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May 2, 2017 - Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
48:49
2017 Personality 19: Biology & Traits: Openness/Intelligence/Creativity II
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Today we're going to talk a little bit more about the fractionation of openness to experience.
We've done a fair number of studies with the Big Five aspect scale, which we've talked about a lot, which enables the Big Five model to be differentiated down into two aspects per trait.
And those aspects have been useful for a variety of reasons.
For example, When we're looking at political behavior, we've been able to determine that conservatives who are generally regarded as higher in conscientiousness are actually more specifically higher in orderliness.
There's not a lot of difference between liberals and conservatives with regards to industriousness, and we've also been able to...
Determine, at least to some degree, that orderliness seems to be associated with disgust sensitivity, and disgust sensitivity is part of the behavioral immune system, and so part of the reasons that conservatives are more inclined to want things like closed borders is because they're more concerned about maintaining the boundaries between things,
and the reason for that seems to be Fundamentally associated with disgust, and I'll talk to you a lot about that next week, because once we sorted that out, it really, really illuminated my way of thinking about things that had happened,
for example, in Nazi Germany, because people tend to think about, like, when people have been studying conservatism from a scientific perspective, they've tended to assume that it's associated with fear of the out-group, say, and that conservatives are more fearful than liberals,
but that actually doesn't seem to be Conservatives are not higher in trait neuroticism, and that's a really tough one, because if you're going to make a case that one group is more anxious, let's say, or threat sensitive than another, and you don't get differences in trait neuroticism, then you've really got a problem.
Wouldn't it be significantly different to be talking about situational fear over a political event versus trait neuroticism?
Well, yeah, but the theories, the theories seem to be more trait-like rather than situation.
Yeah, so, so, but what we have found is that, that, you know, for a long time people thought that all of the negative emotions loaded on neuroticism, and it was like the global, it was the global trait for negative emotion, but disgust seems to be its own peculiar thing, and, uh, but I will talk to you more about that next week, and, But that's just an example of why differentiation at the aspect level seems useful.
You also pick up differences between men and women at the aspect level that aren't obvious at the trait level as well.
So you can think about the models as, you know, you have a model that operates at different levels of resolution and low resolution representations are good for one set of operations and higher resolution Representations are good for other purposes.
The purpose, of course, is to predict.
At least that's one of the primary scientific purposes.
And so you pick the level of analysis that gives you the most prediction and perhaps also the most utility in terms of formulating scientific theories.
And so we'll concentrate a little bit more today on openness per se.
So openness to experience fragments into intellect and openness proper.
And I think the right way to think about intellect is that it's the personality instantiation of IQ, roughly speaking.
And the reason I think that is because, well, first of all, working memory predicts intellect quite nicely.
And working memory tests are very, very highly correlated with G, and specifically G being the first factor that you pull out of any set of IQ tests, right?
That's the technical definition of G. You set up sets of questions, do a factor analysis, and extract out the first factor, which is roughly equivalent, by the way, to the total or to the mean of the items.
If there's a one-factor solution, it's not much different than the average.
So the average is actually a factor That's where the hypothesis is that every single item loads equally on that factor, right?
Because you're adding them all up and then dividing them by the number.
So it's no different than a factor analysis.
Sometimes you'll hear people, like Stephen Jay Gould did this when he was complaining about IQ back in the 90s.
He said, a factor analysis like a factor is just a mathematical abstraction.
It's like, well, Yeah, so is the average.
You think, is the average of a set of numbers real?
And the answer to that question is, it depends on how you define real.
You can use it for certain functions, which is a pretty good definition of real as far as I'm concerned, but when you ask questions like that, you have to define both your terms and you do that somewhat arbitrarily.
Anyways...
People with high IQs tend to think that they're smart, which is, and that's right, and so then they tend to describe themselves as smart if you give them the opportunity to do that, and then that shows up when you ask them questions about their problem-solving ability, and that loads mostly on intellect.
And so, it isn't even obvious that there's any real utility in assessing intellect from the self-report perspective when you could replace that with an IQ test, because the IQ test is way more accurate.
So, but that gives you some sense.
You think about the whole five-factor model, you know where intelligence slots.
It slots in underneath openness.
Now, the openness, proper part of openness to experience, which I tend to think about as creativity, You can use that at least as a shorthand to sort of aid your understanding in what it is.
Creativity seems related to IQ in that more people with higher IQs are likely to be creative, or if you take people who are noted for their creativity, there's a high probability that they'll have a higher IQ. But there's more to it than IQ. And what creativity seems to be associated with, then again depends on whether or not, on how you define creativity.
Because you could define it as the sum total of creative achievements that you've made in your life, which would be the actual production of, say, artifacts of one form or another, performances or inventions or artworks or what have you.
We'll go over the dimensions in a minute.
Or you could also define it as the proclivity to engage in creative thought.
And I think we'll start with that first.
So what does it mean to think creatively?
It's sort of like...
It's something like this.
Imagine that...
