2017 Personality 19: Biology & Traits: Openness/Intelligence/Creativity II

[Music] 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 talked about a lot, which enables the Big Five model to be differentiated down into two aspects per trait. 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.

It's not a lot of difference between liberals and conservatives with regards to industriousness. We've also been able to determine, at least to some degree, that orderliness seems to be associated with disgust sensitivity. Disgust sensitivity is part of the behavioral immune system, and part of the reasons that conservatives are more inclined to want things like close borders is because they're more concerned about maintaining the boundaries between things. The reason for that seems to be fundamentally associated with disgust.

I'll talk to you a lot about that next week because once we've sorted that out, it really illuminated my way of thinking about things that had happened, for example, in Nazi Germany. People tend to think about when people have been studying conservatism from the scientific perspective; they've tended to assume that it's associated with fear of the out-group and that conservatives are more fearful than liberals. However, that doesn't seem to be the case. Conservatives are not higher in trait neuroticism, and that's a really tough one because if you are 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.

Well, the theories seem to be more trait-like rather than situation-based. What we have found is that for a long time, people thought that all of the negative emotions loaded on neuroticism, and it was like the global trait for negative emotion. Disgust seems to be its own peculiar thing. But I will talk to you more about that next week, and that's just an example of why differentiation at the aspect level seems useful.

You can also pick up differences between men and women at the aspect level that aren't obvious at the trait level. So you can think about the model as having different levels of resolution. Low-resolution representations are good for one set of operations and higher-resolution representations are good for other purposes. The primary scientific purpose, of course, is to predict; that's one of the primary scientific purposes.

You pick the level of analysis that gives you the most prediction and perhaps also the most utility in terms of formulating scientific theories. So we'll concentrate a little bit more today on openness per se. Openness to experience fragments into intellect and openness proper. I think the right way to think about intellect is that it's the personality instantiation of IQ, roughly speaking.

The reason I think that is because, first of all, working memory predicts intellect quite nicely, and working memory tests are very highly correlated with G. Specifically, G is the first factor that you pull out of any set of IQ tests. That's the technical definition of G; you set up sets of questions, do a factor analysis, and extract 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, where the hypothesis is that every single item loads equally on that factor because you're adding them all up and then dividing them by the number. It's no different than a factor analysis. Sometimes you'll hear people, like Steve and Jay Gould, talk about this when he was complaining about IQ back in the '90s. He said, "A factor in a factor analysis like a factor is just a mathematical abstraction." It's like, well, yeah, so is the average.

You think it's the average of a set of numbers? The real answer to that question 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 right. So then they can describe themselves as smart if you give them the opportunity to do that. That shows up when you ask them questions about their problem-solving ability, and that loads mostly on intellect. 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.

But that gives you some sense of how the whole five-factor model operates. Intelligence slots in underneath openness. Now the openness proper part of openness to experience, which I tend to think about as creativity, can be used as a shorthand to aid your understanding of 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.

However, there's more to it than IQ. What creativity seems to be associated with then again depends on how you define creativity. 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, inventions, or artworks. We'll cover the dimensions in the middle 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 something like this: you imagine that I toss you an idea, and there's some probability that when I toss you that idea, it will trigger off other ideas in your imagination. You can 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. The ones that will be triggered will be closely associated with that initial idea.

Let's say I toss each of you an idea, and I ask you to think of the first thing that comes to mind. The first thing that comes to mind for you, in all likelihood, would be shared by many of you. You can think about that as a common response, right? That's a less creative response. There will also be some things that come to mind for you that are so idiosyncratic that you're the only person that thinks that, and no one can understand it. Well, that's also not exactly creative because 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. Obviously, there's a certain amount of judgment that goes along with that. 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. If you want to decide if something's creative, like what we would do for our exercise, 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, someone tell me your use for a brick. "Breaking windows." Yes, okay, what else can you use a brick for? "Build a wall." It's a very small wall. Haha, a wall for ants. And what else? "Paperweight." Okay, good. Well, you get the idea.

You're not feeling very multi today, obviously. So, you see that if we gathered your responses—say I said you have to think of 20 items that you could do with a brick—then a bunch of the things that you thought would be the same, but some people would come up with something different. Like yours was reasonably different than one about using it as a paperweight.

But it's a good creative response because it's unexpected, and you could actually do it. You’d get a graph of probability of response, right? The more probable, the less creative, roughly speaking. It's not the only criteria, though, because you also have to look at utility.

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. We could also do that: I could just say, "Write down as many words as you can 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.

