2017 Personality 19: Biology & Traits: Openness/Intelligence/Creativity II

[Music] today we're going to talk a little bit more about the fractionation of openness to experience and we've done a fair number of studies with the Big Five aspect scale which we talked about a lot which enables the Big Five model to be differentiated down into two aspects per trait and those aspects have been useful for a variety of reasons for example when we're looking at political behavior we've been able to determine that conservatives who are generally regarded as higher in conscientiousness are actually more specifically higher in orderliness it's not a lot of difference between

liberals and conservatives with regards to industriousness and we've also been able to determine at least to some degree that orderliness seems to be associated with disgust sensitivity and disgust sensitivity as part of the behavioural immune system and so part of the reasons that conservatives are more inclined to want things like close borders is because they're more concerned about maintaining the boundaries between things and the reason for that seems to be fundamentally associated with disgust and I'll talk to you a lot about that next week because once we've sorted that out it really really illuminated my

way of thinking about things that had happened for example in Nazi Germany because people tend to people tend to think about like when people have been studying conservatism from the scientific perspective they've tended to assume that it's associated with fear of the out-group say and the Conservatives are more fearful the Liberals but that actually doesn't seem to be conservatives are not hiring trait neuroticism and that's a really tough one because if you are going to make a case that a group one group is more anxious let's say or threat sensitive than another and you don't

get differences in treatment autism then you've really got a problem well yeah but the theories the theories seem to be more trade like rather than situation yeah so so but what we have found is that that you know for a long time people thought that all of the negative emotions loaded on neuroticism and it was like the global the global trade for negative emotion but disgust seems to be its own peculiar thing and but I will talk to you more about that next week and but that's just an example of why differentiation at the aspect

level seems useful you also pick up differences between men and women at the aspect level that aren't obvious at the trade level as well so you can think about the model says you know you have a model that operates at different levels of resolution and low resolution representations are good for one set of operations and higher resolution representations are good for other purposes and the purpose of course is to predict at least that's one of the primary scientific purposes and so you pick the level of analysis that gives you the most prediction and perhaps also

the most utility in terms of formulating scientific theories so and so we'll concentrate a little bit more today on openness per se so openness to experience fragments into intellect and openness proper and I think the right way to think about intellect is that it's the personality instantiation of IQ roughly speaking and the reason I think that is because well first of all working memory predicts intellect quite nicely and working memory tests are very very highly correlated with G and specifically G being the first factor that you pull out of any set of IQ tests right

that that's the technical definition of G you set up sets of questions do a factor analysis and extract out the first factor which is roughly equivalent by the way to the total or to that to the mean of the items if it's if there's a one factor solution it's not much different than the average so the average is actually a factor that's that that where the hypothesis is that every single item loads equally on that factor because you're adding them all up and then dividing them by the number so it's no different than a factor

analysis sometimes you'll hear people like Steve and Jay Google did this when he was complaining about IQ back in the 90s he said a factor and a factor analysis like a factor is just a mathematical abstraction it's like well yeah so is the average you think it's the average of a set of numbers real and answer that question is depends on how you define real you can use it for certain functions which is a pretty good definition of real as far as I'm concerned but when you ask questions like that you have to define both

your terms and you do that somewhat arbitrarily anyways people with high IQs tend to think that they're smart which is and that's right and so then they can to describe themselves as smart if you give them the opportunity to do that and then that shows up when you ask them questions about their problem-solving ability and that loads mostly on intellect and so it isn't even obvious that there's any real utility in assessing intellect from the self-report perspective when you could replace that with an IQ test because the IQ test is way more accurate so but

that gives you some sense you think about the whole five factor model you know where intelligence slots it slots in underneath opens now the openness proper part of openness to experience which which I tend to think about as creativity you can use that at least as a shorthand to sort of aid your understanding of what it is creativity seems related to IQ in that more people with higher IQs are likely to be creative or if you take people who are noted for their creativity there's a high probability that they'll have a higher IQ but there's

more to it than IQ and and what what creativity seems to be associated with then again depends on whether or not on how you define creativity because you could define it as the sum total of creative achievements that you've made in your life which would be the actual production of say artifacts of one form or another performances or inventions or artworks or or what-have-you we'll go over the dimensions in the middle in a minute or you could also define it as the proclivity to engage in creative thought and I think we'll start with that first