I toss you out an idea, and there's some probability that when I toss you that idea that that will trigger off other ideas in your imagination.
So you could think about it as a threshold issue.
If you're not very creative, I'll throw you an idea, and hardly any other ideas will be triggered, and the ones that will be triggered are going to be very closely associated with that initial idea.
So let's say I tossed each of you an idea, and I asked you to tell me the first thing that comes to mind.
Okay, so what we would see first is that The first thing that comes to mind, in all likelihood, would be shared by many of you.
Okay, so then you can think about that as a common response, right?
And so that's a less creative response.
And then there'll be some things that come to mind for you that are so idiosyncratic that you're the only person that thinks it, and no one can understand it.
Well, that's also not exactly creative, because the thing that you...
For something to be creative, it has to be novel and useful at the same time.
That's sort of a rough definition.
Something creative is novel and useful.
And obviously, you know, there's a certain amount of judgment that goes along with that, clearly.
But if it's too novel, then no one else can understand it and it's unlikely to be useful.
So there's a range of convenience.
So anyways, if you want to decide if something's creative, like what we would do...
I could say to you, okay, in the next three minutes I want you to write down all the uses you can think of for a brick.
So, okay, so someone tell me a use for a brick.
Breaking windows.
Yes, okay.
What else can you use a brick for?
Build a wall.
Build a wall?
It's a very small wall.
A wall for ants.
And what else?
Paperweight.
Okay, okay.
Well, so you get the idea.
You're not feeling very mouthy today, obviously.
So you see that...
So if we gathered your responses, say I said you have to think up 20 items, 20 things that you could do with a brick, then a bunch of the things that you thought would be the same, and some people would come up with something different.
Like yours was reasonably different, the one about using it as a pumice stone for your feet.
Someone else might have come up with that, but it's a good creative response because it's unexpected and you could actually do it.
Anyway, so you'll get a graph of probability of response, right?
And the more probable, the less creative, roughly speaking.
It's not the only criteria, though, because you also have to look at utility.
So if I said, okay, you've got three minutes to write down as many uses as you can think of for a brick, I would score that in a variety of ways.
The first thing I would do is just figure out how many uses you generated.
That's called fluency.
And we could also do that.
I could just say, write down as many words as you can that begin with the letter S in three minutes, or that begin with the letter C, or four-letter words that begin with the letter D. You know, I can constrain it.
And if I counted how many words you generated, if I had an IQ measure and I had a measure of how many words you generated, IQ plus the number of words that you generated would be a better predictor of your creativity than just IQ. So there's this fluency element.
And so that's something like the rate at which you can produce say verbal ideas.
And one of the things we do know about the creativity dimension of openness is that it is associated with fluency.
And it's also associated with originality.
And originality would be how improbable your use was compared to the uses generated by other people.
So, anyway, so you can think of, you get thrown an idea and there's some probability that that will co-activate other ideas, and if it co-activates many other ideas, that's like fluency, and if it co-activates ideas that are quite distant from the original idea, something like that, and you could track distance by comparing it to probability that other people have generated it, then that's also another indication of creativity.
So they have to be many unlikely responses that are useful.
That's what creativity is, roughly speaking.
And then you can fractionate it into different dimensions.
So that's creative thinking.
But then creative achievement would be the ability to take those original ideas and then actually to implement them in the world.
And that's obviously much more different than merely being creative.
And so, and then what creativity is depends on which of those measurement routes that you take.
Now, I developed a questionnaire with one of my students, Shelley Carson, about, geez, it's just about 30 years ago now, 20 years ago, I guess, called the Creative Achievement Questionnaire, and I'll show you that here.
And I'll show you some of the things that are interesting about it.
You know, you hear very frequently people say things like, everyone's creative.
It's like, that's wrong, okay?
It's wrong.
It's just as wrong as saying that everyone's extroverted.
First of all, you have to be pretty damn smart to be creative, because otherwise you're just going to get to where other people have already got, and that's not creative by definition.
So being fast and being out there at the front of things really makes a difference.
And then you also have to have these divergent thinking capabilities and that's part of your trait structure.
And creative people are really different than non-creative people.
You know, partly because, for example, they're highly motivated to do creative things and to experience novelty and to chase down aesthetic experiences and to attend movies and to read fiction and to go to museums and to enjoy poetry.
And to enjoy music that's not conventional music, for example.
These aren't trivial differences.
And so it's a real misstatement to make the proposition that everyone's creative.
It's just simply not the case.
It's a matter of wishful thinking.
It's like saying that everyone's intelligent.
It's like, well, if everyone's intelligent, then the term loses all of its meaning.
Because any term that you can apply to every member of a category has absolutely no meaning.
Now, that doesn't...
And you know, the other thing you want to be thinking about here is that don't be thinking that creativity is such a good thing.
It's a high-risk, high-return strategy.
So if you're creative, you just try this.
There's creative people in this room, man.
You guys are going to have a hell of a time monetizing your creativity.