I can constrain it. If I counted how many words you generated and 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 that's something like the rate at which you can produce, say, verbal ideas. 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. Originality would be how improbable your use was compared to the uses generated by other people.

So, anyway, you can think of it as getting thrown an idea, and there's some probability that that will co-activate other ideas. If it co-activates many other ideas, that's like fluency. If it co-activates ideas that are quite distant from the original idea, something like that—you could track distance by comparing it to the probability that other people have generated it.

That's another indication of creativity. So they have to be unlikely, many unlikely responses that are useful—that's what creativity is, roughly speaking. Then you can track it in two different dimensions. That's creative thinking, but then creative achievement would be the ability to take those original ideas and actually implement them in the world. That's obviously much different than merely being creative.

What creativity is depends on which of those measurement routes you take. Now, I developed a questionnaire with one of my students, Shelley Carson, about thirty years ago, called the Creative Achievement Questionnaire. I'll show you that here and the things that are interesting about it. You hear very frequently people say things like, "Everyone's creative." It's like, that's wrong.

It's just as wrong as saying that everyone is 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.

Being fast and being out there at the front of things really makes a difference. You also have to have these divergent thinking capabilities—that's part of your trait structure. Creative people are really different from non-creative people, partly because for example, they're highly motivated to do creative things and to experience novelty, to chase down aesthetic experiences: to attend movies, to read fiction, to go to museums, and to enjoy poetry—and music that's not conventional.

These aren't trivial differences, so it's a myth statement to make the proposition that everyone's creative. It's simply not the case. It's a matter of wishful thinking, like saying that everyone is intelligent. If everyone is intelligent, then the term loses all its meaning.

Any term that you can apply to every member of a category has absolutely no meaning. Now, that doesn't mean that, you know—the other thing you want to think about here is that don’t think that creativity is universally a good thing. It’s a high-risk, high-return strategy.

If you’re creative, you just try this: There are creative people in this room. Man, you guys are going to have a hell of a time monetizing your creativity. It’s virtually impossible.

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? 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.

Then you have sales, then you have customer support, and you have to build an organization. If it's really novel, you have to tell people what the hell the thing is. You know, we built this Future Authoring Program, and so it's available for people online. How do you market that? No one knows what that is, and that's a real problem.

If you wrote 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?

Then you have pricing problems, and it's really unbelievably difficult to produce something creative and then monetize it. Even worse, if you're the creator, let's say you have a spectacular invention, you've got no money. You have no customers. Those are big problems.

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. Most people aren't in that situation, so it's a terrible barrier right off the bat.

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. So then, let’s say you get past family and friends and get venture capitalists involved. That's often the next step, or an angel investor—there are steps in building a business: family and friends, angel investor, and then some rich guy that you happen to meet who's 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? Most of it. Why? Because you don’t have any money. How are you going to bargain for control over your product? They'll just say, "Well, do you want the money or not?" If your answer is no, then they’ll go and do something else with their money.

It's not like there’s a shortage of things to do with money because there are a million things you can do with it. So you’re not in a great bargaining position. If you get venture capitalists involved, they'll take another big chunk. Maybe if they're not very straight with you, they'll just throw you out because by that point in the company’s development, you’re nothing but a pain in the neck.

What do you know about marketing, sales, customer service, and building an organization? You don't have a clue. So why do they need you? 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 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.

The overwhelming probability is that you will fail, but a small proportion of creative people succeed spectacularly. 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.

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—you don't really have a choice. You can suppress it, but it's very bad for you. The creative people I've worked with, if they're not creative, they’re miserable.

They have to do it, and there's real joy and pleasure in it, psychological utility, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it’s an intelligent strategy for moving forward through life. Whenever I talk to people who are creative, 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, an artist, or any of the number of things that you might be—find a way to make money and practice your craft on the side.

Because you will 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 things. As a long-term strategy, a medium- to long-term strategy, it’s a better one.

But it’s gotten incredibly difficult for people. For example, it's incredibly difficult for new musicians to monetize their craft, even if they’re really, really good at it. So, anyway, don’t be thinking, "Well, everyone's not creative." Everybody goes, "Oh, that’s terrible." It’s not so terrible, and it’s not self-evident that you would curse someone with high levels of creativity.

Here's how our Creative Achievement Questionnaire works. What we did essentially was think up how many domains there are in which you might be creative. Remember when you're designing a questionnaire, you want to be over-inclusive because the statistics will take care of it, right?

