Intimations of Creativity | Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman | EP 177

[Music]

Hello everyone, Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman. My guest today is a cognitive scientist exploring the limits of human potential. He received his PhD in cognitive science from Yale University and has taught courses on intelligence, creativity, and well-being at Columbia, NYU, the University of Pennsylvania, and elsewhere. He hosts a very popular podcast, The Psychology Podcast, and is the author or editor or co-editor of nine books, including his newest, Transcend: The New Science of Self-Actualization, published in 2020 and just out in paperback as of April of 2021. He wrote Wired to Create: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Creative Mind with Carolyn Gregoire in 2016 and Ungifted: Intelligence Redefined in 2013. He's written major academic works as well; with Robert Sternberg, he co-edited the Cambridge Handbook of Intelligence in 2011, which is a major academic text. He also edited The Complexity of Greatness in 2013, which brought together leading scholars to discuss and debate the relative contributions of biology and society in determining creativity. In 2015, he was named one of 50 groundbreaking scientists who are changing the way we see the world by Business Insider. Dr. Kaufman, thank you for coming on my podcast.

Dr. Peterson: It's great to be here. I've been looking forward to this chat. It's good to see you. We actually have a couple of publications together from a few years back, and so, but we've strangely enough never sat down and had a lengthy discussion, so hopefully today we'll have an opportunity to rectify that. So first of all, maybe you could tell everyone just exactly what a cognitive scientist is.

Dr. Kaufman: Well, I think the important thing to recognize about cognitive science is it's an interdisciplinary field. So it doesn't just involve psychology, but it brings in philosophers, and it brings in neuroscientists, it brings in computer scientists to all kind of sit down at the table and figure out what is the mind and what are the functions of the human mind. What are the limits of the human mind? How does the nervous system represent mind? So basically everything has to do with mind, but it's very interdisciplinary, and that's what really it was exciting to me about it when I got into it. I did my undergrad at Carnegie Mellon, and I did a computer science degree and a cognitive science degree, and it was really exciting to me to kind of figure out how all these different things could be integrated with each other.

Dr. Peterson: And how did a cognitive scientist, who's at least technically more interested, let's say, in the mechanics of thought and abstract cognition, how did you come to be interested in the humanist tradition, which is the focus of this book which we're going to talk about in fair detail today? It isn't obvious that those things have any necessary interrelationship, so what happened?

Dr. Kaufman: Not at all obvious. Well, so as a kid, I grew up with a real deep fascination for understanding individual differences. I mean, I remember just being a very young kid looking on the playground and wondering why someone could so effortlessly go in the jungle gym and why I was so awkward. And I also had some early learning difficulties that made me try to understand what the only limits of my own potential were. So the interest that got me to the field was human intelligence, and I realized after enough years in the field and once my interest brought into creativity, which is the work we did together was on creativity when I was in grad school, and then now self-actualization and humanism, I realized that what I was really interested in was human potential, not intelligence. You know, intelligence I thought was the be-all and end-all of human potential, and then what I've learned, come to realize, you know, throughout my career is that that wasn't—that was just the beginning.

Dr. Peterson: Well, Galton, Francis Galton, who in some sense pioneered the psychometric study of IQ, is also interested in human potential, I would say. So in some sense, that's a return to the source, and it is easy to confuse intelligence with, well, the whole range of human talent and ability, and differentiating all those different concepts and placing them in the proper relationship to one another and identifying them for study is no trivial thing. So you worked a fair bit on intelligence per se.

Dr. Kaufman: So my junior year in college, I was so curious about intelligence that I cold emailed Nicholas McIntosh, who was the head of the department at the University of Cambridge, and I said, "Can I just take a year off my undergraduate studies, and just you teach me everything about IQ? Will you teach me everything there is to know about, like, everything we've known the last hundred years about intelligence?" And to my excitement, he responded to my email; he said, "Sure, come over!" So I packed my bags and went to England. And this didn't count as a study abroad program; there was no study abroad program, so I just notified Carnegie Mellon, I'm going off dangling to study intelligence. And it was just so exciting to me to be able to learn.

Dr. Peterson: How old were you when you did that?

Dr. Kaufman: 20 years old probably.

Dr. Peterson: And he responded to a cold letter and invited you over?

Dr. Kaufman: Yeah, I must have—well, I think that he might have been impressed with some of that, like I was Herb Simon's last research assistant at that time as well. And, but I felt like there were limits to what I was understanding about intelligence through the expertise approach that I was learning from Herb Simon. I felt as though I wasn't learning about intelligence; I was learning about expertise acquisition, and I didn't think they would say exactly the same thing. So anyway, yeah, so he must have been impressed with my email. I mean, I was a real—I was really, I'm trying to think of the word—an enterprising young man? I don't know, I'm trying to think of the right word. You know, I was really excited to learn this stuff.

Dr. Peterson: Curious and enthusiastic.

Dr. Kaufman: Yeah, I like that. And obviously able to communicate that. So you went over to England and you worked with a psychometrician, and so you worked with someone who was very interested in the formalities of measurement and careful definition of intelligence. What did you learn as a consequence of doing that about intelligence?

Dr. Kaufman: Well, I learned a bunch of things. One important thing I learned is that intelligence has multiple general cognitive mechanisms, which contribute or give rise to a general intelligence kind of function. Some, you know, there's this debate in the field about whether or not G or general intelligence is the thing that is causal of things in the world or if it's an emergent property of things. And I learned a little bit about this view that it's an emergent property of these domain-general mechanisms, and the biggest one which captivated my attention was working memory at that time. And then that quickly led to me doing and being interested in differences in sex—different sex differences in working memory. And I came up with a hypothesis when I was working with him in college about that, which then led me to getting studying with him for a master's degree to actually test that hypothesis.

Dr. Peterson: So let's walk over the psychometric view a bit and I'll say some of the things that I think I know, and you can tell me if they're out of date or if you're convinced that they're erroneous in some way. So essentially what the psychometricians have discovered is and established—and I think more credibly than any psychologists have established any other phenomenon within the field of psychology—is that there's a common mechanism or an emergent property that appears to characterize activity in relationship to virtually any set of abstractions. So if you put together a random set of questions that require abstraction to solve, so they could be mathematical questions or general knowledge or vocabulary—the sort of thing even that you might encounter while playing Trivial Pursuit—if you put together a reasonable set of those and then you add up the correct scores and you rank order them across all the people who've taken that particular test, you get something that is a pretty accurate estimate of IQ. That's central tendency. It's that powerful, and that's related to long-term life success in attainment—let's say economic attainment and career attainment—that accounts for about 25% of the variation between people in the differences in attainment. Is that roughly anything?