It's virtually impossible.
It's really, really difficult because, first of all, let's say you make an original product.
You think the world will beat a pathway to your door if you build a better mousetrap.
It's like, that's complete rubbish.
It isn't true in the least.
If you make a good creative product, you've probably solved about 5% of your problem.
Because then you have marketing, which is insanely difficult, and then you have sales, and then you have customer support, and then you have to build an organization, and you have to, if it's really novel, you have to tell people what the hell the thing is.
You know, we built this future authoring program, right, and it's available for people online.
So how do you market that?
No one knows what that is, and that's a real problem.
If you write a book, well, then you have the problem that another million people have also written a book.
But if you produce something that's completely new and doesn't have a category, people can't search for it online.
How are they going to find it?
So you just have...
And then you have pricing problems, and it's really unbelievably difficult to produce something creative and then monetize it.
And even worse, if you're the creative person, let's say you have a spectacular invention.
You've got no money.
Right?
You've got no customers.
Those are big problems.
And so maybe you go and you find a venture capitalist.
We start with family and friends because that's how it works.
You raise money for your product.
You raise money from your family and friends.
That's assuming you have family and friends that have some money and that they're going to give it to you.
And most people aren't in that situation.
So it's a terrible barrier right off the bat.
And then, of course, you're putting your family and friends at substantial financial risk because the probability that your stupid idea is going to make money is virtually zero, even if it's a really brilliant idea.
And so then let's say, well, you get past family and friends and you get venture capitalists involved, because that's often the next step, or an angel investor.
There's steps in building a business.
Family and friends, angel investor, that's some rich guy that you happen to meet, some man or some way who's into this sort of thing and is willing to provide you with some money to get your product off the ground.
Well, how much of your product is that person going to take?
Well, most of it.
Most of it.
And then if you get a venture, and no wonder, because, you know, you don't have any money.
How are you going to bargain for control over your product?
He'll just say, well, do you want the money or not?
And if your answer is no, then he'll go and do something else with his money.
It's not like there's no shortage of things that you can do with your money.
There's a million things you can do with it.
So you're not in a great bargaining position.
And then if you get venture capitalists involved, they'll take another big chunk, and maybe if they're not very straight with you, they'll just throw you out!
Because maybe by that point in the company's development, you're nothing but a pain in the neck, because what do you know about marketing, and sales, and customer service, and building an organization, and running a business?
Like, you don't have a clue, so why do they need you?
So, even if you're successful at generating a new idea and you put it into a business, the probability that you, as the originator of the idea, are going to make some money from it is very, very low.
So don't be thinking that creativity is such a...
is something you would want to curse yourself with.
Now, you know, it's not all bad because it opens up avenues of experience for creative people that aren't available to people who aren't creative.
But it definitely is a high-risk, high-return strategy.
So the overwhelming probability is that you will fail.
But a small proportion of creative people succeed spectacularly.
And so it's like a lottery in some sense.
You're probably going to lose.
But if you don't lose, you could win big.
And that keeps a lot of creative people going.
But also they don't really have much choice in it.
Because if you're a creative person, you're like a fruit tree that's bearing fruit.
So you don't really have...
You can suppress it, but it's very bad for you.
You know, the creative people I've worked with is if they're not creative, they're miserable.
So they have to do it.
And, you know, there's real joy and pleasure in it, and psychological utility, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it's an intelligent, it's certainly not a conservative strategy for moving forward through life.
So, and you know, whenever I talk to people who are creative, and you guys should listen to this, because I know what I'm talking about.
If you happen to be creative, if you're a songwriter, or another kind of musician, or an artist, or any of the other number of things that you might be, find a way to make money.
And then practice your craft on the side.
Because you'll starve to death otherwise.
Now, for some of you that won't be true, but it's a tiny minority.
Your best bet is to find a job that will keep body and soul together and parse off some time that you can pursue your creative thing.
Because then, well, as a long-term strategy, medium to long-term strategy, it's a better one.
But it's got incredibly difficult for people, musicians for example, it's incredibly difficult for new musicians to monetize their craft, even if they're really, really good at it.
So, it's, it's, well, so anyway, so don't be, so I say, well, everyone's not, everyone's not creative, and everybody goes, oh, that's terrible.
It's like, it's not so terrible.
It's not something, it's not self-evident that you would curse someone with high levels of creativity.
So, Alright, so here's how our creative achievement questionnaire works.
What we did essentially was we thought up how many domains there are in which you might be creative.
And this is, remember, when you're designing a questionnaire you want to be over inclusive because the statistics will take care of it, right?
So you can take a big area of potential, you can take a large area and aim your questionnaire at it, and you can do statistics post-hoc to see if you're covering the area.
If the things that you're measuring are nicely correlated, there's something about them that's similar.
If they're not correlated, then maybe you're measuring two different things and you can get rid of one of them.
That's fine.
So we did start with a pretty wide range.
We thought, okay, well, what domains can you be creative in?
Visual arts, painting and sculpture.
