426 
Creativity and genius are highly desirable 
but also rather elusive qualities. Employers 
in high-tech industries often wish that their 
workers were more creative, so creativity 
workshops have proliferated that purport to 
attain that end. Parents are usually pleased 
to learn that they have given birth to a “bud -
ding genius” and often fight hard to get 
their child enrolled in special programs for 
the gifted. Although a person can exhibit 
creativity without being a genius, and be a 
genius without being creative, both charac -
teristics can converge in a single personality. 
Indeed, the creative genius is often viewed as 
the highest or purest manifestation of both 
creativity and genius (Simonton, 2019a). 
Isaac Newton, René Descartes, Miguel de 
Cervantes, Leonardo da Vinci, and Lud -
wig van Beethoven are clear-cut examples. 
Creative genius is so highly valued that spe -
cial honors are devoted to its recognition— 
the Nobel Prize perhaps constituting the 
most conspicuous example. A more recent 
instance is the special grants awarded by 
 MacArthur Foundation, which the mass 
media have taken to confer the unofficial 
title of “genius” upon the recipients.
Of the two attributes, genius has the lon -
ger history as an individual-  difference vari -
able. The first scientific study was Galton’s 
(1869) book Hereditary Genius . Creativity, 
in contrast, did not come into its own as an independent research topic until nearly a 
century later. Often this latter development 
is taken as beginning with Guilford’s (1950) 
Presidential Address before the American 
Psychological Association. Yet it was not 
until the 1960s that research on creativ -
ity really exploded. Although creativity re -
search got a late start, it quickly overtook 
research on genius as a topic in personality 
research. Despite something of a decline in 
interest in the 1980s, research on creativ -
ity has resurged. Now both research topics 
have become sufficiently well established 
to enjoy their own journals and handbooks 
(e.g., Kaufman & Sternberg, 2019; Simon -
ton, 2014e).
The main goal of this chapter is to pro -
vide an overview of the substantive findings 
and issues regarding individual differences 
in creativity and genius, with a special em -
phasis on the two combined. But before we 
can begin that task, I first must define the 
two key terms.
Definitions
What do we mean when we call someone 
“creative”? How do we know who can be 
considered a “genius”? Because creativity is 
perhaps the most difficult to define, I start 
with the first question.CHAPTER 20
Creativity and  Genius
Dean  Keith  Simonton