Dr. Kaufman: I would do like a yes, and if this was in problem I would yes, and say a central concept in this is the idea of the positive manifold, because it's really interesting—and this was Charles Spearman's discovery in 1904—it's interesting that people who tend to do well on one of these kinds of tests tend to do well on other of these kinds of tests. And the thing which is why I thought the expertise acquisition approach I was learning in college didn't fully explain is that we're talking even with lacking expertise in these IQ test items—abstraction like you mentioned—they're a lack of expertise, and yet they're positively correlated with each other. And it didn't have to be that way.

Dr. Peterson: Right.

Dr. Kaufman: Because one could have proposed, "Well, the more you specialize in one thing, the worse you'll be in other things," because you're devoting all your time and attention to one thing. But instead we find that actually there are some general cognitive mechanisms that apply to any task and even novel—especially, actually, I would say especially the novelty.

Dr. Peterson: Yeah, right, because it's an—it actually predicts learning new abstractions better than it predicts real-world performance. And we should also note that the level of predictive accuracy is stunning compared to the predictive accuracy of virtually anything any social scientists have discovered, apart from IQ.

Dr. Kaufman: Yeah, I tweeted that out the other day. I said it's astounding to me when people say so matter-of-factly like IQ tests are invalid when it is probably the most valid test we have in psychology. And that, of course, got a lot of comments like, "Well, that just shows your whole field of..." and that's completely wrong, because the effect sizes in psychology—the valid effect sizes are—what would you call them? Impressive. When you compare psychology to other disciplines of its category of generalization, say. So the idea that the whole field is nonsense is only put forth by people who don't have differentiated understanding of the field or of the social sciences that it might be compared with. The psychologists are the most sophisticated methodologists by far in all the social sciences as far as I'm concerned.

Dr. Peterson: So, yeah, there seems to be this misunderstanding or this expectation of psychology that we're supposed to be perfectly reliable.

Dr. Kaufman: Yeah.

Dr. Peterson: That we're supposed to have perfect reliability of humans. And I don't think any psychologist has ever claimed to have that sort of level of precision. I mean, of course, a lot of people are going to fall between the cracks with these IQ tests, and I'm interested in those people too, I mean of course. But I'm also interested in the statistical generalizations and the implications for society. I mean, you can hold both things in your mind at one time.

Dr. Kaufman: Yes, well, and you can also point out that accounting for 25% of the variation in something as complex as life attainment is unbelievably impressive, especially given how much effect random factors have on determining those outcomes, like health, for example, like physical and mental health, and situational variables like the state of the economy, etc., etc. The availability of educational resources. Across all that variability, you still get this incredibly impressive prediction of this single factor. We could also point out for everyone that, you know, you might think that people have good personalities and bad personalities in some sense that's unidimensional, but if you do the same statistical analysis with a set of personality questions that you would conduct on a set of abstract questions, you get five factors, not one. So it isn't it isn't necessarily the case at all that something will simplify down to a single factor, but that's profoundly the case with IQ. The other thing that is worth pointing out is that bad as IQ tests might be, given that there's much they don't explain, they're far better than any other method we have of assessing potential for, let's say, cognitive growth and acquisition. So if you want to predict how well someone's going to do in an academic environment, then there isn't anything that even comes close to the accuracy of an IQ test. And also to the unbiased—it’s also unbiased compared to all other forms of measurement.

Dr. Kaufman: So, okay, so you learned this in England, but you weren't satisfied with the expertise approach, and so you became a master of the psychometric approach and learned that literature, but that also didn't satisfy you. Why not?

Dr. Kaufman: Yeah, so I really—and I felt this in my bones—just intuitively when I was in college, even sophomore year in college, I was reading—I wrote the—I read the book Successful Intelligence by Robert Sternberg. I felt as though creativity wasn't the same thing as intelligence. I feel like that was this thing that I felt to be true that I—you know, I didn't know there was a whole field until I started reading cognitive psychology as well. I took a course in cognitive psychology my sophomore year with Anne Fay, and got to the chapter on intelligence in Sternberg's textbook where he talks about the psychological literature on creativity, and that really excited me. And I felt like there was more to the story than just IQ. And by the way, McIntosh would definitely agree with that. He—unfortunately, he passed away a couple years ago, but you know, if he were a librarian, he would definitely agree completely with that, and he has in our conversations. It's almost like people import ideas on IQ researchers that they never said. You know, like no IQ researcher that I ever know—have ever known has said like that IQ is a perfect predictor of everything.

Dr. Peterson: Right, you know quite the contrary. They tend to be extremely conservative in their estimates of IQ's potential for prediction.

Dr. Kaufman: Well, you're also in a strange position intellectually—a unique position in some sense—because you worked with one of the leading psychometric scholars who helped develop the idea of the general single factor of intelligence, IQ essentially, but you also worked with Robert Sternberg, who was one of the people in the '90s in particular, and in the '80s as well, who mounted a challenge to the idea of a unitary intelligence. I would say it was him and Howard Gardner at the Harvard School of Education that started to develop theories of multiple intelligence essentially. And so, well, so what did you conclude as a consequence of being exposed to both of those sets of ideas?

Dr. Kaufman: Yeah, and you're quite right. It's a really astute point. I just want to say they had a great affection for each other. I remember we invited Bob, as we call Robert Sternberg, Bob, over to Cambridge to give a talk at Cambridge once. I remember I saw all of us walking in the garden—me, Nick, and Bob. And Bob was criticizing—I remember this vividly—Bob was criticizing neuroscience and saying it's so reductionistic, like it's showing us nothing about intelligence. And Nick was pushing back, but I feel like there was a great affection at the core among all of us. I think that what I really learned from all these perspectives is that we need to stop thinking about all this stuff in either-or terms and do a lot more integration in our thinking about these topics. I'm sure we're going to talk about this when we get to the hierarchy of needs, because, believe it or not, this is related, is that we need to think of this stuff more in terms of integrated hierarchies than in terms of binaries or disparate constructs that are completely a contextual to each other. So the more I got into it, the more I realized how the interesting questions were when you combine intelligence and creativity, you know, when you combine. And when you start looking at the world.

So for instance, I published a paper with Roger Beaty, who's a real leading star in the neuroscience field, showing that both the executive attention network and the default mode network, which is more related to creativity or imagination, when they are coupled together, you see the greatest sources of creativity. So it doesn't make any sense to kind of view these things as separate, but each one does make their unique contributions, if that makes sense.