Then we had experts Sort of rank, order, levels of achievement within those domains.
And so if you were a painter, you could...
Zero gives you, I have no training or recognized talent in this area.
Okay, so you really want to keep an eye on the zeros, alright?
So then, I have taken lessons, people have commented on my talents, I have won a prize, my work has been critiqued in national publications.
Alright, so you get, you get, you get zero to seven points, but you can indicate more than, you know, maybe that's happened to you more than once.
And what happens, this is interesting, is that the higher you are up in this hierarchy, the more likely it is that those things have happened to you more than once.
And that's another example of this weird thing called the Pareto Principle, or Price's Law, which is that it's sort of, as good things happen to you, the probability that more good things will happen increases.
Right.
So because once you're famous, people give you all sorts of opportunities to do other things, right?
So your success doesn't go like this.
It goes like this.
Zero, zero, zero, skyrocket.
That's how it works.
But getting from zero to one, if you're starting a business, the hardest customer you'll ever get is your first one, and then the second hardest one will be your second one.
It's virtually impossible to get a first customer.
Because they're going to say to you, first of all, you're going to be selling to people who are basically conservative.
And they're not going to be willing or able to evaluate whether your damn product is good for anything.
And so they'll say, well, who are your other customers?
And if your answer to that is, well, we don't have any, it's like, well, then what?
They're going to be the first one.
No.
Because people don't stick their necks out.
At all.
Not a bit.
Ever.
And so unless you're well-established in the market, especially if you're dealing with a big company, you can just bloody well forget it.
It's like a three-year sales cycle anyways.
Because big corporations move very, very slowly.
You might be able to find a small company that doesn't have much money who would be willing to use your stupid product for nothing if you're really nice to them.
And you can get one customer that way.
It's very, very difficult.
And so you'll end up...
What do you think the royalty, just out of curiosity, so I've written a book.
It's going to be published by Penguin Random House in January.
What do you think the royalty is for an author on a book?
So you make something creative, you get a percentage of the sale.
What do you think the percentage is?
Just out of curiosity.
Guess.
Yeah, it's like 5%.
So think about that.
So that means that you make your thing and 95% of it belongs to someone else.
And that's if things are going quite well for you.
And it doesn't really matter what you manufacture or produce.
That's about what you can expect.
Sales, marketing, distribution.
It eats it all up.
So, well, anyways, you need to know these things because they're not self-evident.
Okay, so...
Seems to be working all by itself.
Alright, so let's take a look.
Well, how else can you have creative achievement?
Well, you can be a musician.
I have no training or recognized talent.
Recordings of my composition have been sold publicly.
That's the top end.
My composition has been copyrighted, recorded, critiqued in a local publication.
I have composed an original piece of music.
Well, let's try this.
How many of you have composed an original piece of music?
Wow, there's lots of creative people in here.
That's very impressive.
So there must be 10 or 11 people in here.
Oh, that's cool.
So how about, uh, your, your copies, composition has been copyrighted.
How about it's been, the recordings have been sold publicly and actually sold.
How many people?
Two?
Two.
Okay.
Well, so what you can see is there's a rapid drop-off in the number of people who say yes.
How many of you fit into category zero?
I have no training or recognized talent in this area.
Yeah.
Okay.
Okay.
Zero is the median score on all of these.
Median is the score that's the most likely for people to have, right?
It's different than the mean.
Median score is zero.
So what's the median score in the entire creative achievement questionnaire?
Zero.
You add up over all 13 domains, the most typical score is zero.
So that's how creative people are.
They're zero creative.
Not at all.
Yes?
Everybody has a certain degree of creativity, but for the most part, most of them are not really creative at all.
Well, the thing is, you could say that all people are creative and that all people can generate ideas, but the issue isn't whether or not you can generate ideas.
It's whether or not you can generate ideas that are different from the ideas that other people generate.
That's the critical issue.
Because, I mean, it depends on how you define it.
It's a novelty.
Well, the novelty is a huge part of it, but that's sort of built into the definition of creative.
It has to be novel and useful.
And if your idea that you generate is the same as the idea that a bunch of other people have, it's an idea, fair enough.
And if you define creativity that way, then everyone's creative.
But it's a foolish way of defining creativity, because everyone does it.
And we know that there has to be something novel about creativity.
Creativity is the ability to create novel and useful ideas, let's say.
These categories all seem to be artistic as well as requiring specific non-creative skills.
For example, music and dance require a kind of mechanical motor field.
Yeah.
Are there ways to be creative outside of the artistic domain?
Well, let's go through the rest of the domains.
Because we did include domains that aren't artistic.
And yes, there are.
Engineering is a good example of that.
Or writing nonfiction.
Those things tend to tilt more in the intellect direction.
But I'm concentrating most particularly here on the sort of creativity that would be associated with openness.
So...
Yeah.
Okay, so dance.
Well, it's roughly the same as music, so we won't move forward into that.
Architectural design.