so what does it mean to think creatively it's it's sort of like it's something like this you imagine that I toss you out an idea and there's some probability that when I toss you that idea that that will trigger off other ideas in your imagination so you can think about it as a threshold issue if you're not very creative I'll throw you an idea and hardly any other ideas will be triggered and the ones that will be triggered are going to be very closely associated with that initial idea so let's say I toss each of

you an idea and I asked you to think tell me the first thing that comes to mind okay so what we would see first is that the first thing that comes to mind for you the first thing that comes to mind in like in all likelihood we'd be shared by many of you okay so then you can think about that as a common response right and so that's a less creative response and then there'll be some things that come to mind for you that are that they're so idiosyncratic that you're the only person that thinks

that and no one can understand it well that's also not exactly creative because the thing that you for something to be creative it has to be novel and useful at the same time that's sort of rough definition creative something creative is novel and useful and obviously you know there's a there's a certain amount of judgment that goes along with that clearly but if it's too novel then no one else can understand it and it's unlikely to be useful so there's there's a there's a range of convenience so anyways if you want to decide if something's

creative like what we would do for I could say to you okay in the next three minutes I want you to write down all the uses you can think of for a brick so okay so someone tell me your use for a brick breaking windows yes okay what else can use a brick for build a wall it's very small wall haha a wall for ant and what else paperweight okay okay well so you get the idea you're not feeling very multi today obviously but so so you see that so if we gathered your responses say

I said you have to think of 20 items that 20 things that that you could do with a brick then a bunch of the things that you thought would be the same and some people would come up with something different like yours was reasonably different than one about using it as a publish stone for your feet but someone else might come up with that but it's it's a good creative response because it's unexpected and it you could actually do it you know so anyway so you'll get a graph of probability of response right and the

more probable the less creative roughly speaking it's not the only criteria though because you also have to look at utility so if I said okay you've got three minutes to write down as many uses as you can think of for a brick I would score that in a variety of ways the first thing I would do is just figure out how many uses you generated that's called fluency and we could also do that I could just say write down as many words as you can begin with the letter s in three minutes or that begin

with the letter C or four-letter words that begin with the letter D no I can I can constrain it and if I counted how many words you generated if I had an IQ measure and I had a measure of how many words you generated IQ plus the number of words that you generated would be a better predictor of your creativity than just IQ so there's this fluency element that's and so that's something like the rate at which you can produce say verbal ideas and one of the things we do know about about the creativity dimension

of openness is that it is associated with fluency and it's also associated with originality and originality would be how improbable your use was compared to the uses generated by other people so so anyway so you can think of you get thrown an idea and there's some probability that that will Co activate other ideas and if it Co activates many other ideas that's like fluency and if it co activates ideas that are quite distant from the original idea something like that and you could you could track distance by comparing it to to probability that other people

have generated it then that's also another indication of creativity so they have to be unlikely many unlikely responses that are useful that's what creativity is roughly speaking and then you can tracks innate it in two different dimensions so that's creative thinking but then creative achievement would be the ability to take those original ideas and then actually to implement them in the world and that's obviously much more different than merely being creative and so and then what creativity is depends on which of those measurement routes that you take now I developed a questionnaire it's one of

my students Shelley Carson about Jesus just about 30 years ago now 20 years ago I guess called the creative achievement questionnaire and I'll show you that here and I'll show you some of the things that are interesting about it you know you hear very frequently people say things like everyone's creative it's like that's wrong okay it's wrong it's just as wrong as saying that everyone's extroverted first of all you have to be pretty damn smart to be creative because otherwise you're just going to get to where other people have already got and that's not creative

by definition so so being fast and being out there at the front of things really makes a difference and then you also have to have these divergent thinking capabilities and that's part of your trait structure and creative people are really different than non creative people you know partly because for example they're highly motivated to do creative things and to experience novelty in two and two and to chase down aesthetic experiences in to attend movies and to read fiction and to go to museums and to enjoy poetry and and and to enjoy music that's not conventional

music for example these aren't trivial differences and so and so it's a real it's a real myth statement to make the proposition that everyone's creative it's just simply not the case it's a matter of wishful thinking it's like saying that everyone is intelligent it's like well if everyone is intelligent and then the term loses all of its meaning because any term that you can apply to every member of a category has absolutely no meaning now that doesn't and you know the other thing you want to be thinking about here is that don't be thinking that