Dr. Peterson: Okay, so let's go back momentarily to the Sternberg and psychometric debate. So I was really interested and have remained interested in measurement when I encountered all those ideas. I was trying to predict success in complex environments—academic environments like the University of Toronto and Harvard and also in business environments. And I was trying to extend the prediction that was capable with IQ. And so I was scouring the literature looking for reliably measurable methods of assessing anything that would predict achievement and then also reliable measures of achievement, which is a separate problem. But what I found lacking with Sternberg and Gardner in particular was that I could never derive anything of practical measurable utility from their work. And I couldn't find anything in it that would allow me to add to predictive validity. Now, I also at that time was studying the Big Five personality factors, and that became quite clear that there was something in that that was actually measurable. So to even to predict academic performance, if you use IQ essentially—and the SAT and LSAT and all those standardized tests fall into that category, even though the makers deny that quite frequently—they do. Conscientiousness is a good additional predictor, and we looked at prediction of performance in graduate school, and openness, which is the creativity dimension that we'll talk about, didn't predict at all. It was actually slightly negatively predicted with graduate school performance, publications, and so on. But we did find that a combination of neuropsychological tests, basically assessing executive function, could add something to IQ, maybe, depending on how you did the analysis. But conscientiousness definitely did. But I couldn't extract anything out of the multiple intelligence literature. And so—and I always thought that was a fatal flaw, actually, of that literature, because from a scientific perspective, and I also think from a reasonable critical intellectual perspective, if you can't extract out anything of measurable value, then what's the evidence? What's the evidence that you actually have something other than something conceptual? And so you must have run across the same problem when you were trying to expand out from IQ.

Dr. Kaufman: I did. I'll be very blunt about this. I went into the field so excited about theories of multiple intelligences, and once I started studying this scientifically, I became seduced by the truth, I don't know how else to say it. How about horribly impacted by the truth? That was my experience with IQ. It was like, "Oh my God, this won't go away." No matter what you do, and it is solidly—and it's been well measured, and it's really hard to add to it, and everything else looks bad in comparison. It was quite a shock to me, that's the thing. Once I started studying this stuff with Nick, you know, you'd, for instance, you would look at people's attempts to measure Gardner's multiple intelligences, and in every single instance, you'd be able to still extract a G factor. And there's no—and I've come to the conclusion that as long as you're activating consciousness to any degree whatsoever, you're going to—it's going to be G-loaded. What the task you're doing is going to bring in working memory processes. It's going to bring in some other—like general associative learning was another process we introduced. Obviously, the field has studied associative learning, but Nick and I published a paper showing that we could adapt some of those measures that have been used in the behavioral literature, because Nicholas is most well-known for his behavioral research. We were able to adapt some of these associated learning measures to predict G very just as well as working memory, for instance. So we found there are these general cognitive mechanisms that won't go away. Like you could have whatever theory you want to propose of multiple intelligences, these general cognitive mechanisms, you can't sweep them under the rug, right?

Dr. Peterson: So if you laid out a number of hypothetical general or multiple intelligence measures and they measured anything that had to do with abstraction, and you averaged across them, what you'd essentially get as a proxy for IQ if you got anything at all. And what really stunned me was that we couldn't add anything additional to that. We added a huge battery of neuropsychological tests derived from the neuropsych literature—not from the psychometric literature—it was all clinical tests mostly developed at the Montreal Neurological Institute. We had a large battery and computerized them and added them to the IQ measures that we had. If you used IQ and the neuropsych measures separately in an equation, they would both contribute, but if you did a factor analysis and extracted out one factor, which would essentially be the average, then that factor was the best predictor. So I could never find out from my own research whether we had just expanded the definition of IQ slightly in terms of its predictive validity, or whether the neuropsychologists were onto something. But it was striking to me that even these tests derived from a purely clinical literature that wasn't influenced by the psychometric tradition and was actually opposed to it still ended up measuring exactly the same thing. I always told my students, and you tell me what you think about this, that it was forbidden in my lab to study anything without also adding an IQ measure because at least as a covariate. Because it seemed, and I also think the same thing about Big Five personality for whatever that's worth, is like we know that IQ exists. It exists, or at least as much as anything social scientists have ever discovered exists, so if you're studying any complex phenomena, the first thing you should do is get what you already know out of the way. And that made research in my lab much more difficult because we'd get results from some measure, and then that would hypothetically be publishable, but then as soon as we added the IQ measures and the personality measures, it would almost always kill. Like we looked at values as a predictor, for example, of academic achievement. And there's well-developed values literature, but we could kill that instantly with IQ and personality. And I can't get—I don't understand why the field won't accept that.

Dr. Kaufman: Well, I'll give you an analogy—it's almost—I think it's analogous to the fact that all these environmental determinants of X papers don't never use genes as a covariate. You know, it's like, well, things change once you start to include genes as a covariate. Then you find some of these effects drop away. And it's interesting, it's like, we don't even want to know the truth, you know, in certain circumstances.

Dr. Peterson: I've thought about that too. It's not surprising that people don't want to know the truth about IQ because it's quite nasty. I mean, there are huge differences between people in their intrinsic ability to learn, and that has me walloping economic and social consequences. And so there's a bitterness in that that—I mean, I think we still have to address it and take it seriously, but you know, for me, it's like IQ does the liberal and the conservative political perspectives incredible damage because the conservatives are likely to say, "Well, there's a job for everyone if they just get up and get at it," and the liberals like to say, "Well, everybody can be trained to do everything," and both of those are wrong because there’s a large number of people who are not—who have enough trouble with abstraction that finding a productive job in a complex society has become extraordinarily difficult. And that's a huge problem, and we have no idea what to do with it. We won't even look at it.

Dr. Kaufman: Well, something I would like to bring in this discussion, if that's okay, is some of the limits of IQ tests, especially with neurodiverse people, because I found in some of my own research—I studied something called twice exceptionality, actually. I edited a book called Twice Exceptionality: Supporting Bright and Creative Students with Learning Disabilities. Sometimes they're intelligent; they're very intelligent. But sometimes, because of their executive function dysfunctions, like with ADHD individuals, it doesn't show up in an IQ test. So I do want to still leave that window open for us to—

Dr. Peterson: That's absolutely fair enough. Look, as we've already pointed out, IQ is only covering 25% of the relevant territory, and the tests are by no means perfect. And there are people whose capacity is measured improperly with an IQ estimate, no doubt about that. So—and other factors play an important role, like conscientiousness. But it's only about, at least as far as we can measure it—and we can only really measure it still with self-report or other report personality tests—it adds about—it's only about a third as powerful, if that, as IQ. This is how I put it: I say, look, it’s really hard to get an extremely high IQ score by accident. But there are many reasons why perhaps someone bombed an IQ test that could have to do with error variants and other factors. But it's very hard—like if you get 160 IQ, generally and honestly if you didn't cheat, it's hard to just accidentally stumble into those right answers.

Dr. Kaufman: Absolutely. Yeah, that's a good way of looking at it—that it's the low scores that contain the errors.

Dr. Peterson: Yeah, and fair enough, and that should be attended to, not least because we don't ever want to deny anybody with potential the possibility of developing that and sharing it with everyone else. But you know, so many universities now are moving away from the SATs, let's say, and because they perceive and actually shortcoming. But my problem with that is that whatever they're replaced with is likely to be way worse on virtually every imaginable dimension. So we'll see how that all plays out.

Dr. Kaufman: So, okay, so you learned this in England, and you weren't satisfied with the expertise approach, and you became a master of the psychometric approach and learned that literature. But that also didn't satisfy you. Why not?