So you take a large area and aim your questionnaire at it, and you can do statistics post-hoc to see 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 can get rid of one of them; that’s fine.

We started with a pretty wide range. We thought, "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. If you’re a painter, you can get a score of 0, which means you have no training or recognized talent in this area.

Okay, so you really want to keep an eye on the zeros. Then a score of 1 means you’ve taken lessons, people have commented on your talents, you’ve won a prize, or your work has been critiqued in national publications. You get a score from 0 to 7 points, but you can indicate that more than zero, maybe that’s happened to you more than once.

What happens 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. That's another example of this weird thing called the Pareto principle, or Price's law: the probability that more good things will happen increases as you increase your success.

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. Then the second hardest one will be your second one. It is virtually impossible to get a first customer because they’re going to sell to people who are basically conservative.

They aren't going to be willing or able to evaluate whether your product is good for anything, so they’ll say, "Who are your other customers?" If your answer is, "Well, we don’t have any," what do you think they’re going to do? They’ll be the first one to say no because people don’t stick their necks out at all—not a bit—ever.

Unless you're well established in the market, especially if you’re dealing with a big company, you can just forget it. It’s like a three-year sales cycle. 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 product for nothing if you're really nice to them, and you get one customer that way.

It’s very difficult. So what do you think the royalty is, just out of curiosity? 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? 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 about 5%. Think about that. So that means you make your thing, and 95% of it belongs to someone else, and things are going quite well for you. It doesn’t really matter what you manufacture or produce; that's about what you can expect. Sales, marketing, distribution—all that eats it up.

You need to know these things because they’re not self-evident. Okay, so how else can you have creative achievement? You can be a musician: "I have no training or recognize talent." "Recordings of my composition have been sold publicly." That’s the top end. "My composition has been copyrighted and recorded, critiqued in local publications."

"I have composed an original piece of music." 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 how many of you fit into category zero—I have no training or recognized talent in this area?

Okay, zero is the median score on all of these. The median score is the score that's most likely for people to have, and it's different than the mean. The median score is zero for the entire Creative Achievement Questionnaire. It's true: you add up all over all thirteen domains, and the most common score is zero.

So how creative are people? There's zero creativity at all. Yes, everybody has a certain degree—not really creative. Well, the thing is you could say 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. You could well say that novelty is a huge part of it, but that's built into the definition that it has to be novel and useful. If the idea is the same as the idea that a bunch of other people have, it's not—it’s an idea. Fair enough? If you define creativity that way, then everyone is creative, but it's a foolish way of defining creativity because everyone does it.

We know there has to be something novel about creativity. So are there ways to be creative outside the arts? 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 creativity associated with openness. So yeah, dance is 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 national publications." "My work has been reviewed in national publications." A million books sold last year—250 of them sold more than 100,000 copies.

That's another example of high risk, high returns; 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 are tough 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 on a bookshelf in a bookstore.

The reason for that is—this is a trouble I have with the books that I write: no one knows where to put them. That’s a big problem because then the marketing people don’t know how to market them.

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 get published. Even if you do, you can’t sell it because no one can find it.

So just think about the difficulties of 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, and then you have to be reviewed by the right people. Then it has to be put in the right places—it’s like most what happens is your book will go out for a week, no one will buy it, and it’ll disappear 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 at the top. "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?

Has anyone in here created original software for a computer? One to three people; yes, three people. How about "I've sketched out an invention and worked on design flaws?" How many people? Maybe two or three?

I mean, if this was an engineering class, there would likely be more people, but this is more in the domain. It’s not the artsy end of the creativity distribution; it's more on the ideas and mechanical end of it.

Scientific discovery: "I do not have training or recognition in this field." "I received a scholarship based on my work in science or medicine." How many people have received a scholarship based on their work in science and medicine? Okay, nobody.

So we don't have anyone who goes that high. "I've won a prize at a science fair or other local competition." Anyone there? Yes, there's maybe two or three, four people there.

That means we've got four people in a class of about 150 who hit the second level of scientific discovery. Has anyone 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, theater and film: "How many people have performed in theater or film?" Oh yeah, your Narsee bunch. So, "My acting abilities have been recognized in local publications." How many people for that one? That's it.

Anyone 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 direct a theater film production. Got you there.

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.

Yeah, yeah, well that’s about it for now. Caliber was a recruiter and then also piracy got really bad, right? Yeah, well that’s one of the big problems with anything that can be distributed digitally.

