The Science of Creativity in 2013: Looking Back to Look Forward

 

In 1950, the American psychologist Joy P. Guilford delivered a lecture to the American Psychological Association (APA) calling for a scientific focus on creativity. Psychology knew little about creativity at the time. Years earlier, during WWII, the Air Force commissioned Guilford, then a psychologist at USC, to identify pilots who would respond to emergencies with original insights to save themselves and the plane. IQ was a popular measurement but it did not capture the type of thinking that generated novel solutions to urgent predicaments. Studying pilots led Guilford to a few insights he shared with his colleagues at the APA in 1950. First, creativity is not equivalent to intelligence. Second, divergent thinking is central to the concept of creativity. Third, we can develop tests to measure divergent thinking skills. Guilford’s remarks encouraged questions the academy is still having today: What is the relationship between creativity and intelligence? How do we measure creativity? And what, exactly, is creativity?

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Why God Does Not Have a Monopoly on Morality

Just how voraciously do Americans despise atheists? A study conducted last November found that subjects rated atheists as less trustworthy than rapists. In 2006, Americans said that of all the groups they would most disapprove of their children marrying, atheists were the first. According to a 2007 Gallup poll, Americans are more willing to vote a Mormon, Jew, African American and homosexual into the oval office before an otherwise qualified atheist. Why? A paper by Penny Edgell points to morality:

Some people view atheists as problematic because they associate them with illegality, such as drug use and prostitution—that is, with immoral people who threaten respectable community from the lower end of the status hierarchy. Others saw atheists as rampant materialists and cultural elitists that threaten common values from above—the ostentatiously wealthy who make a lifestyle out of consumption or the cultural elites who think they know better than everyone else. Both of these themes rest on a view of atheists as self-interested individualists who are not concerned with the common good.[1]

One of the most salient convictions of the believer is that religion is a prerequisite for morality. Without supervision from the supernatural the world will fall into moral anarchy where believers and non-believers, having no objective morality to grasp right from wrong, will succumb to social Darwinism, hence Smerdyakov’s maxim, “If there is no God, there is no morality.” The question is, as one audience member put it to Richard Dawkins in a Q&A on Australian TV, “Is it possible for an atheist to be a peace-loving, socially responsible person?”

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Between Haidt and Harris: Belief, Religion and Morality

What motivates a suicide bomber? That question divides Sam Harris and Jonathan Haidt, two scholars who study religion from the psychological perspective. For Harris the answer is religion. “Subtract the Muslim belief in martyrdom and jihad, and the actions of suicide bombers become completely unintelligible,” he says in The End of Faith. Haidt takes a different, almost opposite perspective. “Religion,” he asserts in his latest book, The Righteous Mind, “does not seem to be the cause of suicide bombing… Religion is therefore often an accessory to atrocity, rather than the driving force of the atrocity.”

Who’s right? The difference is a question about the role religion plays in human behavior. Harris is a neuroscientist noted for his cogent thinking, razor-sharp writing and a dedication to rational secular thinking, so he sees faith-based beliefs as irrational byproducts of our cognition. (He is a trustee of “Project Reason: A nonprofit foundation devoted to spreading scientific knowledge and secular values in society.”)

Haidt is an atheist like Harris. But Haidt understands religion as a feature of human cognition that helped bind communities together under shared traditions, morals and sacred objects, people and ideas. Haidt’s intellectual hero is the French sociologist Emilé Durkheim, who held that Homo sapiens was really Homo duplex, a creature that exists as an individual but also as a part of a larger society. Religiosity is therefore not just about belief and action, but belonging as well.

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A Nauseating Corner of Psychology: Disgust

Like many features of the human condition, the first psychological account of disgust comes from Charles Darwin, who in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals defined it this way: “Something revolting, primarily in relation to the sense of taste, as actually perceived or vividly imagined; and secondarily to anything which causes a similar feeling, through the sense of smell, touch and even eyesight.”[1] Theories of disgust bounced around following Darwin. Throughout the 20th century it was a niche area of research, but by the 1990s disgust was popular in psychology. Spearheading this movement was Paul Rozin, a clever psychologist who devised several experiments that revealed what elicits disgust. Think about eating soup from a sterilized bedpan or eating chocolate molded to resemble dog feces. Not pleasant, right? Rozin’s insight was that disgust is the “fear of incorporating an offending substance into one’s body.”[2]

Disgust’s evolutionary origins are not a mystery. Humans are omnivores (we eat just about anything we can digest), so disgust acted as a food rejection system – a helpful emotional reminder that it’s not safe to feast indiscriminately. This is why carrion, vomit, feces, mucus, rotten meat, effluvia and other things loaded with dangerous microbes and parasites are so repulsive. Hundreds of thousands of years before Louis Pasteur discovered germ theory, natural selection had already endowed us with an implicit knowledge of it, which is why we not only refuse to eat said contaminates but also touch and think about them.

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Awe-Inspiring Art as a Byproduct of the Freeze Response

Imagine that you are making your way through a dense jungle. Thick vegetation makes it difficult to see more than few feet in front of you. Suddenly, you break through to a clearing and find yourself standing on the edge of a high cliff; one more step and you’re finished.

This imaginary scenario comes from the cognitive scientist David Huron, who explains that the cliff doesn’t trigger the flight or fight response, but a third reaction: the freeze response. Five distinct physiological signals mark the freeze response: gasping, breath-holding, lowered chin with mouth slightly opened, immobility or stiffness and reduced blinking. Taken together, this physiological cocktail helps steady the body, an adaptive response in a situation where the danger is fixed and the slightest movement means death.

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