Dr. Kaufman: Yeah, so I really—and I felt this in my bones—just intuitively when I was in college, even sophomore year in college, I was reading—I wrote the—I read the book Successful Intelligence by Robert Sternberg. I felt as though creativity wasn't the same thing as intelligence. I feel like that was this thing that I felt to be true that I—you know, I didn't know there was a whole field until I started reading cognitive psychology as well. I took a course in cognitive psychology my sophomore year with Anne Fay, and got to the chapter on intelligence in Sternberg's textbook where he talks about the psychological literature on creativity, and that really excited me. And I felt like there was more to the story than just IQ. And by the way, McIntosh would definitely agree with that. He—unfortunately, he passed away a couple years ago, but you know, if he were a librarian, he would definitely agree completely with that, and he has in our conversations. It's almost like people import ideas on IQ researchers that they never said. You know, like no IQ researcher that I ever know—have ever known has said IQ is a perfect predictor of everything.

Dr. Peterson: Yeah, I know quite the contrary. They tend to be extremely conservative in their estimates of IQ's potential for prediction.

Dr. Kaufman: Well, you're also in a strange position intellectually—a unique position in some sense—because you worked with one of the leading psychometric scholars who helped develop the idea of the general single factor of intelligence, IQ essentially, but you also worked with Robert Sternberg, who was one of the people in the '90s in particular, and in the '80s as well, who mounted a challenge to the idea of a unitary intelligence. I would say it was him and Howard Gardner at the Harvard School of Education that started to develop theories of multiple intelligence essentially. And so, well, so what did you conclude as a consequence of being exposed to both of those sets of ideas?

Dr. Kaufman: Yeah, and you're quite right. It's a really astute point. I just want to say that they had a great affection for each other. I remember we invited Bob, as we call Robert Sternberg, Bob, over to Cambridge to give a talk at Cambridge once. I remember I saw all of us walking in the garden—me, Nick, and Bob. And Bob was criticizing—I remember this vividly—Bob was criticizing neuroscience and saying it's so reductionistic, like it's showing us nothing about intelligence. And Nick was pushing back, but I feel like there was a great affection at the core among all of us. I think that what I really learned from all these perspectives is that we need to stop thinking about all this stuff in either-or terms and do a lot more integration in our thinking about these topics. I'm sure we're going to talk about this when we get to the hierarchy of needs, because, believe it or not, this is related, is that we need to think of this stuff more in terms of integrated hierarchies than in terms of binaries or disparate constructs that are completely a contextual to each other. So the more I got into it, the more I realized how the interesting questions were when you combine intelligence and creativity, when you combine.

When you start looking at the world, for instance, I published a paper with Roger Beaty, who's a real leading star in the neuroscience field, showing that both the executive attention network and the default mode network, which is more related to creativity or imagination, when they are coupled together, you see the greatest sources of creativity. So it doesn't make any sense to view these things as separate, but each one does make their unique contributions, if that makes sense.

Dr. Peterson: Okay, so let's go back momentarily to the Sternberg and psychometric debate. So I was really interested and have remained interested in measurement when I encountered all those ideas. I was trying to predict success in complex environments—academic environments like the University of Toronto and Harvard and also in business environments. And I was trying to extend the prediction that was capable with IQ. And so I was scouring the literature looking for reliably measurable methods of assessing anything that would predict achievement and then also reliable measures of achievement, which is a separate problem. But what I found lacking with Sternberg and Gardner in particular was that I could never derive anything of practical measurable utility from their work. And I couldn't find anything in it that would allow me to add to predictive validity. Now, I also at that time was studying the Big Five personality factors, and that became quite clear that there was something in that that was actually measurable. So to even to predict academic performance, if you use IQ essentially—and the SAT and LSAT and all those standardized tests fall into that category, even though the makers deny that quite frequently—they do. Conscientiousness is a good additional predictor, and we looked at prediction of performance in graduate school, and openness, which is the creativity dimension that we'll talk about, didn't predict at all. It was actually slightly negatively predicted with graduate school performance, publications, and so on. But we did find that a combination of neuropsychological tests, basically assessing executive function, could add something to IQ, maybe depending on how you did the analysis. But conscientiousness definitely did. But I couldn't extract anything out of the multiple intelligence literature. And so—and I always thought that was a fatal flaw, actually, of that literature, because from a scientific perspective, and I also think from a reasonable critical intellectual perspective, if you can't extract out anything of measurable value, then what's the evidence? What's the evidence that you actually have something other than something conceptual? And so you must have run across the same problem when you were trying to expand out from IQ.

Dr. Kaufman: I did. I'll be very blunt about this. I went into the field so excited about theories of multiple intelligences, and once I started studying this scientifically, I became seduced by the truth, I don't know how else to say it. How about horribly impacted by the truth? That was my experience with IQ. It was like, "Oh my God, this won't go away." No matter what you do, and it is solidly—and it's been well measured, and it's really hard to add to it, and everything else looks bad in comparison. It was quite a shock to me, that's the thing. Once I started studying this stuff with Nick, you know, you'd, for instance, you would look at people's attempts to measure Gardner's multiple intelligences, and in every single instance, you'd be able to still extract a G factor. And there's no—and I've come to the conclusion that as long as you're activating consciousness to any degree whatsoever, you're going to—it's going to be G-loaded. What the task you're doing is going to bring in working memory processes. It's going to bring in some other—like general associative learning was another process we introduced. Obviously, the field has studied associative learning, but Nick and I published a paper showing that we could adapt some of those measures that have been used in the behavioral literature, because Nicholas is most well-known for his behavioral research. We were able to adapt some of these associated learning measures to predict G very just as well as working memory, for instance. So we found there are these general cognitive mechanisms that won't go away. Like you could have whatever theory you want to propose of multiple intelligences, these general cognitive mechanisms you can't sweep them under the rug, right?

Dr. Peterson: So if you laid out a number of hypothetical general or multiple intelligence measures and they measured anything that had to do with abstraction, and you averaged across them, what you'd essentially get as a proxy for IQ if you got anything at all. And what really stunned me was that we couldn't add anything additional to that. We added a huge battery of neuropsychological tests derived from the neuropsych literature—not from the psychometric literature—it was all clinical tests mostly developed at the Montreal Neurological Institute. We had a large battery and computerized them and added them to the IQ measures that we had. If you used IQ and the neuropsych measures separately in an equation, they would both contribute, but if you did a factor analysis and extracted out one factor, which would essentially be the average, then that factor was the best predictor. So I could never find out from my own research whether we had just expanded the definition of IQ slightly in terms of its predictive validity, or whether the neuropsychologists were onto something. But it was striking to me that even these tests derived from a purely clinical literature that wasn't influenced by the psychometric tradition and was actually opposed to it still ended up measuring exactly the same thing. I always told my students—and you tell me what you think about this—that it was forbidden in my lab to study anything without also adding an IQ measure because at least as a covariate. Because it seemed—and I also think the same thing about Big Five personality for whatever that's worth—is like we know that IQ exists. It exists, or at least as much as anything social scientists have ever discovered exists, so if you're studying any complex phenomena, the first thing you should do is get what you already know out of the way. And that made research in my lab much more difficult because we'd get results from some measure, and then that would hypothetically be publishable, but then as soon as we added the IQ measures and the personality measures, it would almost always kill. Like we looked at values as a predictor, for example, of academic achievement. And there's well-developed values literature, but we could kill that instantly with IQ and personality. And I can't get—I don't understand why the field won't accept that.

