 20. Creativity and Genius  433
basis of creativity and genius. There are two 
main difficulties.
First is the matter of identification. How 
does the researcher decide that a given 
child is creative? One common approach is 
to make this decision according to perfor -
mance on some “creativity test,” usually 
some measure of divergent thinking (Runco, 
1992). Yet this approach somewhat begs 
the question. Such assessment is only as 
good as the instruments are valid. Unfortu -
nately, the validity of various creativity tests 
can sometimes be on the low side (Plucker 
et al., 2019). An alternative approach is to 
identify creativity according to actual be -
havioral performance—  the generation of 
genuine creative products. This method 
is especially useful in the case of children 
who display precocious talent, such as child 
prodigies in a particular domain of creativ -
ity. Nonetheless, this line of attack does not 
completely remove the validity problem. It is 
extremely rare for children (and even adoles -
cents) to generate products that satisfy adult 
standards of creativity (Winner, 2014). The 
products may reveal a precocious acquisi -
tion of specialized skills, and a degree of vir -
tuosity in the execution of those skills, but 
without displaying the originality and adap -
tiveness necessary to be competitive with the 
output of mature creators. Given these prob -
lems of identification, it is not always safe 
to assume that the personality profile char -
acteristic of youthful creativity is the same 
as that for adulthood creativity (see, e.g., 
Parloff, Datta, Kleman, & Handlon, 1968). 
The selection procedures may not entail suf -
ficiently overlapping criteria.
Second is the matter of continuity. De -
velopment from childhood through adoles -
cence and even adulthood is fraught with a 
great variety of changes in cognitive makeup 
and personality structure. Besides progres -
sive developmental differentiation of various 
functions, specific personality traits may 
wax and wane, with particularly dramatic 
effects taking place during puberty (Albert, 
1996). Some of these transformations may 
be exogenous (environmental) and others 
endogenous (genetic), but in combination 
they signify the instability of a youth’s talent 
during the course of growth and maturation 
(Simonton, 1999). At various points during 
the course of development, creativity may undergo spurts and slumps, and may even 
vanish altogether (Runco & Charles, 1997). 
Even in adulthood, creativity may come and 
go, whether we assess it psychometrically 
(McCrae, Arenberg, & Costa, 1987) or 
historiometrically (Kozbelt, 2014; McKay 
& Kaufman, 2014). These developmental 
instabilities within individuals hold even 
though individual differences in creativity 
may be relatively stable over time.
It should be pointed out that these two 
difficulties are mitigated, if not entirely 
obliterated, when we revert to the psycho -
metric definition of genius; that is, if genius 
is defined as an exceptionally high IQ, then 
the problem of identification disappears 
by definitional fiat. Furthermore, such IQ 
scores are highly stable across childhood, 
adolescence, and adulthood (Simonton, 
1976; Terman & Oden, 1959). The main 
source in developmental instability would 
then probably be concentrated in the person -
ality profiles that characterize highly intel -
ligent persons. However, even if these latter 
profiles were highly stable across time, that 
stability would not contribute much to our 
understanding of the dispositional qualities 
of the exceptional creator. For both in youth 
and in maturity, the personality profiles of 
highly intelligent individuals differ mark -
edly from those of highly creative individu -
als (Albert, 1994; Getzels & Jackson, 1962; 
Wallach & Kogan, 1965). The psychometric 
genius and the historiometric genius are dif -
ferent people from a dispositional perspec -
tive (Simonton, 2016).
Cognitive versus  Dispositional  Attributes
Research on individual differences in cre -
ativity may be said to have roots in two 
distinct psychological traditions. The first 
harks back to the Gestalt psychologists, who 
were the pioneers in research on problem 
solving and insight. In this tradition, much 
research on creativity has focused more 
on the creative process than on the person 
(Simonton & Damian, 2013). Some investi -
gators have even gone so far as to suggest 
that creativity is a mental operation acces -
sible to all, and thus is largely unrelated to 
general individual-  difference dimensions 
(e.g., Weisberg, 1992). Creative geniuses are 
merely persons who have acquired the nec -