It's like, yeah, yeah. Timing is everything, and that’s another one of the terrible cut-offs. It’s not only that you have to be right and have your act 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 demand. People won't buy anything that they don’t have a crying need for because they have priorities. Imagine everybody has ten priorities, and number ten is important, but no one ever does it.

And number eight is important, and no one ever does it. So you have to go talk to someone to buy what you have, and that has to be priority one or two for them. They’ll say, "Oh, that’s good; we really need it." But if 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. Then the other thing that will happen too is if you go up and try to sell your product, you won't know who to talk to. You'll end up spending 95% of your time—this is especially true in companies—talking to the people who will talk to you, obviously, but those aren’t the people who ever make any decisions.

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. You won’t be able to get to the people who make decisions because other people who know how to do that have already gotten there, and that’s not you.

So that’s very difficult as well. Culinary arts: "My recipes have been published nationally." Anyone? How about, "I often experiment with recipes." Purposeful experimentation, right? Not accidental experimentation. Yes? Sorry!

Alright, "My recipes would be published in a local cookbook." Anyone? Okay, well, you get the point, right? You see how this works.

Here are ways you can be creative, and here are strata of accomplishment within those ways. So then the question is, what does it look like? Yes, yes, yes, yes, fair enough.

This probably needs to be updated to reflect that. There’s the distribution of scores now. That’s dismal. That’s a dismal thing to look at. You have to understand why. Look at this: zero.

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. Then you have these horrible people out here; 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 90% are doing the other half; who cares about them?

You have 10,000 employees—100 of them do half the work, right? Here’s a nasty little law. As your company grows, incompetence grows exponentially, and confidence grows linearly. Got it?

With ten, it’s three who are doing half the work, but at 10,000, it’s 100 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.

One of the things that’s interesting when big companies start to shake is maybe they’ve had a bad quarter or two. The stock price starts to tip down, and the people who have options aren’t very happy about that. Maybe they start to announce layoffs.

All the hundred people who have opportunities leave, and they're the ones who are doing half the work. That puts your company in a pretty rough situation because now you have the 9,900 people left over who were only doing half the work.

The next time you announce layoffs, the next most productive hundred leave. So then you’re left with nobody who's productive at a massive overhead payroll. Price's law—you can look that up.

Price is a guy who was looking at scientific productivity, and one of the things he found was when he was looking at Ph.D. students is that the median number of publications for a Ph.D. graduate when he did his work—which was in the early '60s—was one.

Half as many had two, half as many had three, and half as many as that had four—real stepped out. One of the corollaries of that is that there are a number of people who are hyper-productive, and that’s these people out here.

If you were to graph how many people in that population of 300 had $10,000 in a savings account, it would look very much like this. Some of them would have some; most people would have like no savings whatsoever. The median person would have no savings whatsoever.

Then you go up to 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 a difference in creative production, every realm.

It 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, and Mozart.

That's right, those five. So here's something cool: you take all the music those people wrote, and 5% of the music all those people wrote occupies 50% of the music that is played. Almost all the composers never get a listen.

Even among the composers, almost none of their music ever gets played. That’s another example of this Price's law of scaling, and it applies to all sorts of things, like the number of hockey goals scored, number of basketball hoops successfully put through the hoop, the size of cities—all follow the same distribution. It’s a weird law.

You can think about it. 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; some people start to lose a bit.

If you win, the probability that you’ll keep winning starts to increase, and if you lose, your vulnerability increases as you lose. Soon, if six people play Monopoly, one person has zero. What happens when they have zero? They're out of the game.

Zero is a weird number because when you hit zero, you’re out of the game. 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.

That's what happens if you play an iterated trading game to its final conclusion. That’s partly the law underlying this kind of distribution.

It’s really—it’s not a consequence necessarily of structural inequality. It’s built into the system at a deeper level than that. 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 instantly moving back up to the top. Different people, maybe, but still back up to the top.

Even for the 1%, there’s a lot of turnover. I think you have a 10% chance, if I remember correctly, of being in the top 1% for at least one year of your life. A 40% chance of being in the top 10% for at least one year in your life. That’s in Canada; in the U.S., it’s less so.

In Europe, 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, people inside redistribute to recreate? No, not usually.

I mean, they do, but it’s attenuated because people mean if you reach up the entire company and pull from everywhere, there’s some probability that some of those people would rise to the top who 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. So, yeah, you kill. You wonder sometimes, "Well, how can companies die so quickly?" Well, they go into a death spiral—it’s almost impossible for them to get out of.

It happens extraordinarily quickly. This is why the typical Fortune 500 company lasts only 30 years. It’s not that easy for these behemoths to continue existence across time.