Dr. Kaufman: Well, I'll give you an analogy—it's almost—I think it's analogous to the fact that all these environmental determinants of X papers never use genes as a covariate. You know, it's like, well, things change once you start to include genes as a covariate. Then you find some of these effects drop away. And it's interesting, it's like we don't even want to know the truth, you know, in certain circumstances.

Dr. Peterson: I've thought about that too. It's not surprising that people don't want to know the truth about IQ because it's quite nasty. I mean, there are huge differences between people in their intrinsic ability to learn, and that has me walloping economic and social consequences. And so there's a bitterness in that that—I mean, I think we still have to address it and take it seriously, but you know, for me, it's like IQ does the liberal and the conservative political perspectives incredible damage because the conservatives are likely to say, "Well, there's a job for everyone if they just get up and get at it," and the liberals like to say, "Well, everybody can be trained to do everything," and both of those are wrong because there’s a large number of people who are not—who have enough trouble with abstraction that finding a productive job in a complex society has become extraordinarily difficult. And that's a huge problem, and we have no idea what to do with it. We won't even look at it.

Dr. Kaufman: Well, something I would like to bring in this discussion, if that's okay, is some of the limits of IQ tests, especially with neurodiverse people, because I found in some of my own research—I studied something called twice exceptionality, actually. I edited a book called Twice Exceptionality: Supporting Bright and Creative Students with Learning Disabilities. Sometimes they're intelligent; they're very intelligent. But sometimes, because of their executive function dysfunctions, like with ADHD individuals, it doesn't show up in an IQ test. So I do want to still leave that window open for us to—

Dr. Peterson: That's absolutely fair enough. Look, as we've already pointed out, IQ is only covering 25% of the relevant territory, and the tests are by no means perfect. And there are people whose capacity is measured improperly with an IQ estimate, no doubt about that. So—and other factors play an important role, like conscientiousness. But it's only about, at least as far as we can measure it—and we can only really measure it still with self-report or other report personality tests—it adds about—it's only about a third as powerful, if that, as IQ. This is how I put it: I say, look, it’s really hard to get an extremely high IQ score by accident. But there are many reasons why perhaps someone bombed an IQ test that could have to do with error variants and other factors. But it's very hard—like if you get 160 IQ, generally and honestly if you didn't cheat, it's hard to just accidentally stumble into those right answers.

Dr. Kaufman: Absolutely. Yeah, that's a good way of looking at it—that it's the low scores that contain the errors.

Dr. Peterson: Yeah, and fair enough, and that should be attended to, not least because we don't ever want to deny anybody with potential the possibility of developing that and sharing it with everyone else. But you know, so many universities now are moving away from the SATs, let's say, and because they perceive and actually shortcoming. But my problem with that is that whatever they're replaced with is likely to be way worse on virtually every imaginable dimension. So we'll see how that all plays out.

Dr. Kaufman: So, okay, so you learned this in England, and you weren't satisfied with the expertise approach, and you became a master of the psychometric approach and learned that literature. But that also didn't satisfy you. Why not?

Dr. Kaufman: Yeah, so I really—and I felt this in my bones—just intuitively when I was in college, even sophomore year in college, I was reading—I wrote the—I read the book Successful Intelligence by Robert Sternberg. I felt as though creativity wasn't the same thing as intelligence. I feel like that was this thing that I felt to be true that I—you know, I didn't know there was a whole field until I started reading cognitive psychology as well. I took a course in cognitive psychology my sophomore year with Anne Fay, and got to the chapter on intelligence in Sternberg's textbook where he talks about the psychological literature on creativity, and that really excited me. And I felt like there was more to the story than just IQ. And by the way, McIntosh would definitely agree with that. He—unfortunately, he passed away a couple years ago, but you know, if he were a librarian, he would definitely agree completely with that, and he has in our conversations. It's almost like people import ideas on IQ researchers that they never said. You know, like no IQ researcher that I ever know—have ever known has said IQ is a perfect predictor of everything.

Dr. Peterson: Right, you know quite the contrary. They tend to be extremely conservative in their estimates of IQ's potential for prediction.

Dr. Kaufman: Well, you're also in a strange position intellectually—a unique position in some sense—because you worked with one of the leading psychometric scholars who helped develop the idea of the general single factor of intelligence, IQ essentially, but you also worked with Robert Sternberg, who was one of the people in the '90s in particular, and in the '80s as well, who mounted a challenge to the idea of a unitary intelligence. I would say it was him and Howard Gardner at the Harvard School of Education that started to develop theories of multiple intelligence essentially. And so, well, so what did you conclude as a consequence of being exposed to both of those sets of ideas?

Dr. Kaufman: Yeah, and you're quite right. It's a really astute point. I just want to say they had a great affection for each other. I remember we invited Bob, as we call Robert Sternberg, Bob, over to Cambridge to give a talk at Cambridge once. I remember I saw all of us walking in the garden—me, Nick, and Bob. And Bob was criticizing—I remember this vividly—Bob was criticizing neuroscience and saying it's so reductionistic, like it's showing us nothing about intelligence. And Nick was pushing back, but I feel like there was a great affection at the core among all of us. I think that what I really learned from all these perspectives is that we need to stop thinking about all this stuff in either-or terms and do a lot more integration in our thinking about these topics. I'm sure we're going to talk about this when we get to the hierarchy of needs, because, believe it or not, this is related, is that we need to think of this stuff more in terms of integrated hierarchies than in terms of binaries or disparate constructs that are completely a contextual to each other. So the more I got into it, the more I realized how the interesting questions were when you combine intelligence and creativity, when you combine.

When you start looking at the world, for instance, I published a paper with Roger Beaty, who's a real leading star in the neuroscience field, showing that both the executive attention network and the default mode network, which is more related to creativity or imagination, when they are coupled together, you see the greatest sources of creativity. So it doesn't make any sense to view these things as separate, but each one does make their unique contributions, if that makes sense.