creativity is such a good thing it's a high-risk high-return strategy so if you're creative you just try this there's creative people in this room man you guys are going to have a hell of a time monetizing your creativity it's virtually impossible it's really really difficult because first of all let's say you make an original product you think the world will beat a pathway to your door if you build a better mousetrap it's like that's complete rubbish it isn't it isn't true in the least if you make a good creative product you've probably solved about 5%

of your problem because then you have marketing which is insanely difficult and then you have sales and then you have customer support and then you have to build an organization and you have to if it's really novel you have to tell people what the hell the thing is you know we built this future authoring program right and so it's available for people online how do you market that no one knows what that is and that's a real problem if you wrote a book well then you have the problem that another million people have also written

a book but if you produce something that's completely new and doesn't have a category people can't search for it online how are they going to find it so you just have and then you have pricing problems and it's really unbelievably difficult to produce something creative and then monetize it and even worse if you're the creative let's say you have a spectacular invention you've got no money right you've got no customers those are big problems and so maybe you go and you find a venture capitalist we start with family and friends because that's how it works

you raise money for your product you raise money from your family and friends that's assuming you have family and friends that have some money and that they're going to give it to you and most people aren't in that situation so it's a terrible barrier right off the bat and then of course you're putting your family and friends it's substantial financial risk because the probability that your stupid idea is going to make money is virtually zero even if it's a really brilliant idea and so then let's say well you get past family and friends and you

get venture capitalist capitalists involved because that's often the next step or an angel investor that's there's their steps in building a business family and friends angel investor that's some rich guy that you happen to meet some manner in some way who's who's into this sort of thing and is willing to provide you with some money to get your product off the ground well how much of your product is that person going to take well most of it most of it and then if you get a venture and no wonder because you know you don't have

any money how are you going to bargain for control over your product he'll just say well do you want the money or not and if your answer is no then he'll go and do something else with his money it's not like there's no shortage of things that you can do with your money because there's a million things you can do with it so you're not in a great bargaining position and then if you get venture capitalists involved they'll take another big chunk and maybe if they're not very straight with you they'll just throw you out

because maybe by that point in the company's development you're nothing but a pain in the neck because what do you know about marketing and sales and customer service and building an organization and running a business like you don't have a clue so why do they need you so even if you're successful at generating a new idea and you put it into a business the probability that you as the originator of the of the idea are going to make some money from it is very very low so don't be thinking that creativity is such a is

such a something you would want to curse yourself with now you know it's not all bad because it opens up avenues of experience for creative people that aren't available to people who aren't creative but it definitely is a high-risk high-return strategy you know so the overwhelming probability is that you will fail but a small proportion of creative people succeed spectacularly and so it's like a lottery in some sense you're probably going to lose but if you don't lose you could win big and that keeps a lot of creative people going but also they don't really

have much choice in it because if you're a creative person you're like a fruit tree that's that's bearing fruit so you don't really have you can suppress it but it's very bad for you you know the creative people I've worked with is if they're not creative they're miserable so they have to do it but and and you know there's real joy and pleasure in it and and the end and and and psychological utility but that doesn't necessarily mean that it's an intelligent it's certainly not a conservative strategy for moving forward through life so and you

know whenever I talk to people who are creative and you guys should listen to this because I know what I'm talking about if you happen to be creative if you're a songwriter or another kind of musician or an artist or or any of the other number of things that you might be find a way to make money and then practice your craft on the side because you will starve to death otherwise now some for some of you that won't be true but it's a tiny minority your best bet is to find a job that will

keep body and soul together and parse off some time that you can pursue your creative things because then well as a long-term strategy you medium to long term strategy it's a better one but it's got incredibly difficult for people musicians for example it's incredibly difficult for new musicians to monetize their their craft even if they're really really good at it so it's it's well so anyway so don't be so I say well everyone's not everyone's not creative and everybody goes oh that's terrible it's like it's not so terrible it's not something it's not self-evident that

you would curse someone with high levels of creativity so alright so here's how our creative achievement questionnaire works what we did essentially was we thought up how many domains there are in which you might be creative and this is remember when you're designing a questionnaire you want to be over-inclusive because the statistics will take care of it right so you can you can take a big area of potential you can take a large area and aim your questionnaire at it and you can do statistics post talk to see you're covering the area if if the