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. 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.

That’s also partly because it’s not that easy to integrate creative people into your company. You certainly don’t want them at the bottom because they're supposed to be doing what they're told to do, so you filter out a lot of them at the bottom.

Then you need them at the top, but they've already been filtered out. 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; it would have to be the member of a class that you've already encountered substantially. Anyway, the take-home lesson from this is zero.

That’s like a graph of monetary distribution as well. 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 can’t get a bank account if you don’t have any money, right?

If there’s a bunch of things that start to work against you when you’re at zero, you can’t shake it. It’s very difficult to get out of that 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, which is summed across all the categories and all the exemplars of the categories that you've chosen. The question is: can you predict creative achievement? This is how we did it with this construct delegation.

The first thing we wanted to know was, was the Creative Achievement Questionnaire actually associated with something you might regard as creativity? We got a number of students to come in, and we gave them a collage kit.

Everyone got exactly the same kit, and then they had to make a collage out of the collage kit. We had five artists rate the collage for quality, and then we averaged across the ratings. The first thing you would do if you did that is—you might think, "Can artists actually come up with a measure of how creative a collage is?"

The answer is actually technical; if 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.

In that case, there is a judgment that emerges as a consensus across artists. The first thing we found was there’s 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.

It was clear that trained artists could make reliable judgments about the quality of collages because you had to check that out first. If they’re all over the place, you got no measure. It’s like everyone’s using different rulers; you got no measure.

Well, we found that the correlation between the creative evaluation of collages and the total T.A.Q. was 0.59, which is mind-boggling. I told you last time that under 5% of published social studies social science studies demonstrate a correlation coefficient or an effect size greater than 0.5.

This is 0.6, and 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 0.5 is unheard of.

The fact that you could estimate someone’s lifetime creative achievement by having them do a collage that four artists rate is an indication that there is something real at the bottom of it. That’s like the definition of real. The Creative Personality Scale uses circular adjectives that are associated with creativity from a very large list of adjectives—Goldberg’s adjective markers; that’s another Big Five variant—that were correlated at about 0.51.

It doesn’t measure openness; it just measures intellect, but be that as it may, it’s still a personality marker of trait openness. It was correlated at 0.51. The NEO-PI-R openness was correlated at 0.33. Then we use the divergent thinking tests, and I told you about those already: how many uses can you think of for a brick, for example?

Those are scored according to fluency: how many answers you provide and also originality: how many unique, useful answers do you provide. That was nicely correlated as well. The overall correlation is 0.47, then fluency is 0.38, originality is 0.46, and flexibility is 0.37.

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 indexed by personality markers on the C, 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 that would be the divergent thinking tests and also in terms of creative production.

Creative production and creative thinking are quite tightly aligned. 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. The other thing you see with creative people is that they tend, especially if they’re writers, to be affected by pathologies, like manic depressive disorder.

That’s partly because manic people become unbelievably fluid; I think they speak incredibly quickly; they generate ideas like mad. It’s a hyper-arousal of the positive emotion system, roughly speaking, and that can have a side effect of creativity.

This is a cool study I just found today; it's a terror management study, so I’ll read it to you. The relationship between creativity and symbolic mortality has been long acknowledged by scholars. In reviewing the literature, we found 12 papers that empirically examined the relationship between creativity and mortality awareness using a terror management theory paradigm.

Overall, this supports the notion that creativity plays an important role in the management of existential concerns. A mini meta-analysis of the impact of death awareness on creativity resulted in a small to 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. 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 creative achievement among people for whom creativity constitutes a central part of the cultural worldview. It’s an empirical examination of some of the existential theories that I was presenting to you previously because part of the idea that was proposed 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. That was actually put to the empirical test in this study, and I thought that was quite cool.

There’s another paper; this was by Kaufmann and a couple of my students, Jacob Hirsch and Colin Dion. I'm on that paper as well near the end. They were interested in whether openness and intellect predicted different elements of creative achievements, or this goes back to your question about the differentiation between the artsy end of creativity and maybe the more practical end associated, for example, with the proclivity to like nonfiction.

The Big Five personality dimension, openness/intellect, is 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 in 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 extraversion 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 higher-order trait plasticity, right? Because plasticity was openness plus extraversion, and that’s fundamentally associated with activation of the underlying dopaminergic system, which is the system that mediates exploratory behavior.

So if you’re dominated by that 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. Yeah, I think that’s the same student who always does that.

Alright, we’ll see you on Tuesday. [Applause]