Dr. Peterson: Okay, so let's go back momentarily to the Sternberg and psychometric debate. So I was really interested and have remained interested in measurement when I encountered all those ideas. I was trying to predict success in complex environments—academic environments like the University of Toronto and Harvard and also in business environments. And I was trying to extend the prediction that was capable with IQ. And so I was scouring the literature looking for reliably measurable methods of assessing anything that would predict achievement and then also reliable measures of achievement, which is a separate problem. But what I found lacking with Sternberg and Gardner in particular was that I could never derive anything of practical measurable utility from their work. And I couldn't find anything in it that would allow me to add to predictive validity. Now, I also at that time was studying the Big Five personality factors, and that became quite clear that there was something in that that was actually measurable. So to even to predict academic performance, if you use IQ essentially—and the SAT and LSAT and all those standardized tests fall into that category, even though the makers deny that quite frequently—they do. Conscientiousness is a good additional predictor, and we looked at prediction of performance in graduate school, and openness, which is the creativity dimension that we'll talk about, didn't predict at all. It was actually slightly negatively predicted with graduate school performance, publications, and so on. But we did find that a combination of neuropsychological tests, basically assessing executive function, could add something to IQ, maybe depending on how you did the analysis. But conscientiousness definitely did. But I couldn't extract anything out of the multiple intelligence literature. And so—and I always thought that was a fatal flaw, actually, of that literature, because from a scientific perspective, and I also think from a reasonable critical intellectual perspective, if you can't extract out anything of measurable value, then what's the evidence? What's the evidence that you actually have something other than something conceptual? And so you must have run across the same problem when you were trying to expand out from IQ.

Dr. Kaufman: I did. I'll be very blunt about this. I went into the field so excited about theories of multiple intelligences, and once I started studying this scientifically, I became seduced by the truth, I don't know how else to say it. How about horribly impacted by the truth? That was my experience with IQ. It was like, "Oh my God, this won't go away." No matter what you do, and it is solidly—and it's been well measured, and it's really hard to add to it, and everything else looks bad in comparison. It was quite a shock to me, that's the thing. Once I started studying this stuff with Nick, you know, you'd, for instance, you would look at people's attempts to measure Gardner's multiple intelligences, and in every single instance, you'd be able to still extract a G factor. And there's no—and I've come to the conclusion that as long as you're activating consciousness to any degree whatsoever, you're going to—it's going to be G-loaded. What the task you're doing is going to bring in working memory processes. It's going to bring in some other—like general associative learning was another process we introduced. Obviously, the field has studied associative learning, but Nick and I published a paper showing that we could adapt some of those measures that have been used in the behavioral literature, because Nicholas is most well-known for his behavioral research. We were able to adapt some of these associated learning measures to predict G very just as well as working memory, for instance. So we found there are these general cognitive mechanisms that won't go away. Like you could have whatever theory you want to propose of multiple intelligences, these general cognitive mechanisms you can't sweep them under the rug, right?

Dr. Peterson: So if you laid out a number of hypothetical general or multiple intelligence measures and they measured anything that had to do with abstraction, and you averaged across them, what you'd essentially get as a proxy for IQ if you got anything at all. And what really stunned me was that we couldn't add anything additional to that. We added a huge battery of neuropsychological tests derived from the neuropsych literature—not from the psychometric literature—it was all clinical tests mostly developed at the Montreal Neurological Institute. We had a large battery and computerized them and added them to the IQ measures that we had. If you used IQ and the neuropsych measures separately in an equation, they would both contribute, but if you did a factor analysis and extracted out one factor, which would essentially be the average, then that factor was the best predictor. So I could never find out from my own research whether we had just expanded the definition of IQ slightly in terms of its predictive validity, or whether the neuropsychologists were onto something. But it was striking to me that even these tests derived from a purely clinical literature that wasn't influenced by the psychometric tradition and was actually opposed to it still ended up measuring exactly the same thing. I always told my students—and you tell me what you think about this—that it was forbidden in my lab to study anything without also adding an IQ measure because at least as a covariate. Because it seemed—and I also think the same thing about Big Five personality for whatever that's worth—is like we know that IQ exists. It exists, or at least as much as anything social scientists have ever discovered exists, so if you're studying any complex phenomena, the first thing you should do is get what you already know out of the way. And that made research in my lab much more difficult because we'd get results from some measure, and then that would hypothetically be publishable, but then as soon as we added the IQ measures and the personality measures, it would almost always kill. Like we looked at values as a predictor, for example, of academic achievement. And there's well-developed values literature, but we could kill that instantly with IQ and personality. And I can't get—I don't understand why the field won't accept that.

Dr. Kaufman: Well, I'll give you an analogy—it's almost—I think it's analogous to the fact that all these environmental determinants of X papers never use genes as a covariate. You know, it's like, well, things change once you start to include genes as a covariate. Then you find some of these effects drop away. And it's interesting, it's like we don't even want to know the truth, you know, in certain circumstances.

Dr. Peterson: I've thought about that too. It's not surprising that people don't want to know the truth about IQ because it's quite nasty. I mean, there are huge differences between people in their intrinsic ability to learn, and that has me walloping economic and social consequences. And so there's a bitterness in that that—I mean, I think we still have to address it and take it seriously, but you know, for me, it's like IQ does the liberal and the conservative political perspectives incredible damage because the conservatives are likely to say, "Well, there's a job for everyone if they just get up and get at it," and the liberals like to say, "Well, everybody can be trained to do everything," and both of those are wrong because there’s a large number of people who are not—who have enough trouble with abstraction that finding a productive job in a complex society has become extraordinarily difficult. And that's a huge problem, and we have no idea what to do with it. We won't even look at it.

Dr. Kaufman: Well, something I would like to bring in this discussion, if that's okay, is some of the limits of IQ tests, especially with neurodiverse people, because I found in some of my own research—I studied something called twice exceptionality, actually. I edited a book called Twice Exceptionality: Supporting Bright and Creative Students with Learning Disabilities. Sometimes they're intelligent; they're very intelligent. But sometimes, because of their executive function dysfunctions, like with ADHD individuals, it doesn't show up in an IQ test. So I do want to still leave that window open for us to—

Dr. Peterson: That's absolutely fair enough. Look, as we've already pointed out, IQ is only covering 25% of the relevant territory, and the tests are by no means perfect. And there are people whose capacity is measured improperly with an IQ estimate, no doubt about that. So—and other factors play an important role, like conscientiousness. But it's only about, at least as far as we can measure it—and we can only really measure it still with self-report or other report personality tests—it adds about—it's only about a third as powerful, if that, as IQ. This is how I put it: I say, look, it’s really hard to get an extremely high IQ score by accident. But there are many reasons why perhaps someone bombed an IQ test that could have to do with error variants and other factors. But it's very hard—like if you get 160 IQ, generally and honestly if you didn't cheat, it's hard to just accidentally stumble into those right answers.

Dr. Kaufman: Absolutely. Yeah, that's a good way of looking at it—that it's the low scores that contain the errors.

Dr. Peterson: Yeah, and fair enough, and that should be attended to, not least because we don't ever want to deny anybody with potential the possibility of developing that and sharing it with everyone else. But you know, so many universities now are moving away from the SATs, let's say, and because they perceive and actually shortcoming. But my problem with that is that whatever they're replaced with is likely to be way worse on virtually every imaginable dimension. So we'll see how that all plays out.