things that you're measuring are nicely correlated they're this you know there's something about them that's similar if they're not correlated then maybe you're measuring two different things and you can get rid of one of them that's fine so we did start with a pretty wide range we thought okay well what domains can you be creative in visual arts painting and sculpture then we had experts sort of rank order levels of achievement within those domains and so if you are a painter you can 0 gives you I have no training or recognised talent in this area

okay so you really want to keep an eye on the zeros alright so then I have taken lessons people have commented on my talents I have won a prize my work is being critiqued in national publications all right so you get you get you get zero to seven points but you can indicate more than no maybe that's happened to you more than once so and what happens this is interesting is that higher you are up in this hierarchy the more likely it is that those things have happened to you more than once and that's that's

another example of this weird thing called the Pareto principle or Prices law which is that it's sort of good things happen to you the probability that more good things will happen increases right so because once you're famous people give you all sorts of opportunities to do other things right so your your your success doesn't go like this goes like this zero zero zero skyrocket that's how it works but getting from zero getting from zero to one if you're starting a business the hardest customer you'll ever get is your first one and then the second hardest

one will be your second one it's virtually impossible to get a first customer because they're going to say to you first of all you're going to be selling to people who are basically conservative and there aren't going to be evaluate they're not going to be willing or able to evaluate whether your damn product is good for anything and so they'll say well who are your other customers and if your answer to that is well we don't have any it's like well then what they're going to be the first one no because people don't stick their

necks out at all not a bit ever and so unless you're well established in the market especially if you're dealing with a big company you can just bloody well forget it it's like a three year sales cycle anyways it's RIT because big corporations move very very slowly and you might be able to find a small company that doesn't have much money who would be willing to use your stoop product for nothing if you're really nice to them and you get one customer that way it's very very difficult and so you'll you'll end up you know

and what do you think the royalty just out of curiosity so I've written a book it's going to be published by penguin Random House and in January what do you think the royalty is for an author on a book so you make something creative you get a percentage of the sale what do you think the percentage is just out of curiosity guess yeah it's like 5% so think about that so that means that you make your thing and 95% of it belongs to someone else and that's that things are going quite well for you and

it doesn't really matter what you manufacture or produce that's about what you can expect sales marketing distribution it eats it all up so us all well anyways you need to know these things because they're not self-evident okay so seems to be working all by itself all right so let's take a look well how else can you have creative achievement well you can be a musician I have no training or recognize Talent recordings of my composition have been sold publicly that's the top end my composition has been copyrighted recorded critiqued in local population publication I have

composed an original piece of music well let's try this how many of you have composed an original piece of music wow there's lots of creative people in here that's very impressive so there must be 10 or 11 people in here oh that's cool so how about your coffees composition has been copyrighted how about it's been the recordings have been sold publicly and actually sold how many people - two okay well so what you can see is there's a rapid drop-off in the number of people who say yes how many of you fit into category zero

I have no training a recognised talent in this area yeah okay okay zero is the median score on all of these median is the score that's the most likely for people to have or it's different than the mean median score is zero so what's the median score and the entire creative achievement questionnaire zero you you add up all over all thirteen domains the most difficult score is zero so that's how creative people are there's zero creative at all yes everybody has a certain degree not really creative well the thing is you could say that people

have people all people are creative and that all people can generate ideas but the issue isn't whether or not you can generate ideas it's whether or not you can generate ideas that are different from the ideas that other people generate that's the critical issue because it mean it depends on how you define it you could you well the novelty is a huge part of it but that's that's sort of built into the definition of creative it has to be novel and useful and if your idea that you generate is the same as the idea that

a bunch of other people have it's not it's an idea fair enough and if you define creativity that way then everyone's creative but it's a foolish way of defining creativity because everyone does it and and we know that there has to be something novel about creativity useful idea today the Integra's all seem to be artistic and well as requiring specific non-creative skills for example music and require yeah are there ways to be creative outside there well let's go through the rest of the domains because we did include domains that aren't that aren't artistic and yes

there are engineering is a good example of that or writing nonfiction that those things tend to tilt more in the intellect direction but I'm concentrating most particularly here on sort of creativity that would be associated with openness so yeah okay so dance well it's roughly the same as music so we won't we won't move forward into that architectural design my architectural design my architectural design has been recognized in the national publication Creative Writing my work has been reviewed in national publications million books sold last year 250 of them sold more than 100,000 copies right so