My architectural design has been recognized in a national publication.
Creative writing.
My work has been reviewed in national publications.
Million books sold last year, 250 of them sold more than 100,000 copies.
Right?
So that's another example of high risk, high return.
So probably you won't write a book.
If you write a book, probably no one will publish it.
If you publish it, almost certainly no one will buy it.
So, you see what I mean?
The exclusion criteria there are so thoroughly, they're so difficult, because it's very difficult to write a book, even a bad one.
You have to work a long time to write a bad book.
And then your book has to be pretty damn good before you're going to get it published.
And you also have to know how to go about getting it published.
You don't send a book to a publisher, by the way.
They don't want your stupid book.
They want a summary of the book.
They want an outline of the book.
They want three chapters of the book.
They want to know who the hell you are and why anyone should listen to you.
They want to know what other books your book is like.
And most importantly, perhaps, they want to know where it would sit in a bookshelf in a bookstore.
And the reason for that is that, and I have trouble, this is trouble with the books that I write, is no one knows where to put them.
That's a big problem, because then the marketing people don't know how to market them.
And maybe that's because they're more creative than usual.
It doesn't matter.
If there isn't a place that you can put the book where people can find it, then you're not going to publish it, and even if you do, you can't sell it, because no one can find it.
So you just think about the difficulties in being a successful author.
You're not going to write a book.
It's too hard.
There's no damn way you're going to get it published, and if you do, it probably won't be a very good publisher.
Then they have to do a really good job of selling it and marketing it.
Then you have to enter the market at the right time, right?
And then you have to be reviewed by the right people, and then it has to be put in the right places.
It's like most of what happens is your book will go out for a week, no one will buy it, and it'll disappear.
And that's if you've done 99.99% of things right.
So...
Okay.
Creative writing.
Our humor.
My humor has been recognized in a national publication.
That's the top end.
I've written a joke or cartoon that has been published.
I've written jokes for other people.
I've worked as a professional comedian.
Inventions.
I regularly find novel uses for household objects.
I've built a prototype of one of my designed inventions.
I've sold one of my inventions to people I know.
Has anyone in here built a prototype of a designed invention?
No one.
Okay.
Has anyone in here created original software for a computer?
One, two, three people.
Yes, three people.
How about, I've sketched out an invention and worked on its design flaws.
How many people?
So, maybe two or three.
Yeah, I mean, if this was an engineering class, in all likelihood, there would be more people in that category.
But this is more in the domain.
It's not exactly the artsy end of the creativity distribution.
It's more on the ideas and mechanical end of it.
And that's a reasonable way of thinking about it, I would say.
Scientific discovery.
I do not have training or recognized ability in this field.
I've received a scholarship based on my work in science or medicine.
How many people have received a scholarship based in their work on science and medicine?
Okay, nobody.
So we don't have anybody that goes up that high.
I've won a prize at a science fair or other local competition.
Anybody there?
Yes, there's maybe two or three, four people there.
So that means we've got four people in a class of about 150 who hit the second level of scientific discovery.
Anybody received a grant to pursue their work in science and medicine?
It's highly unlikely.
You guys are mostly too young to have had that happen to you.
Okay, so, theater and film.
Anybody who's at...
How many people have performed in theater or film?
Oh yeah, you're an artsy bunch, eh?
So, my acting abilities have been recognized in local publication.
How many people for that?
One.
That's it.
Anybody higher than that?
I have directed or produced a theater or film production.
One.
Two.
I've been paid...
There's a good one.
I have been paid to...
One, two...
Two.
Okay.
My theatrical work has...
I've been paid to direct a theatre or film production.
Ha!
Got you there.
You've done that?
Hey, congratulations.
You're way the hell up on the list.
Right, right.
Right, right.
Hard to monetize.
How many films did you make?
You made four.
Did you make any money?
Oh, you did?
Well, congratulations.
I sold lesbian films and the time was right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, well that's a...
But then piracy happened so, so hard.
So for a while, like, there was a number of Canadian filmmakers that were doing my product, and then all of a sudden, now there is, so there's a lot more queerness, and then also piracy got really bad.
Right.
Yeah, well, that's one of the big problems with anything that can be distributed digitally.
So timing is everything.
Yeah.
Yeah, right.
Timing is everything.
And that's, it's actually...
Well, that's another one of the terrible cut-offs, is that not only do you have to be right and have yourself together and produce the proper thing, but the market has to open at exactly that moment so that you can walk through.
There has to be a demand.
So people won't buy anything that they don't have a crying need for, because they have priorities, eh?
Let's imagine everybody has ten priorities, and number ten is important, but no one ever does it.
And number eight is important, but no one ever does it.
And so you have to go talk to someone to buy what you have, and that has to be priority one or two for them, because they'll say, oh, that's good, we really need it, but it's priority eight.
It's like, forget it.
They'll never buy your thing.
Because they never get to priority eight on their list of ten priorities.
They only get down to, like, priority four.