Dr. Kaufman: So, okay, so you learned this in England, and you weren't satisfied with the expertise approach, and you became a master of the psychometric approach and learned that literature. But that also didn't satisfy you. Why not?

Dr. Kaufman: Yeah, so I really—and I felt this in my bones—just intuitively when I was in college, even sophomore year in college, I was reading—I wrote the—I read the book Successful Intelligence by Robert Sternberg. I felt as though creativity wasn't the same thing as intelligence. I feel like that was this thing that I felt to be true that I—you know, I didn't know there was a whole field until I started reading cognitive psychology as well. I took a course in cognitive psychology my sophomore year with Anne Fay, and got to the chapter on intelligence in Sternberg's textbook where he talks about the psychological literature on creativity, and that really excited me. And I felt like there was more to the story than just IQ. And by the way, McIntosh would definitely agree with that. He—unfortunately, he passed away a couple years ago, but you know, if he were a librarian, he would definitely agree completely with that, and he has in our conversations. It's almost like people import ideas on IQ researchers that they never said. You know, like no IQ researcher that I ever know—have ever known has said IQ is a perfect predictor of everything.

Dr. Peterson: Right, you know quite the contrary. They tend to be extremely conservative in their estimates of IQ's potential for prediction.

Dr. Kaufman: Well, you're also in a strange position intellectually—a unique position in some sense—because you worked with one of the leading psychometric scholars who helped develop the idea of the general single factor of intelligence, IQ essentially, but you also worked with Robert Sternberg, who was one of the people in the '90s in particular, and in the '80s as well, who mounted a challenge to the idea of a unitary intelligence. I would say it was him and Howard Gardner at the Harvard School of Education that started to develop theories of multiple intelligence essentially. And so, well, so what did you conclude as a consequence of being exposed to both of those sets of ideas?

Dr. Kaufman: Yeah, and you're quite right. It's a really astute point. I just want to say they had a great affection for each other. I remember we invited Bob, as we call Robert Sternberg, Bob, over to Cambridge to give a talk at Cambridge once. I remember I saw all of us walking in the garden—me, Nick, and Bob. And Bob was criticizing—I remember this vividly—Bob was criticizing neuroscience and saying it's so reductionistic, like it's showing us nothing about intelligence. And Nick was pushing back, but I feel like there was a great affection at the core among all of us. I think that what I really learned from all these perspectives is that we need to stop thinking about all this stuff in either-or terms and do a lot more integration in our thinking about these topics. I'm sure we're going to talk about this when we get to the hierarchy of needs, because, believe it or not, this is related, is that we need to think of this stuff more in terms of integrated hierarchies than in terms of binaries or disparate constructs that are completely a contextual to each other. So the more I got into it, the more I realized how the interesting questions were when you combine intelligence and creativity, when you combine.

When you start looking at the world, for instance, I published a paper with Roger Beaty, who's a real leading star in the neuroscience field, showing that both the executive attention network and the default mode network, which is more related to creativity or imagination, when they are coupled together, you see the greatest sources of creativity. So it doesn't make any sense to view these things as separate, but each one does make their unique contributions, if that makes sense.

Dr. Peterson: Okay, so let's go back momentarily to the Sternberg and psychometric debate. So I was really interested and have remained interested in measurement when I encountered all those ideas. I was trying to predict success in complex environments—academic environments like the University of Toronto and Harvard and also in business environments. And I was trying to extend the prediction that was capable with IQ. And so I was scouring the literature looking for reliably measurable methods of assessing anything that would predict achievement and then also reliable measures of achievement, which is a separate problem. But what I found lacking with Sternberg and Gardner in particular was that I could never derive anything of practical measurable utility from their work. And I couldn't find anything in it that would allow me to add to predictive validity. Now, I also at that time was studying the Big Five personality factors, and that became quite clear that there was something in that that was actually measurable. So to even to predict academic performance, if you use IQ essentially—and the SAT and LSAT and all those standardized tests fall into that category, even though the makers deny that quite frequently—they do. Conscientiousness is a good additional predictor, and we looked at prediction of performance in graduate school, and openness, which is the creativity dimension that we'll talk about, didn't predict at all. It was actually slightly negatively predicted with graduate school performance, publications, and so on. But we did find that a combination of neuropsychological tests, basically assessing executive function, could add something to IQ, maybe depending on how you did the analysis. But conscientiousness definitely did. But I couldn't extract anything out of the multiple intelligence literature. And so—and I always thought that was a fatal flaw, actually, of that literature, because from a scientific perspective, and I also think from a reasonable critical intellectual perspective, if you can't extract out anything of measurable value, then what's the evidence? What's the evidence that you actually have something other than something conceptual? And so you must have run across the same problem when you were trying to expand out from IQ.

Dr. Kaufman: I did. I'll be very blunt about this. I went into the field so excited about theories of multiple intelligences, and once I started studying this scientifically, I became seduced by the truth, I don't know how else to say it. How about horribly impacted by the truth? That was my experience with IQ. It was like, "Oh my God, this won't go away." No matter what you do, and it is solidly—it's been well measured, and it's really hard to add to it, and everything else looks bad in comparison. It was quite a shock to me, that's the thing. Once I started studying this stuff with Nick, you know, you'd, for instance, you would look at people's attempts to measure Gardner's multiple intelligences, and in every single instance, you'd be able to still extract a G factor. And there's no—and I've come to the conclusion that as long as you're activating consciousness to any degree whatsoever, you're going—it's going to be G-loaded. What the task you're doing is going to bring in working memory processes. It's going to bring in some other—like general associative learning was another process we introduced. Obviously, the field has studied associative learning, but Nick and I published a paper showing that we could adapt some of those measures that have been used in the behavioral literature, because Nicholas is most well-known for his behavioral research. We were able to adapt some of these associated learning measures to predict G very just as well as working memory, for instance. So we found there are these general cognitive mechanisms that won't go away. Like you could have whatever theory you want to propose of multiple intelligences, these general cognitive mechanisms you can't sweep them under the rug, right?

