceiving that to do so he first has to encourage the thousands
of engineers working for the company to generate as many novel ideas as
possible. So various forms of brainstorming are instituted, where employees
free-associate without fear of being ridiculously impractical. But the next steps
are less clear. How does the field (in this case, management) choose among the
multitude of new ideas the ones worth pursuing? And how can the chosen ideas
be included in the domain (in this case, the production schedule of Motorola)?
Because we are used to thinking that creativity begins and ends with the person,
it is easy to miss the fact that the greatest spur to it may come from changes
outside the individual.
CREATIVITY IN THE RENAISSANCE
A good example is the sudden spurt in artistic creativity that took place in
Florence between 1400 and 1425. These were the golden years of the
Renaissance, and it is generally agreed that some of the most influential new
works of art in Europe were created during that quarter century. Any list of the
masterpieces would include the dome of the cathedral built by Brunelleschi, the
“Gates of Paradise” crafted for the baptistery by Ghiberti, Donatello’s sculptures
for the chapel of Orsanmichele, the fresco cycle by Masaccio in the Brancacci
Chapel, and Gentile da Fabriano’s painting of the Adoration of the Magi in the
Church of the Trinity.
How can this flowering of great art be explained? If creativity is something
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entirely within a person, we would have to argue that for some reason an
unusually large number of creative artists were born in Florence in the last
decades of the fourteenth century. Perhaps some freak genetic mutation occurred,
or a drastic change in the education of Florentine children suddenly caused them
to become more creative. But an explanation involving the domain and the field
is much more sensible.
As far as the domain is concerned, the Renaissance was made possible in
part by the rediscovery of ancient Roman methods of building and sculpting that
had been lost for centuries during the so-called Dark Ages. In Rome and
elsewhere, by the end of the thirteen hundreds, eager scholars were excavating
classical ruins, copying down and analyzing the styles and techniques of the
ancients. This slow preparatory work bore fruit at the turn of the fifteenth century,
opening up long-forgotten knowledge to the artisans and craftsmen of the time.
The cathedral of Florence, Santa Maria Novella, had been left open to the
skies for eighty years because no one could find a way to build a dome over its
huge apse. There was no known method for preventing the walls from collapsing
inward once the curvature of the dome had advanced beyond a certain height.
Every year eager young artists and established builders submitted plans to the
Opera del Duomo, the board that supervised the building of the cathedral, but
their plans were found unpersuasive. The Opera was made up of the political and
business leaders of the city, and their personal reputations were at stake in this
choice. For eighty years they did not feel that any proposed solution for the
completion of the dome was worthy of the city, and of themselves.
But eventually humanist scholars became interested in the Pantheon of Rome,
measured its enormous dome, and analyzed how it had been constructed. The
Pantheon had been rebuilt by the emperor Hadrian in the second century. The
diameter of its 71-foot-high dome was 142 feet. Nothing on that scale had been
built for well over a thousand years, and the methods that allowed the Romans to
build such a structure that would stand up and not collapse had been long
forgotten in the dark centuries of barbarian invasions. But now that peace and
commerce were reviving the Italian cities, the knowledge was slowly being
pieced back together.
Brunelleschi, who in 1401 appears to have visited Rome to study its
antiquities, understood the importance of the studies of the Pantheon. His idea for
how to complete the dome in Florence was based on the framework of internal
stone arches that would help contain the thrust, and the herringbone brickwork
between them. But his design was not just a restatement of the Roman model—it
was influenced also by all the architecture of the intervening centuries, especially
the Gothic models. When he presented his plan to the Opera, they recognized it as
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a feasible and beautiful solution. And after the dome was built, it became a
liberating new form that inspired hundreds of builders who came after him,
including Michelangelo, who based on it his design for the cupola of St. Peter’s
in Rome.
But no matter how influential the rediscovery of classical art forms, the
Florentine Renaissance cannot be explained only in terms of the sudden
availability of information. Otherwise, the same flowering of new artistic forms
would have taken place in all the other cities exposed to the ancient models. And
though this actually did happen to a certain extent, no other place matched
Florence in the intensity and depth of artistic achievement. Why was this so?