And then the other thing that'll happen too is if you go out and try to sell your product, you won't know who to talk to and you'll end up spending 95% of your time, this is especially true in companies, with the people who will talk to you.
Obviously.
But those aren't the people who ever make any decisions.
So they'll tell you all sorts of good things about your product and how interested they are, but they'll never buy it because they can't make decisions.
And you won't be able to get to the people who make decisions because other people who know how to do that have already got there.
And that's not you.
So that's very difficult as well.
Culinary arts.
My recipes have been published nationally.
Anyone?
How about, um, I often experiment with recipes, and this is purposeful experimentation, right?
Not accidental experimentation.
Yeah.
Alright.
Alright.
My recipes have been published in a local cookbook.
Anyone?
No.
Okay.
Okay, well you get the point, right?
You see how this works.
It's just, well, here are ways you can be creative, and here are strata of accomplishment within those ways.
And so then the question is, what does it look like?
Yes?
Yes.
Yes, fair enough.
And this probably needs to be updated to reflect that.
So, there's the distribution of scores.
Now, that's dismal.
That's a dismal thing to look at.
You have to understand that.
Why?
Look at this.
Zero.
Right?
The median person has not done anything creative ever in their life with anything on any dimension.
Right?
It's really important to know that.
And then you have these horrible people out here.
Right?
They do everything.
They do everything.
Price's Law.
Here's Price's Law.
This is something to hammer into your heart.
The square root of the number of people in a domain do 50% of the work.
Okay, so let's go through that.
You have ten employees.
Three of them do half the work.
Makes sense.
That's reasonable.
You have a hundred employees.
Ten of them do half the work.
That's a problem.
So the other ninety percent are doing the other half.
Who cares about them?
You have ten thousand employees.
A hundred of them do half the work.
Right, so here's a nasty little law.
As your company grows, incompetence grows exponentially and competence grows linearly.
Got it?
Right?
Because with 10, it's 3 who are doing half the work, but at 10,000, it's 100 that are doing half the work.
So, 9,900 of your employees are doing as much as the best 100.
You might not even know who the best 100 are, but probably they know.
And maybe their peers know too.
And so one of the things that's really interesting, when big companies start to shake, which means maybe they've had a bad quarter, two bad quarters, and the stock price starts to tip down, and the people, the hot people who have options are not very happy about that, and maybe they start to announce layoffs, the hundred people who have opportunities leave.
And they're the ones who were doing half the work.
So, boy, that puts your company in a pretty rough situation because now you've got the 9900 people left over who were only doing half the work.
And the next time you announce layoffs, the next most productive hundred leave.
And so then you're left with nobody who's productive and a massive overhead payroll.
Price's Law.
You can look that up.
DeSola Price.
DeSola Price is a guy who was looking at scientific productivity.
And one of the things he found was, when he was looking at PhD students, is that The median number of publications for a PhD graduate when he did his work, which was in the early 60s, was one.
Okay?
Half as many had two.
Half as many as that had three.
Half as many as that had four.
It's a real step down.
And one of the corollaries of that is that there's a certain number of people who are hyperproductive.
And that's these people out here.
And if you were graphing the distribution, let's say you graphed how many people in a population of 300 had $10,000 in a savings account.
It would look very much like this.
Most people would have no savings whatsoever.
The median person would have no savings whatsoever.
And then you go up here, where the 1% is, they have all the money.
But the thing you want to understand about that 1% issue that you always hear about is that it applies in every single realm where there's difference in creative production.
Every realm.
Doesn't matter.
Number of records produced, number of records sold, number of compositions written.
So here's an example.
Five composers.
Produce the music that occupies 50% of the classical repertoire.
Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Mozart.
That's right.
Those five.
Okay, so here's something cool.
So you take all the music those people wrote.
5% of the music all those people wrote occupies 50% of the music of their writing that's played.
So not only do almost all the composers never get a listen, but even among the composers who do get a listen, almost none of their music ever gets played.
So, then that's another example of this prices law scaling.
It applies to all sorts of things, like number of hockey goals scored is also distributed this way.
Number of basketballs successfully put through the hoop follows the same distribution.
Size of cities follows the same distribution.
It's a weird law, and you can think about it in part.
Why does this happen?
Well, imagine what happens when you play Monopoly.
What happens?
Everybody has the same amount of money to begin with.
Right?
So then you start playing.
It's basically a random game.
Well, some people start to win a bit, and some people start to lose a bit.
And then if you win, the probability that you'll keep winning starts to increase.
And if you lose, your vulnerability increases as you lose.
And then maybe you've got, say, six people playing Monopoly.
Soon one person has zero.
What happens when they have zero?
They're out of the game.
So zero's a weird number.
Because when you hit zero, you're out of the game.
So then if you keep playing, people start to stack up at zero, right?
What happens at the end of the game?
One person has all the property and all the money and everyone else has none, right?
That's what happens if you play an iterated trading game to its final conclusion.
And that's part of the law, in a sense, that's underlying this kind of distribution.
