APPLIED COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY, VOL. 8,613-620 (1994)

Book Reviews;

One hundredpercent perspiration

CREATIVITY; BEYOND THE MYTH OF GENIUS. Robert W. Weisberg. W.H. Freeman & Co, New York. No. of pages: 312. ISBN 0-7176-2365-4 (hardback) and 0-7167-2367-0 (paperback). Price E21.95 and E12.95, respectively.

‘Creativity’ has the status of motherhood and apple pie Everyone thinks they know it when they see it and is convinced it is ‘a good thing’. Now that psychometric attempts to identify creative individuals have proved largely unfruitful, a managerially minded age finds appeal in the notion that creative processes can be cultivated in ordinary individuals. In education and in business, the idea now prevails that it is the processes involved that are special, rather than the individuals in whom they occur. These processes, it is commonly supposed, are largely unconscious and involve sudden leaps of insight or special qualities of flexibility or sensitivity.

In his earlier Creativity: Genius and other myths (1986), Robert Weisberg argued that there was in fact little evidence that creative thinking involves such special forms of thinking. In his present book, he goes on to ask expressly about the role of ‘ordinary’ thinking in creativity, suggesting that while creative products are exceptional, the processes by which they are pro- duced are not, and laying his bold conjecture open to refutation from a wide range of evidence from laboratory experiments and historical case studies of creative production in science, technology, and the arts.

The scope of these cases is catholic and impressive. Picasso, Jackson Pollock, Mozart, Darwin, Watson and Crick, the Wright Brothers, James Watt, Coleridge and Kekule, and intriguing oddments like Calder’s mobiles and Edison’s Icinetoscope pass by on parade. Those familiar with the field will recognize here geniuses who have themselves written about their supposed acts of creation, reinforcing the idea that the process is something as special as the product. This is all grist to Weisberg’s iconoclastic mill. Their historical achievements, he argues, were not sudden insights, as they often claimed after the event, but a continuous evolution of component ideas combined with discrete integrations of elements previously separate.

Weisberg thus proposes that the ecological context in which creativity should be studied is a historical one, and that we need to identify the antecedent elements in creative thought which he argues are always present, and which are necessary for a full account of the total intellectual process. The historical aspect is also important in the sense that ‘real’ creativity can only be evaluated in relation to the context in which it occurs, and is dependent on others for its recognition. (Stated in Weisberg’s economical and lucid style, this point somehow seems less crass than in much jargon-laden constructionist writing.)

In the case he selects, Weisberg is persuasive that much creative thought at least is more ‘ordinary’ than has usually been supposed. If we are to follow him further there are some difficult questions, about the basis for sampling all potential relevant cases, about whether we can ever know enough for complete analysis, and about what are material antecedents, as opposed only to potential ones. Must we not also consider as antecedents such as cosmologi- cal attitudes and frames of mind linked to historical traditions? Not least, what would, with all these uncertainties, constitute contrary evidence?

On the matter of the problematic nature of disconfinnation, one is occasionally left a little uneasy at the short shrift Weisberg cavalierly gives to admittedly not very clear evidence going against his hypothesis, as when he dismisses Gretzels and Czikszentmihaly’s finding that successful artists scored significantly lower than others on the 16-PF scale measuring conformity and concern with social approval with the remark that one such result among

0 1994 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

614 Book Reviews

many may be due to chance. This is of course true, but attention surely needs to be given to patterns of results in such cases and some acknowledgement is due of the plausibility of the finding and the need to put down a marker for future work. Scepticism surely has a duty to be self-reflexive.

These reservations detract only little from the achievement of this book and the important challenge from its conclusions. Despite other valuable recent contributions to the psychology of creativity, Weisberg’s is to be welcomed as a hard-edged approach which puts a sceptical case with great clarity and addresses evidence from a variety of domains-from the laboratory as much as from ‘real life’. From the former he deduces the importance to creative thinking of ‘near’ analogies, critical judgement, and expertise, while the latter provides an important reminder that the broader context to be considered in understanding creative processes is not merely ‘ecological’ but historical. A key achievement in all this is to disperse much of the romantic mist that still clings to the subject without in any way diminishing historical creative achievements, or indeed the continuing fascination of the topic of creativity.

COLIN BERRY University of East London

New approaches to nature and nurture

THE ORIGINS AND DEVELOPMENT OF HIGH ABILITY. Gregory R. Bock and Kate Ackrill (Eds). John Wiley & Sons, Chichester, 1993. No. of pages 258. ISBN 0-471-93945-5. Price f45.00 (Hard cover).

A greater variety of approaches to exceptional cognitive performance than offered by the contrasting books contributed by Weisberg, reviewed above, and Finke, Ward, and Smith, reviewed in a recent issue of this journal, is to be found in this collection of papers from the CIBA Foundation symposium held in London in January 1993. This brings together an impressive international collection of experts on giftedness and high ability. Although it does not focus exclusively, or even primarily, on the nature of cognitive processes involved, it merits the attention of readers of this journal in addressing the very broad context within which these processes must ultimately be understood.

The contributions fall into five categories: conceptualizing ‘giftedness’ or high ability, evi- dence on a genetic basis, characteristics of the early lives of high achievers, accounts of excep- tional abilities in specialized areas (musical, scientific, mathematical, and linguistic) and discussions of interventions aimed at promoting high ability. Although not generally organized sequentially on this basis, the papers in the latter four categories are enclosed by reflections of a broader character in the form of brief but insightful overviews from Richard Atkinson, and orienting contributions on conceptual aspects by Robert Sternberg and Douglas Detter- man, and by a discussion of the feasibility of creating gifted people by Anders Ericsson and colleagues. Some ancient themes are in evidence, such as nature versus nurture and general versus multiple specific intelligence, although they appear in the changed light of new evidence and conceptualizations. Nature is taking on more concrete form, with lightning advances in genetics and basic biological differences in brain organization, which allegedly have powerful consequences for sex-related differences in patterns of cognitive performance, while nurture is now being differentiated in terms of individuals’ affective and cognitive responses to differing patterns of family dynamics.

The contributions vary somewhat in weight, there being perhaps too much by way of early reports on research progress, although the variety of the lines of research conveys an impression of a vigorous getting to grips with issues and prospects of solid progress. Perhaps the format, with each participant doing a party piece and defending its merits against others who had come to do theirs (I parody slightly), is not always ideal. It would not be appropriate, anyway, for what was here an incipient debate on admissible forms of evidence and the relative roles of the scientific versus the anecdotal. As Weisberg’s book warns us, one difficulty with