The explanation is that the field of art became particularly favorable to the
creation of new works at just about the same time as the rediscovery of the
ancient domains of art. Florence had become one of the richest cities in Europe
first through trading, then through the manufacture of wool and other textiles, and
finally through the financial expertise of its rich merchants. By the end of the
fourteenth century there were a dozen major bankers in the city—the Medici
being only one of the minor ones—who were getting substantial interest every
year from the various foreign kings and potentates to whom they had lent money.
But while the coffers of the bankers were getting fuller, the city itself was
troubled. Men without property were ruthlessly exploited, and political tensions
fueled by economic inequality threatened at any moment to explode into open
conflict. The struggle between pope and emperor, which divided the entire
continent, was reproduced inside the city in the struggle between the Guelf and
Ghibelline factions. To make matters worse, Florence was surrounded by Siena,
Pisa, and Arezzo, cities jealous of its wealth and ambitions and always ready to
snatch away whatever they could of Florentine trade and territory.
It was in this atmosphere of wealth and uncertainty that the urban leaders
decided to invest in making Florence the most beautiful city in Christendom—in
their words, “a new Athens.” By building awesome churches, impressive
bridges, and splendid palaces, and by commissioning great frescoes and majestic
statues, they must have felt that they were weaving a protective spell around their
homes and businesses. And in a way, they were not wrong: When more than five
hundred years later Hitler ordered the retreating German troops to blow up the
bridges on the Arno and level the city around them, the field commander refused
to obey on the grounds that too much beauty would be erased from the world—
and the city was saved.
The important thing to realize is that when the Florentine bankers,
churchmen, and heads of great guilds decided to make their city intimidatingly
35
beautiful, they did not just throw money at artists and wait to see what happened.
They became intensely involved in the process of encouraging, evaluating, and
selecting the works they wanted to see completed. It was because the leading
citizens, as well as the common people, were so seriously concerned with the
outcome of their work that the artists were pushed to perform beyond their
previous limits. Without the constant encouragement and scrutiny of the members
of the Opera, the dome over the cathedral would probably not have been as
beautiful as it eventually turned out to be.
Another illustration of how the field of art operated in Florence at this time
concerns the building of the north and especially the east door of the baptistery,
one of the uncontested masterpieces of the period, which Michelangelo declared
was worthy of being the “Gate of Paradise” when he saw its heart-wrenching
beauty. In this case also a special commission had been formed to supervise the
building of the doors for this public edifice. The board was composed of eminent
individuals, mostly the leaders of the guild of wool weavers that was financing
the project. The board decided that each door should be of bronze and have ten
panels illustrating Old Testament themes. Then they wrote to some of the most
eminent philosophers, writers, and churchmen in Europe to request their opinion
of which scenes from the Bible should be included in the panels, and how they
should be represented. After the answers came in, they drew up a list of
specifications for the doors and in 1401 announced a competition for their
design.
From the dozens of drawings submitted the board chose five finalists—
Brunelleschi and Ghiberti among them. The finalists on the short list were given
a year to finish a bronze mock-up of one of the door panels. The subject was to
be “The Sacrifice of Isaac” and had to include at least one angel and one sheep in
addition to Abraham and his son. During that year all five finalists were paid
handsomely by the board for time and materials. In 1402 the jury reconvened to
consider the new entries and selected Ghiberti’s panel, which showed technical
excellence as well as a wonderfully natural yet classical composition.
Lorenzo Ghiberti was twenty-one years old at the time. He spent the next
twenty years finishing the north door and then another twenty-seven finishing the
famed east door. He was involved with perfecting the baptistery doors from 1402
to 1452, a span of a half century. Of course, in the meantime he finished many
more commissions and sculpted statues for the Medicis, the Pazzis, the guild of
merchant bankers, and other notables, but his reputation rests on the Gates of
Paradise, which changed the Western world’s conception of decorative art.
If Brunelleschi had been influenced by Roman architecture, Ghiberti studied
and tried to emulate Roman sculpture. He had to relearn the technique for casting
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large bronze shapes, and he studied the classic profiles carved on Roman tombs
on which he modeled the expressions of the characters he made emerge from the
door panels. And again, he combined the rediscovered classics with the more
recent Gothic sculpture produced in Siena. However, one could claim without
too much risk of exaggeration that what made the Gates of Paradise so beautiful
was the care, concern, and support of the entire community, represented by the
field of judges who supervised their construction. If Ghiberti and his fellows
were driven to surpass themselves, it was by the intense competition and focused
attention their work attracted. Thus the sociologist of art Arnold Hauser rightly
assesses this period: “In the art of the early Renaissance…the starting point of
production is to be found mostly not in the creative urge, the subjective selfexpression and spontaneous inspiration of the artist, but in the task set by the
customer.”