that's another that's another example of high risk high returns so probably you won't write a book if you write a book probably no one will publish it if you publish it almost certainly no one will buy it so you see you see what I mean there's exclusion the exclusion criteria there are so there's so thoroughly they're so difficult because it's very difficult to write a book even a bad one you have to work a long time to write a bad book and then your book has to be pretty damn good before you're going to get

it published and and you also have to know about know how to go about getting it published that's also you don't send a book to a publisher by the way they don't want your stupid book they want a summary of the book they want an outline of the book they want three chapters of the book they want to know who the hell you are and why anyone should listen to you they want to know what other books your book is like and most importantly perhaps they want to know where it would sit in a bookshelf

in a bookstore and the reason for that is that and I have trouble this is trouble with the books that I write is no one was where to put them that's a big problem because then the marketing people don't know how to market them and maybe that's because they're more creative than usual it doesn't matter if there isn't a place that you can put the book where people can find it then you're not going to publish it and even if you do you can't sell it because no one can find it so you just think

about the difficulties and being a successful author you're not going to write a book it's too hard there's no damn way you're going to get it published and if you do it probably won't be a very good publisher then they have to do a really good job of selling it and marketing it then you have to enter the market at the right time right and then you have to be reviewed by the right people and then it has to be put in the right places it's like most what happens is your book will go out

for a week no one will buy it and it'll disappear and that's if you've done 99.99% of things right so okay creative writing our humor my humor has been recognized in a national publication that's at the top and I've written a joke or cartoon that has been published I've written jokes for other people I've worked as a professional comedian inventions I regularly find novel uses for household objects I've built a prototype of one of my designed inventions I've sold one of my inventions to people I know has anyone in here built a prototype of a

designed invention no one okay has anyone in here created original software for a computer one to three people yes three people how about I've sketched out an invention and worked on design flaws how many people so maybe two or three yeah I mean if this was an engineering class and all likelihood there would be more people in not telling but that this is more in the domain it's not the exactly the artsy end of the creativity distribution it's more on the ideas and and mechanical end of it and and and that's a reasonable way of

thinking about it I would say so um scientific discovery I do not have training or recognizability in this field I received a scholarship based on my work in science or medicine how many people have received a scholarship based in their work on science and medicine okay nobody so we don't have anybody that goes up that high I've won a prize at a science fair or other local competition anybody there yes there's maybe two or three four people there so that means we've got four people in the class of about 150 who hit the third the

second level of scientific discovery anybody received a grant to pursue their work in science and medicine its highly unlikely you guys are mostly too young to have had that happen to you okay so theater and film anybody who's at how many people have performed in theater or film oh yeah your Narsee bunchy so my acting abilities have been recognized in local publication how many people for that one that's it anybody higher than that I have directed or produced a theater or film production one two I've been paid there's a good one I have been paid

to pit one two two okay my theatrical work has been paid to direct the theater film production ha got you there so you've done that Hey congratulations you're way the hell up on the list right right right right hard to monetize how many films did you make you made poor did you make any money oh you did well congratulations yeah yeah yeah well that's about yeah yeah calab recruiter and then also piracy got really bad right yeah well that's one of the big problems with anything that can be distributed digitally it's like yeah yeah yeah

I rat right timing is everything and that's it's actually well that's that's another one of the terrible cut offs is that not only do you have to be right and have yourself together and produce the proper thing but the market has to open it's exactly that moment so that you can walk through there has to be a demand so people won't buy anything that they don't have a crying need for because they have priority say it's imagine everybody has ten priorities and ten number ten is important but no one ever does it and number eight

is important that no one ever does it and so you have to go talk to someone to buy what you have and that has to be priority one or two for them because they'll say oh that's good we really need it but it's priority eight it's like forget it they'll never buy your thing because they never get to priority eight on their list of ten priorities they only get down to like priority four so and then the other thing that will happen too is if you go up try to sell your product you won't know

who to talk to and you'll end up spending ninety five percent of your time this is especially true in companies with the people who will talk to you right obviously but those aren't the people who ever make any decisions so they'll tell you all sorts of good things about your product and how interested they are but they'll never buy it because they can't make make decisions and you won't be able to get to the people who make decisions because other people who know how to do that have already got there and that's not you so