Dr. Peterson: So if you laid out a number of hypothetical general or multiple intelligence measures and they measured anything that had to do with abstraction, and you averaged across them, what you'd essentially get as a proxy for IQ if you got anything at all. And what really stunned me was that we couldn't add anything additional to that. We added a huge battery of neuropsychological tests derived from the neuropsych literature—not from the psychometric literature—it was all clinical tests mostly developed at the Montreal Neurological Institute. We had a large battery and computerized them and added them to the IQ measures that we had. If you used IQ and the neuropsych measures separately in an equation, they would both contribute, but if you did a factor analysis and extracted out one factor, which would essentially be the average, then that factor was the best predictor. So I could never find out from my own research whether we had just expanded the definition of IQ slightly in terms of its predictive validity, or whether the neuropsychologists were onto something. But it was striking to me that even these tests derived from a purely clinical literature that wasn't influenced by the psychometric tradition and was actually opposed to it still ended up measuring exactly the same thing. I always told my students—and you tell me what you think about this—that it was forbidden in my lab to study anything without also adding an IQ measure because at least as a covariate. Because it seemed—and I also think the same thing about Big Five personality for whatever that's worth—is like we know that IQ exists. It exists, or at least as much as anything social scientists have ever discovered exists, so if you're studying any complex phenomena, the first thing you should do is get what you already know out of the way. And that made research in my lab much more difficult because we'd get results from some measure, and then that would hypothetically be publishable, but then as soon as we added the IQ measures and the personality measures, it would almost always kill. Like we looked at values as a predictor, for example, of academic achievement. And there's well-developed values literature, but we could kill that instantly with IQ and personality. And I can't get—I don't understand why the field won't accept that.

Dr. Kaufman: Well, I'll give you an analogy—it's almost—I think it's analogous to the fact that all these environmental determinants of X papers never use genes as a covariate. You know, it's like, well, things change once you start to include genes as a covariate. Then you find some of these effects drop away. And it's interesting, it's like we don't even want to know the truth, you know, in certain circumstances.

Dr. Peterson: I've thought about that too. It's not surprising that people don't want to know the truth about IQ because it's quite nasty. I mean, there are huge differences between people in their intrinsic ability to learn, and that has me walloping economic and social consequences. And so there's a bitterness in that that—I mean, I think we still have to address it and take it seriously, but you know, for me, it's like IQ does the liberal and the conservative political perspectives incredible damage because the conservatives are likely to say, "Well, there's a job for everyone if they just get up and get at it," and the liberals like to say, "Well, everybody can be trained to do everything," and both of those are wrong because there’s a large number of people who are not—who have enough trouble with abstraction that finding a productive job in a complex society has become extraordinarily difficult. And that's a huge problem, and we have no idea what to do with it. We won't even look at it.

Dr. Kaufman: Well, something I would like to bring in this discussion, if that's okay, is some of the limits of IQ tests, especially with neurodiverse people, because I found in some of my own research—I studied something called twice exceptionality, actually. I edited a book called Twice Exceptionality: Supporting Bright and Creative Students with Learning Disabilities. Sometimes they're intelligent; they're very intelligent. But sometimes, because of their executive function dysfunctions, like with ADHD individuals, it doesn't show up in an IQ test. So I do want to still leave that window open for us to—

Dr. Peterson: That's absolutely fair enough. Look, as we've already pointed out, IQ is only covering 25% of the relevant territory, and the tests are by no means perfect. And there are people whose capacity is measured improperly with an IQ estimate, no doubt about that. So—and other factors play an important role, like conscientiousness. But it's only about, at least as far as we can measure it—and we can only really measure it still with self-report or other report personality tests—it adds about—it's only about a third as powerful, if that, as IQ. This is how I put it: I say, look, it’s really hard to get an extremely high IQ score by accident. But there are many reasons why perhaps someone bombed an IQ test that could have to do with error variants and other factors. But it's very hard—like if you get 160 IQ, generally and honestly if you didn't cheat, it's hard to just accidentally stumble into those right answers.

Dr. Kaufman: Absolutely. Yeah, that's a good way of looking at it—that it's the low scores that contain the errors.

Dr. Peterson: Yeah, and fair enough, and that should be attended to, not least because we don't ever want to deny anybody with potential the possibility of developing that and sharing it with everyone else. But you know, so many universities now are moving away from the SATs, let's say, and because they perceive and actually shortcoming. But my problem with that is that whatever they're replaced with is likely to be way worse on virtually every imaginable dimension. So we'll see how that all plays out.

Dr. Kaufman: So, okay, so you learned this in England, and you weren't satisfied with the expertise approach, and you became a master of the psychometric approach and learned that literature. But that also didn't satisfy you. Why not?

Dr. Kaufman: Yeah, so I really—and I felt this in my bones—just intuitively when I was in college, even sophomore year in college, I was reading—I wrote the—I read the book Successful Intelligence by Robert Sternberg. I felt as though creativity wasn't the same thing as intelligence. I feel like that was this thing that I felt to be true that I—you know, I didn't know there was a whole field until I started reading cognitive psychology as well. I took a course in cognitive psychology my sophomore year with Anne Fay, and got to the chapter on intelligence in Sternberg's textbook where he talks about the psychological literature on creativity, and that really excited me. And I felt like there was more to the story than just IQ. And by the way, McIntosh would definitely agree with that. He—unfortunately, he passed away a couple years ago, but you know, if he were a librarian, he would definitely agree completely with that, and he has in our conversations. It's almost like people import ideas on IQ researchers that they never said. You know, like no IQ researcher that I ever know—have ever known has said IQ is a perfect predictor of everything.

Dr. Peterson: Right, you know quite the contrary. They tend to be extremely conservative in their estimates of IQ's potential for prediction.

Dr. Kaufman: Well, you're also in a strange position intellectually—a unique position in some sense—because you worked with one of the leading psychometric scholars who helped develop the idea of the general single factor of intelligence, IQ essentially, but you also worked with Robert Sternberg, who was one of the people in the '90s in particular, and in the '80s as well, who mounted a challenge to the idea of a unitary intelligence. I would say it was him and Howard Gardner at the Harvard School of Education that started to develop theories of multiple intelligence essentially. And so, well, so what did you conclude as a consequence of being exposed to both of those sets of ideas?

Dr. Kaufman: Yeah, and you're quite right. It's a really astute point. I just want to say they had a great affection for each other. I remember we invited Bob, as we call Robert Sternberg, Bob, over to Cambridge to give a talk at Cambridge once. I remember I saw all of us walking in the garden—me, Nick, and Bob. And Bob was criticizing—I remember this vividly—Bob was criticizing neuroscience and saying it's so reductionistic, like it's showing us nothing about intelligence. And Nick was pushing back, but I feel like there was a great affection at the core among all of us. I think that what I really learned from all these perspectives is that we need to stop thinking about all this stuff in either-or terms and do a lot more integration in our thinking about these topics. I'm sure we're going to talk about this when we get to the hierarchy of needs, because, believe it or not, this is related, is that we need to think of this stuff more in terms of integrated hierarchies than in terms of binaries or disparate constructs that are completely a contextual to each other. So the more I got into it, the more I realized how the interesting questions were when you combine intelligence and creativity, when you combine.

When you start looking at the world, for instance, I published a paper with Roger Beaty, who's a real leading star in the neuroscience field, showing that both the executive attention network and the default mode network, which is more related to creativity or imagination, when they are coupled together, you see the greatest sources of creativity. So it doesn't make any sense to view these things as separate, but each one does make their unique contributions, if that makes sense.