Of course, the great works of Florentine art would never have been made just
because the domain of classical art had been rediscovered, or because the rulers
of the city had decided to make it beautiful. Without individual artists the
Renaissance could not have taken place. After all, it was Brunelleschi who built
the dome over Santa Maria Novella, and it was Ghiberti who spent his life
casting the Gates of Paradise. At the same time, it must be recognized that
without previous models and the support of the city, Brunelleschi and Ghiberti
could not have done what they did. And that with the favorable conjunction of
field and domain, if these two artists had not been born, some others would have
stepped in their place and built the dome and the doors. It is because of this
inseparable connection that creativity must, in the last analysis, be seen not as
something happening within a person but in the relationships within a system.
DOMAINS OF KNOWLEDGE AND ACTION
It seems that every species of living organism, except for us humans, understands
the world in terms of more or less built-in responses to certain types of
sensations. Plants turn toward the sun. There are amoebas sensitive to magnetic
attraction that orient their bodies toward the North pole. Baby indigo buntings
learn the patterns of the stars as they look out of their nests and then are able to
fly great distances at night without losing their way. Bats respond to sounds,
sharks to smell, and birds of prey have incredibly developed vision. Each
species experiences and understands its environment in terms of the information
its sensory equipment is programmed to process.
The same is true for humans. But in addition to the narrow windows on the
world our genes have provided, we have managed to open up new perspectives
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on reality based on information mediated by symbols. Perfect parallel lines do
not exist in nature, but by postulating their existence Euclid and his followers
could build a system for representing spatial relations that is much more precise
than what the unaided eye and brain can achieve. Different as they are from each
other, lyric poetry and magnetic resonance spectroscopy are both ways to make
accessible information that otherwise we would never have an inkling about.
Knowledge mediated by symbols is extrasomatic; it is not transmitted
through the chemical codes inscribed in our chromosomes but must be
intentionally passed on and learned. It is this extrasomatic information that makes
up what we call a culture. And the knowledge conveyed by symbols is bundled
up in discrete domains—geometry, music, religion, legal systems, and so on.
Each domain is made up of its own symbolic elements, its own rules, and
generally has its own system of notation. In many ways, each domain describes
an isolated little world in which a person can think and act with clarity and
concentration.
The existence of domains is perhaps the best evidence of human creativity.
The fact that calculus and Gregorian chants exist means that we can experience
patterns of order that were not programmed into our genes by biological
evolution. By learning the rules of a domain, we immediately step beyond the
boundaries of biology and enter the realm of cultural evolution. Each domain
expands the limitations of individuality and enlarges our sensitivity and ability to
relate to the world. Each person is surrounded by an almost infinite number of
domains that are potentially able to open up new worlds and give new powers to
those who learn their rules. Therefore, it is astounding how few of us bother to
invest enough mental energy to learn the rules of even one of these domains, and
live instead exclusively within the constraints of biological existence.
For most people, domains are primarily ways to make a living. We choose
nursing or plumbing, medicine or business administration because of our ability
and the chances of getting a well-paying job. But then there are individuals—and
the creative ones are usually in this group—who choose certain domains because
of a powerful calling to do so. For them the match is so perfect that acting within
the rules of the domain is rewarding in itself; they would keep doing what they do
even if they were not paid for it, just for the sake of doing the activity.
Despite the multiplicity of domains, there are some common reasons for
pursuing them for their own sake. Nuclear physics, microbiology, poetry, and
musical composition share few symbols and rules, yet the calling for these
different domains is often astonishingly similar. To bring order to experience, to
make something that will endure after one’s death, to do something that allows
humankind to go beyond its present powers are very common themes.
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When asked why he decided to become a poet at the age of seven, György
Faludy answered, “Because I was afraid to die.” He explained that creating
patterns with words, patterns that because of their truth and beauty had a chance
to survive longer than the body of the poet, was an act of defiance and hope that
gave meaning and direction to his life for the next seventy-three years. This urge
is not so very different from physicist John Bardeen’s description of his work on
superconductivity that might lead to a world without friction, the physicist Heinz
Maier-Leibnitz’s hope that nuclear energy will provide unlimited power, or the
biochemical physicist Manfred Eigen’s attempt to understand how life evolved.