that's very difficult as well culinary arts my recipes have been published nationally anyone how about I often experiment with rest misses purposeful experimentation right not accidental experimentation yes sorry alright my recipes would be published in the local cookbook anyone know okay okay well you get the you get the point right you see you see how this works it's just well here are ways you can be creative and here are strata of accomplishment within those ways and so then the question is what does it look like yes yes yes yes fair enough and and this probably

needs to be updated to reflect that so so there's there's the distribution of scores now that's dismal that's a dismal thing to look at you have to understand that why look at this zero right the median person has not done anything creative ever in their life with anything on any dimension right it's really important to know that and then you have these horrible people out here right they do everything they do everything price is law here's prices law this is something to hammer into your heart the square root of the number of people in a

domain do 50% of the work okay so let's go through that you have ten employees three of them do half the work makes sense that's reasonable you have a hundred employees ten of them do half the work that's problem so the other 90% are doing the other half who cares about them you have 10,000 employees 100 of them do have to work right so here's that here's a nasty little law as your company grows incompetence grows in it exponentially and confidence grows linearly got it right because it with ten it's three who are doing half

the work but at 10,000 it's 100 that are doing half the work so nine thousand nine hundred of your employees are doing as much as the best 100 you might not even know who the best 100 are but probably they know and maybe their peers know too and so one of the things that's really interesting when big companies start to shake which means maybe they've had a bad quarter too bad quarters and the stock price starts to tip down and the people the hot people who have options are not very happy about that and maybe

they start to announce layoffs all the hundred people who have opportunities leave and they're the ones who were doing half the work so boy that puts your company in a pretty rough situation because now you've got the ninety nine hundred people left over who we're only doing half the work and the next time you announced layoffs the next most productive hundred leave and so then you're left with nobody who's productive at a massive overhead payroll prices law you can look that up to Sol a price to Sol a price is a guy who is looking

at scientific productivity and one of the things he found was when he was looking at PhD students is that the median number of publications for a PhD graduate when he did his work which was in the early 60s was one okay half as many had - half as many as that had three half as many as that had four - real stepped out and one of the corollaries of that is that there's a number of people who are hyper productive and that's these people out here and if you were graphing the distribution let's say you

graphed how many people in that population of 300 had $10,000 in a savings account it would look very much like this some of them would have are some of some of them would most people would have like no savings whatsoever the median person would have no savings whatsoever and then you go up here where the 1% is they have all the money but the thing you want to understand about that 1% issue that you always hear about is that it applies in every single realm where there's difference in creative production every realm doesn't matter number

of Records produce number of records sold number of compositions written so here's here's an example 5 composers produce the music that occupies 50% of the classical repertoire by Bach Beethoven Brahms Tchaikovsky who's Mozart that's right those 5 ok so here's something cool so you take all the music those people wrote 5 percent of the music all those people wrote occupies 50 percent of the music that of their writing that's played so not only do almost all the composers never get a listen but even among the composers and you get a list and almost none of

their music ever gets played so so then that's that's another example of this price is law of scaling so and it applies to all sorts of things like number of hockey goals scored is also distributed this way number of basketball basketball basketball successfully put through the hoop follows the same distribution size of cities follows the same distribution it's a weird it's a weird law and you you can think about it in part why does this happen law imagine what happens when you play Monopoly what happens everybody has the same amount of money to begin with

right so then you start playing it's basically a random game well some people start to win a bit some people start to lose a bit and then if you win the probability that you'll keep winning starts to increase and if you lose your vulnerability increases as you lose and then maybe you've got to say six people play Monopoly soon one person has zero what happens when they have zero they're out of the game so zero is a weird number because when you hit zero you're out of the game so so then if you keep playing

people start to stack up at zero right what happens at the end of the game one person has all the property and all the money and everyone else has none right that's what happens if you play an iterated trading game to its final conclusion and that's part of the the law in a sense that's underlying this kind of distribution so it's it's really it's it's it's not a consequence necessarily of structural inequality it's built into the system at a deeper level than that so you know people talk about all the time about how unfair it

is that 1% of the population has the vast amount of the money and 1% of the 1% has most of that money and 1% of the 1% of the 1% has most of that money but it is a it's a it's an inevitable conclusion of iterated trading games and we don't know how to fight it we don't know how to take from the people who have and move it to the bottom without instantly moving back up to the top different people maybe but still back up to the top because even the 1% turns a lot

