In this book, Gregory Feist reviews and consolidates the scattered literatures on the psychology of science, then calls for the establishment of the field as a unique discipline. He offers the most ...comprehensive perspective yet on how science came to be possible in our species and on the important role of psychological forces in an individual's development of scientific interest, talent, and creativity. Without a psychological perspective, Feist argues, we cannot fully understand the development of scientific thinking or scientific genius.The author explores the major subdisciplines within psychology as well as allied areas, including biological neuroscience and developmental, cognitive, personality, and social psychology, to show how each sheds light on how scientific thinking, interest, and talent arise. He assesses which elements of scientific thinking have their origin in evolved mental mechanisms and considers how humans may have developed the highly sophisticated scientific fields we know today. In his fascinating and authoritative book, Feist deals thoughtfully with the mysteries of the human mind and convincingly argues that the creation of the psychology of science as a distinct discipline is essential to deeper understanding of human thought processes.
The general conclusion from recent research on the Big Two dimensions of human personality — Plasticity (extraversion and openness) and Stability (neuroticism, agreeableness, and conscientiousness) — ...show that Plasticity has a more robust and stronger association with creativity than Stability. More specifically, people who are high in plasticity and low in stability may be most likely to exhibit creative thought and behavior. Moreover, current research in neuroscience, genetics and neurochemistry of behavior each suggest biological mechanisms for how these personality qualities lower thresholds for creative thought and behavior.
The purpose of this study was twofold: first, to be among the first attempts to validate linguistic analysis as a method of creativity assessment and second, to differentiate between individuals in ...varying scientific and artistic creativity levels using personality language patterns. Creativity is most commonly assessed through methods such as questionnaires and specific tasks, the validity of which can be weakened by scorer or experimenter error, subjective and response biases, and self-knowledge constraints. Linguistic analysis may provide researchers with an automatic, objective method of assessing creativity, and free from human error and bias. The current study used 419 creativity text samples from a wide range of creative individuals mostly in science (and some in the arts and humanities) to investigate whether linguistic analysis can, in fact, distinguish between creativity levels and creativity domains using creativity dictionaries and personality dimension language patterns, from the linguistic inquiry and word count (LIWC) text analysis program. Creative individuals tended to use more words on the creativity keyword dictionaries as well as more introversion and openness to experience language pattern words than less creative individuals. Regarding creativity domains, eminent scientists used fewer introversion, and openness to experience language pattern words than eminent artists. Text analysis through LIWC was able to partially distinguish between the three creativity levels, in some cases, and the two creativity domains (science and art). These findings lend support to the use of linguistic analysis as a partially valid assessment of scientific and artistic creative achievement.
The role of psychopathology in creative achievement has long been a debated topic in both popular culture and academic discourse. Yet the field is settling on various robust trends that show there is ...no one answer. Conclusions vary by level and kind of creativity and level and kind of psychopathology. The current study sought to replicate previous findings that linked lifetime rates of psychopathology to world-class levels of creativity. A total of 199 biographies of eminent professionals (creative artists, creative scientists, eminent athletes) were rated by raters who were blind to the identity of the eminent person on 19 mental disorders using a 3-point scale of not present (0), probable (1), and present (2). Athletes served as an eminent but not creative comparison group to discern whether fame, independently of creativity, was associated with psychopathology. Results showed that artists exhibited higher lifetime rates of psychopathology than scientists and athletes in the more inclusive criterion for psychopathology (i.e., it was either probable or present), whereas both artists and athletes exhibited higher rates than scientists in the stricter criterion for psychopathology (i.e., it was present). Apart from anxiety disorder, athletes did not differ from the U.S. population in lifetime rates of psychopathology, whereas artists differed from the population in terms of alcoholism, anxiety disorder, drug abuse, and depression. These data generally corroborate and replicate previous biographical research on the link between artistic creativity and life-time rates of psychopathology.
► We examine personality and cognitive attitudes behind who is interested in science. ► Openness, conscientiousness, introversion and need for cognition predict scientific interest. ► Personality and ...need for cognition predicted interest in science, with small robust effect sizes.
One important task for psychologists of science is to examine the psychological factors (such as personality or cognition) that underlie who becomes interested in science and what kind of attitudes people develop toward science. Those were the primary questions addressed by the present study in a sample of 655 college undergraduates. We predicted that the personality dimensions of openness to experience, conscientiousness, and introversion as well as the cognitive style need for cognition would each predict level of interest in science. Results confirmed these predictions, although the effect sizes tended to be small. Further analyses revealed that need for cognition explained variance in interest in science over and above variance explained by personality.