Domains are wonderfully different, but the human quest they represent converges
on a few themes. In many ways, Max Planck’s obsession with understanding the
Absolute underlies most human attempts to transcend the limitations of a body
doomed to die after a short span of years.
There are several ways that domains can help or hinder creativity. Three
major dimensions are particularly relevant: the clarity of structure, the centrality
within the culture, and accessibility. Say that pharmaceutical companies A and B
are competing in the same market. The amount of money they devote to research
and development, as well as the creative potential of their researchers, is equal.
Now we want to predict whether company A or B will come up with the most
effective new drugs, basing our prediction solely on domain characteristics. The
questions we would ask are the following: Which company has the more detailed
data about pharmaceuticals? Where are the data better organized? Which
company puts more emphasis in its culture on research, relative to other areas
such as production and marketing? Where does pharmaceutical knowledge earn
more respect? Which company disseminates knowledge better among its staff?
Where is it easier to test a hypothesis? The company where knowledge is better
structured, more central, and more accessible is likely to be the one where—
other things still being equal—creative innovations are going to happen.
It has been often remarked that superior ability in some domains—such as
mathematics or music—shows itself earlier in life than in other domains—such
as painting or philosophy. Similarly, it has been suggested that the most creative
performances in some domains are the work of young people, while in other
domains older persons have the edge. The most creative lyric verse is believed
to be that written by the young, while epics tend to be written by more mature
poets. Mathematical genius peaks in the twenties, physics in the thirties, but great
philosophical works are usually achieved later in life.
The most likely explanation for these differences lies in the different ways
these domains are structured. The symbolic system of mathematics is organized
relatively tightly; the internal logic is strict; the system maximizes clarity and
lack of redundancy. Therefore, it is easy for a young person to assimilate the
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rules quickly and jump to the cutting edge of the domain in a few years. For the
same structural reasons, when a novelty is proposed—like the long-awaited
proof of Fermat’s last theorem presented by a relatively young mathematician in
1993—it is immediately recognized and, if viable, accepted. By contrast, it takes
decades for social scientists or philosophers to master their domains, and if they
produce a new idea, it takes the field many years to assess whether it is an
improvement worth adding to the knowledge base.
Heinz Maier-Leibnitz tells the story of a small physics seminar he taught in
Munich, which was interrupted one day by a graduate student who suggested a
new way to represent on the blackboard the behavior of a subatomic particle.
The professor agreed that the new formulation was an improvement and praised
the student for having thought of it. By the end of the week, Maier-Leibnitz says,
he started getting calls from physicists at other German universities, asking in
effect, “Is it true that one of your students came up with such and such an idea?”
The next week, calls began to come in from American universities on the East
Coast. In two weeks, colleagues from Cal Tech, Berkeley, and Stanford were
asking the same question.
This story could never have been told about my branch of psychology. If a
student stood up in a psychology seminar at any school in the world and uttered
the most profound ideas, he or she would not create a ripple beyond the walls of
the classroom. Not because psychology students are less intelligent or original
than the ones in physics. Nor because my colleagues and I are less alert to our
students’ new ideas. But because with the exception of a few highly structured
subdomains, psychology is so diffuse a system of thought that it takes years of
intense writing for any person to say something that others recognize as new and
important. The young student in Maier-Leibnitz’s class was eventually awarded
the Nobel Prize in physics, something that could never happen to a psychologist.
Does this mean that a domain that is better structured—where creativity is
easier to determine—is in some sense “better” than one that is more diffuse? That
it is more important, more advanced, more serious? Not at all. If that were true,
then chess, microeconomics, or computer programming, which are very clearly
structured domains, would have to be considered more advanced than morality or
wisdom.
But it is certainly true that nowadays a quantifiable domain with sharp
boundaries and well-defined rules is taken more seriously. In a typical university
it is much easier to get funding for such a department. It is also easier to justify
promotion for a teacher in a narrowly defined domain: Ten colleagues will
willingly write letters of recommendation stating that professor X should be
promoted because she is the world’s authority on the mating habits of the
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kangaroo rat or on the use of the subjunctive in Dravidic languages. It is much
less likely that ten scholars would agree on who is a world authority on
personality development. From this it is easy to make the regrettable mistake of
inferring that personality development is a scientifically less respectable domain
than the one that studies the mating practices of the kangaroo rat.