like I think you have a 10% chance if I remember correctly you have a 10% chance of being in the top 1% for at least one year of your life and a 40% chance of being in the top 10% for at least one year in your life that's in Canada in the u.s. it's less so in Europe so there's a fair bit of churning at the top end it's not the same people all the time you have the money but it is a tiny fraction of the people all the time who have all the money

yeah people inside redistribute to recreate no not usually I mean they do but it's attenuated because the people mean if you reach up the entire company and put everywhere somewhere else there's some probability that some of those people would rise to the top that weren't at the top before but in that company that that isn't generally what happens people get stuck in their niche and they don't move so yeah this is you kill you wonder sometimes well how can companies die so quickly well they go they go into a death spiral it's almost impossible for

them to get out of so and it happened happen extraordinarily quickly this is why you know the typical fortune 500 company only last 30 years that's it it's not that easy for these Bale moths to continue existance across time so and it's because it's really easy for something to die it's very unlikely that it will be built it's very unlikely that it will be successful and once successful it's very unlikely that it will continue to duplicate its success because the underlying landscape shifts on it and it doesn't know where to go and that's also partly

because it's not that easy to integrate creative people into your company right you certainly don't want them at the bottom because they're supposed to be people who are doing what they're told to do so you filter out a lot of them at the bottom and then you need them at the top but they've already been filtered out and also creative people are troublesome to work with because they're always how do you evaluate a creative person you all you almost can't by definition because they keep coming up with new things and you don't have a good

evaluative strategy for a new thing it wouldn't be new if you had a good evaluative strategy for it right it would have to be the member of a class that you've already encountered substantially so anyway so the take-home lesson from this is zero right right and then that's like that's like a graph of money monetary distribution as well and the thing the problem with being at zero is it's very difficult to get out of zero this is also why people get stuck in poverty you know you can't get a bank account if you're if you

don't have any money right if there's a bunch of things that start to move against you when you're at zero that you can't shake it's very difficult to get out of the to get out of the that the pit here because zero is a kind of pit okay so now we've got the creative achievement questionnaire and we're going to take your score and your score is summed across all the categories and and and all the exemplars of the categories that you've chosen so then the question is well can you predict creative achievement and and this

is this is this is how we did it with this was construct delegation the first thing we wanted to know was was the creative achievement questionnaire actually associated with something that you might regard as creativity okay so we got a number of students to come in and we gave them a collage kit and so then everybody got exactly the same tip and then we had to make a collage out of the collage kit then we have five artists rate the collage for quality and then we averaged across the ratings now the first thing you would

do if you did that is because you would might think well can artists actually come up with a a measure of how creative a collage is and the answer to that is actually technical if all say you guys are the panel if all of you identify the same collages as of high quality and the same ones as of low quality then we can assume that there's something about your judgement that's like independent of your idiosyncrasies we could say well there is a judgment that emerges as a consensus across artists and the first thing we found

was that there was there is quite a high correlation between each artists judgment of the quality of the collages I can't remember what the inter-rater reliability was but it was something like 0.8 it was really high so it was clear that trained artists could make reliable judgments about the quality of collages because you had to check that out first because if they're all over the place you got no measure right it's like everyone's using a different rulers got no measure so they have to be using the same ruler well we found that the correlation between

the creative evaluation of collages and the total taq was 0.59 which is mind-boggling I told you last time that under 5% of published social studies social science studies have a are demonstrate a correlation coefficient of an effect size greater than 0.5 this is 0.6 and if you if you square it point 5 squared is 25 percent of the variance point 6 squared is 36 percent of the variance point 6 is a lot more than 0.5 and point 5 is unheard of and so the fact that you could estimate someone's lifetime creative achievement by having them

do a collage that for artists rape was an indication that there really is something real at the bottom of it right that's like the definition of real the creative personality scale you use circle adjectives that are associated with creativity from a very large list of adjectives that work pretty well Goldberg's adjective markers that's another Big Five variant that was correlated at about 0.5 1 it doesn't measure to experience it just measures intellect but be that as it may it's still an personality marker of trade openness it was correlated at 0.5 won the Neel PIR openness