So it's really...
It's not a consequence, necessarily, of structural inequality.
It's built into the system at a deeper level than that.
So, you know, people talk about all the time about how unfair it is that 1% of the population has the vast amount of the money, and 1% of the 1% has most of that money, and 1% of the 1% of the 1% has most of that money.
But it's an inevitable conclusion of iterated trading games, and we don't know how to fight it.
We don't know how to take From the people who have and move it to the bottom without it instantly moving back up to the top.
Different people maybe.
But still back up to the top.
Because even the 1% churns a lot.
Like I think you have a 10% chance, if I remember correctly, you have a 10% chance of being in the top 1% for at least one year of your life.
And a 40% chance of being in the top 10% for at least one year in your life.
That's in Canada and the US. It's less so in Europe.
So there's a fair bit of churning at the top end.
It's not the same people all the time who have the money, but it is a tiny fraction of the people all the time who have all the money.
So, back to your example of the company that has a couple back quarters and lays off some people, the top end, do the people inside redistribute to recreate the same order?
Not usually.
I mean, they do, but it's attenuated.
Because the people...
If you reshuffled the entire company and put everywhere somewhere else, there's some probability that some of those people would rise to the top that weren't at the top before.
But in that company, that isn't generally what happens.
People get stuck in their niche and they don't move.
You wonder sometimes, how can companies die so quickly?
Well, they go into a death spiral that's almost impossible for them to get out of.
So, and it can happen extraordinarily quickly.
This is why, you know, the typical Fortune 500 company only lasts 30 years.
That's it.
It's not that easy for these behemoths to continue existence across time.
So, and it's because it's really easy for something to die.
It's very unlikely that it will be built.
It's very unlikely that it will be successful.
And once successful, it's very unlikely that it will continue to duplicate its success because the underlying landscape shifts on it and it doesn't know where to go.
And that's also partly because it's not that easy to integrate creative people into your company, right?
You certainly don't want them at the bottom because they're supposed to be people who are doing what they're told to do.
So you filter out a lot of them at the bottom, and then you need them at the top, but they've already been filtered out, and also creative people are troublesome to work with because they're always...
How do you evaluate a creative person?
You almost can't, by definition, because they keep coming up with new things, and you don't have a good evaluative strategy for a new thing.
It wouldn't be new if you had a good evaluative strategy for it, right?
It would have to be the member of a class that you've already encountered substantially.
So, anyway, so the take-home lesson from this is...
Zero!
Right!
Right!
And then that's like a graph of monetary distribution as well.
And the problem with being at zero is it's very difficult to get out of zero.
This is also why people get stuck in poverty, you know?
You can't get a bank account if you don't have any money, right?
There's a bunch of things that start to move against you when you're at zero that you can't shake.
It's very difficult to get out of the pit here, because zero is a kind of pit.
Okay, so, now we've got the creative achievement questionnaire and we're going to take your score and your score is summed across all the categories and all the exemplars of the categories that you've chosen.
So then the question is, well, can you predict creative achievement?
And this is how we did it.
This was construct validation.
The first thing we wanted to know was, well, was the creative achievement questionnaire actually associated with something that you might regard as creativity?
Okay, so we got a number of students to come in and we gave them a collage kit.
And so then everybody got exactly the same kit.
And then we had to make a collage out of the collage kit.
And then we have five artists rate the collage for quality.
And then we averaged across the ratings.
Now the first thing you would do if you did that is, because you might think, well, can artists actually come up with a measure of how creative a collage is?
And the answer to that is actually technical.
If all, say you guys are the panel, if all of you identify the same collages as of high quality and the same ones as of low quality, then we can assume that there's something about your judgment that's, like, independent of your idiosyncrasies.
We could say, well, there is a judgment that emerges as a consensus across artists.
And the first thing we found was that there was.
There was quite a high correlation between Each artist's judgment of the quality of the collages.
I can't remember what the inter-rater reliability was, but it was something like 0.8.
It was really high.
So it was clear that trained artists could make reliable judgments about the quality of collages.
Because you had to check that out first.
Because if they're all over the place, you've got no measure, right?
It's like everyone's using a different ruler.
You've got no measure.
So they have to be using the same ruler.
Well, we found that the correlation between the creative evaluation of collages and the total CAQ was 0.59, which is mind-boggling.
I told you last time that under 5% of published social studies, social science studies, have an R... Demonstrate a correlation coefficient of an effect size greater than 0.5.
This is 0.6.
If you square it, 0.5 squared is 25% of the variance.
0.6 squared is 36% of the variance.
0.6 is a lot more than 0.5.
And point five is unheard of, and so the fact that you could estimate someone's lifetime creative achievement by having them do a collage that four artists rate was an indication that there really is something real at the bottom of it, right?
Because that's like the definition of real.
The creative personality scale, you circle adjectives that are associated with creativity from a very large list of adjectives, that worked pretty well.
Goldberg's adjective markers, that's another big five variant, that was correlated at about.51.