In the current historical climate, a domain where quantifiable measurement is
possible takes precedence over one where it does not. We believe that things that
can be measured are real, and we ignore those that we don’t know how to
measure. So people take intelligence very seriously, because the mental ability
we call by that name can be measured by tests; whereas few bother about how
sensitive, altruistic, or helpful someone is, because as yet there is no good way to
measure such qualities. Sometimes this bias has profound consequences—for
instance, in how we define social progress and achievement. One of futurist
Hazel Henderson’s life goals is to convince world governments to start
computing less easily measured trends in their Gross Natural Product. As long as
the costs of pollution, depredation of natural resources, decline in the quality of
life, and various other human costs are left out of the reckoning of the GNP, she
claims, entirely distorted pictures of reality result. A country may pride itself on
all its new highways while the resulting auto emissions are causing widespread
emphysema.
FIELDS OF ACCOMPLISHMENT
If a symbolic domain is necessary for a person to innovate in, a field is necessary
to determine whether the innovation is worth making a fuss about. Only a very
small percentage of the great number of novelties produced will eventually
become part of the culture. For instance, about one hundred thousand new books
are published every year in the United States. How many of these will be
remembered ten years from now? Similarly, about five hundred thousand people
in this country state on their census forms that they are artists. If each of them
painted only one picture a year, it would amount to about fifteen million new
paintings per generation. How many of these will end up in museums or in
textbooks on art? One in a million, ten in a million, one in ten thousand? One?
George Stigler, the Nobel laureate in economics, made the same point about
new ideas produced in his domain, and what he says can be applied to any other
field of science:
The profession is too busy to read much. I keep telling my colleagues
at the Journal of Political Economy that anytime we get an article that
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fifteen of our profession, of the seven thousand subscribers, read
carefully, that must be truly a major article of the year.
These numbers suggest that the competition between memes, or units of
cultural information, is as fierce as the competition between the units of chemical
information we call genes. In order to survive, cultures must eliminate most of
the new ideas their members produce. Cultures are conservative, and for good
reason. No culture could assimilate all the novelty people produce without
dissolving into chaos. Suppose you had to pay equal attention to the fifteen
million paintings—how much time would you have left free to eat, sleep, work,
or listen to music? In other words, no person can afford to pay attention to more
than a very small fraction of new things produced. Yet a culture could not survive
long unless all of its members paid attention to at least a few of the same things.
In fact it could be said that a culture exists when the majority of people agree that
painting X deserves more attention than painting Y, or idea X deserves more
thought than idea Y.
Because of the scarcity of attention, we must be selective: We remember and
recognize only a few of the works of art produced, we read only a few of the new
books written, we buy only a few of the new appliances busily being invented.
Usually it is the various fields that act as filters to help us select among the flood
of new information those memes worth paying attention to. A field is made up of
experts in a given domain whose job involves passing judgment on performance
in that domain. Members of the field choose from among the novelties those that
deserve to be included in the canon.
This competition also means that a creative person must convince the field
that he or she has made a valuable innovation. This is never an easy task. Stigler
emphasizes the necessity of this difficult struggle for recognition:
I think you have to accept the judgment of others. Because if one
were allowed to judge his own case, every one of us should have been
president of the United States and received all the medals and so forth.
And so I guess I am most proud of the things in which I succeeded in
impressing other people with what I have done. And those would be
things like the two areas of work in which I received the Nobel Prize,
and things like that. So those and certain other works that my profession
has liked would be, as far as my professional life goes, the things of
which I’m most proud.
I have always looked upon the task of a scientist as bearing the
responsibility for persuading his contemporaries of the cogency and
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validity of his thinking. He isn’t entitled to a warm reception. He has to
earn it, whether by the skill of his exposition, the novelty of his ideas, or
what. I’ve written on subjects which I thought had promise which haven’t
amounted to much. That’s all right. That may well mean that my judgment
wasn’t good, because I don’t think any one person’s judgment is as good
as that of a collection of his better colleagues.
Fields vary greatly in terms of how specialized versus how inclusive they
are. For some domains, the field is as broad as society itself. It took the entire
population of the United States to decide whe...
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