was correlated at 0.33 and then we use the divergent thinking tests and I told you about those already's how many uses can you think of for a brick for example and so those are scored according to fluency how many answers you provide and then also originality how many unique useful answers do you provide and that was nicely correlated as well overall correlation of 0.47 and then fluency 0.38 originality 0.46 and flexibility point 3 7 so so what does that mean well the creative achievement questionnaire indexes lifetime creative achievement in a way that's powerfully associated with

actual creative production of a single item plus creative creativity as it's indexed by personality markers on the C IQ is also potently predicted by IQ which is exactly what you'd expect so you can do an extraordinarily good job of determining how likely someone is to have high levels of creative achievement across their lifespan by using psychometric tests so it means that creativity is a real thing that's the first thing both in terms of thinking creatively that would be the divergent thinking tests and also in terms of creative production and and that creative production and creative

thinking are quite tightly aligned so that was good that's been a very influential paper I think it's got about 500 citations now people use the creative achievement questionnaire a lot to assess creativity it's also associated with a higher than average likelihood of psychosis and the other thing you see with creative people is that they tend especially if they're writers they tend the pathology that goes along with that is often manic depressive disorder and that's partly because manic people become unbelievably fluid I think they speak incredibly quickly they generate ideas like mad and it's a hyper

arousal of the positive emotion system roughly speaking and that can have as a side effect creativity so this is a cool study I just found this one today it's a terror management study so what I'll read it to you the relationship between creativity and symbolic mortality had been long acknowledged by scholars in the review of the literature we found 12 papers that empirically examined the relationship between creativity and mortality awareness using a terror management theory paradigm overall supporting the notion that creativity plays an important role in the management of existential concerns also a mini meta-analysis

of the impact of death awareness on creativity resulted in a small medium weighted mean effect we examine the existential buffering functions of creative achievement as assessed by the creative achievement questionnaire in a sample of 108 students at high but not low levels of creative goals creative achievement was associated with lower death thought accessibility under mortality salience well that means if you remind people that they're going to die the creative people were less likely to generate death related thoughts as a consequence to our knowledge this is the first empirical report of the anxiety buffering functions of

a creative achievement among people for whom creativity constitutes a central part of the cultural worldview it's like a empirical examination of some of the existential theories that I was presenting to you previously because part of the idea that was put forth to say by people like Nietzsche was that one of the ways to fight back against existential anxiety and death anxiety and all of that is to engage in creative production and so that was actually put to the empirical test in this study so I thought that was quite cool so there's another paper this was

by Kaufmann and a couple of my students Jacob Hirsch and Colin Dion I'm on that paper as well near the end there they were interested in whether openness and intellect predicted different elements of creative achievements or goes back to your question about the differentiation between the artsy end of creativity and maybe the more practical idiot and the practical end associated for example with the proclivity to like nonfiction the Big Five personality dimension openness / intellect is the trait most closely associated with creativity and creative achievement little is known however regarding the discriminant validity of its

two aspects discriminant validity is whether one aspect predicts one set of things and the other aspect predicts a different set of things if there's no discriminant validity if they can't be used for different purposes then there's no point having them so you want to see that they're actually capable of differentiating between between real world phenomena two of its aspects openness to experience reflecting cognitive engagement with perception fantasy aesthetics and emotions and intellect reflecting cognitive engagement with abstract and semantic information primarily through reasoning in relation to creativity in four demographically diverse samples totaling over a thousand

participants we investigated the independent predictive validity of openness and intellect by assessing the relations among cognitive ability divergent thinking personality and creative achievement across the Arts and Sciences we confirm that hypothesis that openness predicts creative achievement in the arts and intellect predicts creative achievement in the sciences inclusion of performance measures of general cognitive ability that's IQ and divergent thinking indicated that the relationship of intellect to scientific creativity may be due at least in part to these abilities lastly we found that extraversion additionally predicted creative achievement in the arts independently of openness so what that means

is that creative achievement in the arts is actually a function of higher-order trait plasticity right because plasticity was openness plus extraversion and that's associated fundamentally with activation of the underlying dopaminergic system which is the system that mediates exploratory behavior so if you're dominated by that the function of that system you're an exploratory gregarious person then you're more likely to manifest creative ability in the arts so apparently it's time stop yeah I think that's the same student who always does that alright we'll see you on Tuesday [Applause]