430 Iv. COGNITI vE AND M OTIvATIONAL P ROCESSES
eminence, something first demonstrated by 
James McKeen Cattell back in 1903. This 
common denominator has permitted psy -
chologists to examine the similarities and 
contrasts in the personality profiles of dis -
tinguished creators and leaders (e.g., Cox, 
1926; Simonton, 1991d; Simonton & Song, 
2009; Thorndike, 1950).
Although it is feasible to speak of genius 
in leadership domains, as well as genius in 
creative domains, in this chapter I concen -
trate on the latter. There are three reasons 
for this focus. First, the research literature 
on the personal characteristics of leaders 
is so immense that it would easily take up 
considerable space (Simonton, 1995). Sec -
ond, individual-  difference variables appear 
to play a much less conspicuous role in out -
standing leadership than they do in excep -
tional creativity. Very often, situational fac -
tors dominate over individual factors (e.g., 
Simonton, 2013a). Even when personal at -
tributes have some role to play, frequently 
their effects are moderated by contextual 
variables. Third, although leaders can clear -
ly qualify as geniuses by the historiometric 
definition, they are rather less likely to do 
so under the psychometric definition. Not 
only do leaders often display lower levels of 
intellectual ability than do creators (Cox, 
1926; Simonton, 1976; Simonton & Song, 
2009), there is also evidence that leadership 
effectiveness can actually be compromised 
by a leader’s possessing an excessively high 
intelligence (Simonton, 1995). Sometimes 
the relation between leadership and intelli -
gence may be best described by a curvilin -
ear, inverted-  U function (Antonakis, House, 
& Simonton, 2017; Simonton, 1985). This 
nonmonotonic association contrasts greatly 
with what is observed for creativity.
Having defined the terms and delineated 
this chapter’s scope, I wish to provide next a 
general personality sketch of the highly cre -
ative individual. After doing so, I turn to a 
discussion of some of the key issues in the 
study of the creative personality.
General Personality  Sketch
Since the onset of research on the creative 
personality, researchers have periodically 
published reviews of the central research findings (e.g., Barron & Harrington, 1981; 
Feist, 1998, 2019; Furnham, 2017). These 
reviews indicate a reasonable consensus re -
garding the factors associated with cross- 
sectional variation in creativity; that is, indi -
viduals who display high levels of creativity 
appear to differ from less creative individu -
als on numerous cognitive and dispositional 
characteristics. The most conspicuous over -
all feature of this distinctive profile is its 
complexity. The creative genius often has 
the appearance of being a bundle of highly 
variable and sometimes even contradictory 
attributes. To make this point, consider the 
following six clusters of findings:
1. Creative individuals are almost invari -
ably more intelligent than average, at least 
by a standard deviation or more (Furham, 
2017; Kim, Crammond, & VanTassel-  Baska, 
2010). An IQ of about 120 is often given as 
the approximate threshold level (Barron & 
Harrington, 1981), yet highly creative peo -
ple have scored lower (e.g., Cervantes, ac -
cording to Cox, 1926). Although researchers 
have often spoken of the relation between 
IQ and creativity becoming negligible after 
the supposed IQ 120 threshold, that null re -
lation may only hold for measures of general 
intelligence (Feist, 2014). When intellectual 
ability is assessed with greater specificity, 
such as focusing on mathematical precoc -
ity, a positive correlation may appear even 
among the top 1% of the distribution (Kell 
& Lubinski, 2014).
2. In line with the last point, intelligence 
is not a homogeneous construct but rather 
may comprise distinguishable intelligences 
(see, e.g., Gardner, 1983; Simonton, 2016; 
Sternberg, 2003). In Guilford’s (1967) clas -
sic “structure of intellect model,” intelli -
gence was broken into 120 distinct types, 
only a subset of which has any direct in -
volvement in creativity (Bachelor & Mi -
chael, 1997). Particularly crucial is the dis -
tinction between convergent and divergent 
processes. Convergent thought  endeavors 
to identify the single correct response to a 
given problem situation, whereas divergent 
thought  tries to generate many different re -
sponses. The latter concept has led to the 
emergence of a large number of divergent 
thinking tests that that have had some suc -