In this article, I argue that scientific fame and impact exists on a continuum from the mundane to the transformative/revolutionary. Ideally, one achieves fame and impact in science by synthesizing ...two extreme career prototypes: intrinsic and extrinsic research. The former is guided by interest, curiosity, passion, gut, and intuition for important untapped topics. The latter is guided by money, grants, and/or what is being published in top-tier journals. Assessment of fame and impact in science ultimately rests on productivity (publication) and some variation of its impact (citations). In addition to those traditional measures of impact, there are some relatively new metrics (e.g., the h index and altmetrics). If psychology is to achieve consensual cumulative progress and better rates of replication, I propose that upcoming psychologists would do well to understand that success is not equal to fame and that individual career success is not necessarily the same as disciplinary success. Finally, if one is to have a successful and perhaps even famous career in psychological science, a good strategy would be to synthesize intrinsic and extrinsic motives for one's research.
Theory and research in both personality psychology and creativity share an essential commonality: emphasis on the uniqueness of the individual. Both disciplines also share an emphasis on temporal ...consistency and have a 50-year history, and yet no quantitative review of the literature on the creative personality has been conducted. The 3 major goals of this article are to present the results of the first meta-analytic review of the literature on personality and creative achievement, to present a conceptual integration of underlying potential psychological mechanisms that personality and creativity have in common, and to show how the topic of creativity has been important to personality psychologists and can be to social psychologists. A common system of personality description was obtained by classifying trait terms or scales onto one of the Five-Factor Model (or Big Five) dimensions: neuroticism, extraversion, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. Effect size was measured using Cohen 's d (Cohen, 1988). Comparisons on personality traits were made on 3 sets of samples: scientists versus nonscientists, more creative versus less creative scientists, and artists versus nonartists. In general, creative people are more open to new experiences, less conventional and less conscientious, more self-confident, self-accepting, driven, ambitious, dominant, hostile, and impulsive. Out of these, the largest effect sizes were on openness, conscientiousness, self-acceptance, hostility, and impulsivity. Further, there appears to be temporal stability of these distinguishing personality dimensions of creative people. Dispositions important to creative behavior are parsed into social, cognitive, motivational, and affective dimensions. Creativity, like most complex behaviors requires an intra- as well as interdisciplinary view and thereby mitigates the historically disciplinocentric attitudes of personality and social psychologists.
A thorough understanding of the relationship between quality and quantity of creative productions is critically important for creativity researchers and practitioners. The current study examines the ...equal odds baseline as a simple model to describe the quality-quantity relationship. Among other predictions, the equal odds baseline posits the presence of individual differences in hit ratios. In this work, the expected residual variance under the more constrained assumption that hit ratios is constant across creators is derived and implemented in a test against the observed residual variance. In the case that the equal odds baseline holds for a given dataset, this test can be used to examine the presence of individual differences in hit ratios within summary data from previously published studies. It is further shown that a significantly smaller observed residual variance as compared to the expected residual variance under strict equal odds provides strong evidence against the equal odds baseline. The outlined approach extends the equal odds baseline and is empirically illustrated with reported data from primary studies on divergent thinking, brainstorming research, and scientific productivity. The presented findings highlight the strong heuristic value of the equal odds baseline.
Motivated reasoning occurs when we reason differently about evidence that supports our prior beliefs than when it contradicts those beliefs. Adult participants (N = 377) from Amazon's Mechanical Turk ...(MTurk) system completed written responses critically evaluating strengths and weaknesses in a vignette on the topic of anthropogenic climate change (ACC). The vignette had two fictional scientists present prototypical arguments for and against anthropogenic climate change that were constructed with equally flawed and conflicting reasoning. The current study tested and found support for three main hypotheses: cognitive style, personality, and ideology would predict both motivated reasoning and endorsement of human caused climate change; those who accept human-caused climate change will be less likely to engage in biased reasoning and more likely to engage in objective reasoning about climate change than those who deny human activity as a cause of climate change. (144 words)
The Creative Person in Science Grosul, Maya; Feist, Gregory J
Psychology of aesthetics, creativity, and the arts,
02/2014, Letnik:
8, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
The psychological qualities of the creative person in general are gradually becoming more and more clear, and yet the psychological qualities of the creative scientists remain less clear. The current ...investigation examined the personality characteristics of the creative scientist in a sample of 145 academic physical, biological, and social scientists (33% women) from major research universities throughout the United States. Personality data were collected online through completion of the Big Five Inventory (John, Donahue, & Kentle, 1991) and the Psychoticism subscale of the Revised Eysenck Personality Questionnaire (Francis, Brown, & Philipchalk, 1992). Creativity was assessed using various publication and citation-based metrics from Web of Science, Science Citation Index, and Social Science Citation Index, including the h-index and the creativity index (Soler, 2007). An overall creativity index was created by log-transforming, standardizing, and summing the multiple productivity and impact measures. Results mostly confirmed the prediction that openness to experience and psychoticism would explain variance in scientific creativity once career age, gender, and area of science were statistically controlled for in a stepwise hierarchical regression model. These patterns of results confirm and extend previous research in the psychology of science and suggest that personality traits function to lower behavioral thresholds and make creative behavior in science more likely.
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