It doesn't measure openness to experience, it just measures intellect.
But be that as it may, it's still a personality marker of trade openness.
It was correlated at 0.51.
The neopir openness was correlated at 0.33.
And then we used the divergent thinking tests.
And I told you about those already.
How many uses can you think of for a brick, for example.
And so those are scored according to fluency, how many answers you provide, and then also originality, how many unique, useful answers do you provide, and that was nicely correlated as well.
Overall, correlation of 0.47, and then fluency 0.38, originality 0.46, and flexibility 0.37.
So, so what does that mean?
Well, the creative achievement questionnaire Indexes lifetime creative achievement in a way that's powerfully associated with actual creative production of a single item, plus creativity as it's indexed by personality markers.
The CAQ is also potently predicted by IQ, which is exactly what you'd expect.
So you can do an extraordinarily good job of determining how likely someone is to have high levels of creative achievement across their lifespan by using psychometric tests.
So it means that creativity is a real thing, that's the first thing, both in terms of thinking creatively, and that would be the divergent thinking tests, and also in terms of creative production, and that creative production and creative thinking are quite tightly aligned.
So...
So that was good.
That's been a very influential paper.
I think it's got about 500 citations now.
People use the Creative Achievement Questionnaire a lot to assess creativity.
It's also associated with a higher than average likelihood of psychosis.
And the other thing you see with creative people is that they tend, especially if they're writers, they tend, the pathology that goes along with that is often manic depressive disorder.
And that's partly because manic people become unbelievably fluent.
They speak incredibly quickly.
They generate ideas like mad.
And it's a hyper-arousal of the positive emotion system, roughly speaking.
And that can have, as a side effect, creativity.
This is a cool study.
I just found this one today.
It's a terror management study.
I'll read it to you.
The relationship between creativity and symbolic immortality had been long acknowledged by scholars.
In a review of the literature, we found 12 papers that empirically examined the relationship between creativity and mortality awareness using a terror management theory paradigm, overall supporting the notion that creativity plays an important role in the management of existential concerns.
Also, a mini meta-analysis of the impact of death awareness on creativity resulted in a small, medium-weighted mean effect.
We examined the existential buffering functions of creative achievement as assessed by the Creative Achievement Questionnaire in a sample of 108 students.
At high but not low levels of creative goals, creative achievement was associated with lower death thought accessibility under mortality salience.
Well, that means if you remind people that they're going to die, the creative people were less likely to generate death-related thoughts as a consequence.
To our knowledge, this is the first empirical report of the anxiety buffering functions of a creative achievement among people for whom creativity constitutes a central part of their cultural worldview.
It's like an empirical examination of some of the existential theories that I was presenting to you previously, because part of the idea that was put forth, say, by people like Nietzsche was that one of the ways to fight back against existential anxiety and death anxiety and all of that is to engage in creative production, and so that was actually put to the empirical test in this study.
So I thought that was quite cool.
So here's another paper.
This was by Kaufman and a couple of my students, Jacob Hirsch and Colin DeYoung.
I'm on that paper as well, near the end there.
They were interested in whether openness and intellect predicted different elements of creative achievement.
Sort of goes back to your question about the differentiation between the artsy end of creativity and maybe the more practical and...
The practical end associated, for example, with the proclivity to like non-fiction.
The big five personality dimension, openness slash intellect.
It's the trait most closely associated with creativity and creative achievement.
Little is known, however, regarding the discriminant validity of its two aspects.
Discriminant validity is whether one aspect predicts one set of things and the other aspect predicts a different set of things.
If there's no discriminant validity, if they can't be used for different purposes, then there's no point having them.
So you want to see that they're actually capable of differentiating between real-world phenomena.
Two of its aspects, openness to experience, Reflecting cognitive engagement with perception, fantasy, aesthetics, and emotions, and intellect, reflecting cognitive engagement with abstract and semantic information, primarily through reasoning.
In relation to creativity, in four demographically diverse samples totaling over a thousand participants, we investigated the independent predictive validity of openness and intellect by assessing the relations among cognitive ability, divergent thinking, personality, and creative achievement across the arts and sciences.
We confirmed the hypothesis that openness predicts creative achievement in the arts, and intellect predicts creative achievement in the sciences.
Inclusion of performance measures of general cognitive ability, that's IQ, and divergent thinking indicated that the relationship of intellect to scientific creativity may be due at least in part to these abilities.
Lastly, we found that extroversion additionally predicted creative achievement in the arts independently of openness.
So what that means is that Creative achievement in the arts is actually a function of the higher order trait plasticity, right?
Because plasticity was openness plus extroversion, and that's associated fundamentally with activation of the underlying dopaminergic system, which is the system that mediates exploratory behavior.
So, if you're dominated by that, the function of that system, you're an exploratory, gregarious person, then you're more likely to manifest creative ability in the arts.
So...
Apparently.
It's time to stop.
I think that's the same student who always does that, isn't it?
All right.
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