Abstract
Although this article’s author and Ellen Winner completed their graduate training at Harvard’s now extinct Department of Psychology and Social Relations in the 1970s, they pursued divergent paths that only intersected on a few critical occasions, especially two discomfiting events during scientific meetings (the first event for her and the second for the author). Yet these distressing events stimulated this author to produce new publications on two crucial issues: artistic talent and creative life cycles. He much later reciprocated by inviting her to contribute a chapter on child prodigies for his handbook on genius. Without ever having collaborated, a productive relationship still emerged, albeit almost entirely at a distance.
Ellen Winner and I are almost exact contemporaries. Not only did we earn our respective BAs just 1 year apart, but also our very first professional publications appeared in the exact same year, namely, 1975. Hence, whatever our respective birth years, by the latter criterion, we definitely claim identical career ages (Simonton, 1991a). Moreover, in the 1970s, our activities coincided in place as well as time: Both of us were students in Harvard’s ill-fated Department of Social Relations. Because the program started disintegrating in the early 1970s, we both ended up earning our doctorates in the now defunct Department of Psychology and Social Relations, a transitional arrangement after the sociologists and cultural anthropologists had gone their separate ways and the residual Social Relations faculty rejoined the Psychology faculty after a quarter century of estrangement. Yet she and I were in different programs and started our training in different years. While she was working in developmental psychology from 1975 to 1978, I was working in social psychology from 1970 to 1974. But even then there exists a chance connection: She did her dissertation on “The Comprehension and Production of Metaphoric Language” under Roger Brown (who was chair of Social Relations when I arrived). Despite the latter’s status as a distinguished developmental psycholinguist, he had written a textbook on social psychology that I read and admired while a college undergraduate. It was that book’s breadth and brilliance that moved me to enter Harvard’s graduate program on the same subject, even if I would work with an entirely different mentor (viz. David A. Kenny, from whom Winner would later take graduate statistics). My own dissertation would be titled “The Social Psychology of Creativity: An Archival Data Analysis.”
After earning our respective doctorates, our boats really sailed off in quite separate directions. While she docked near Boston Harbor, I ended up anchored almost a thousand leagues away near the Port of Sacramento. Furthermore, our research programs could not contrast more. Her research focused on living and breathing children, mine on adult geniuses who were almost always plain dead! Even more, she eventually concentrated on the visual arts, whereas my early fascination was creativity and aesthetics in classical music.
Nevertheless, various professional networks started to introduce some potential convergences in our oceanic voyages. These networks included two of her earliest collaborators, namely, David Perkins and Howard Gardner, overlapping contacts that led to my participation in the 1990 Mini-Conference on Creativity sponsored by Project Zero at Harvard’s School of Education. Although she had served as research assistant at Project Zero since her graduate student days and became research associate after getting her doctorate, any interactions between the two of us were unmemorable—even though by then she and Gardner were married.
Sometimes two ships passing in the night don’t even bother to turn on their searchlights!
Artistic Talent
That continent-wide separation dramatically changed 5 years later. We were each invited to present papers at an international conference on the “Acquisition of Expert Performance” held just up the Wakulla River from the Gulf of Mexico. The overwhelming majority of the participants belonged to the persuasion that expert performance was a pure matter of so-called deliberate practice within a well-defined domain of achievement (Ericsson, 1996).
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Talent per se did not exist. The antagonism to nature and the endorsement of nurture were absolute. I vividly remember an uncomfortable breakfast conversation with Nobel laureate Herbert Simon, the patriarch of this extremist position, who insisted that the empirical results of behavior genetics must be dismissed out of hand. The discoveries of hormones and neurotransmitters notwithstanding, he could see no way to link RNA-guided protein production with human cognition and behavior. In this hostile setting, Winner presented a paper on “The Rage to Master: The Decisive Case for Talent in the Visual Arts” in which she offered a strong argument for a biological basis for such talent. In particular, By talent, I refer to an innate ability or proclivity to learn in a particular domain. I argue that individual differences in innate ability exist, and that high levels of ability include a motivational component: a strong interest in a particular domain, along with a strong drive to master that domain. The same case for talent that I make here for the visual arts can also be made in many other domains. Specifically, I suggest, the case for talent can be made for any domain in which one finds childhood precocity or autistic … savants. (Winner, 1996, p. 271)
Unfortunately, my own paper concerned “Creative Expertise: A Life-span Developmental Perspective” and thus devoted much less time to discussing the possible genetic basis of talent.
Nonetheless, I did observe “there exists some evidence that the most gifted individuals may take less time to master the requisite skills and knowledge” (Simonton, 1996, p. 243). This statement was based on an earlier historiometric study I had conducted of 120 (deceased) classical composers (Simonton, 1991b). That investigation showed that the composers who attained the highest degree of posthumous acclaim, especially as manifested in their lifetime output of masterworks, not only tended to start expertise acquisition at noticeably younger ages but also were able to attain mastery of their domain in appreciably less time. They just got better sooner and faster. Even if that inquiry did not specifically examine either interest or motivation, it should be obvious that the results are certainly consistent with Winner’s (1996) main claims about talent. Strikingly, music happens to be among those domains where both child prodigies and savants are commonplace.
Even though we each embarked for our separate coasts east and west, Winner now remained a blip on my ship’s radar. An immediate consequence was that she accepted my 1995 invitation to join the editorial board of the Journal of Creative Behavior where I had been serving as editor since 1993. Much more critically, she inspired me to fathom the very nature of talent. Although I had devoted the first two decades of my career to building a sizable inventory of environmental influences, from the familial and educational to the political and cultural, the time had come to treat possible genetic factors. The outcome yielded three distinct contributions:
The formulation of a mathematical model that uniquely integrated emergenic inheritance with epigenetic growth, a model that articulates the genuine complexities of the phenomenon (Simonton, 1999): Some criticisms of the nature position were predicated on rather simplistic conceptions of how talent was supposed to work (cf. Kogan & Kangas, 2006). The development of meta-analytic techniques for estimating overall talent from already published predictive validity and heritability coefficients (Simonton, 2008): These techniques showed not only that the prima facie case for talent was quite strong but also that talent has a far more substantial impact on artistic creativity than it has on scientific creativity. The specification of a research agenda that could integrate both nature and nurture into a complex recursive model of expertise development and expert performance in creative domains (Simonton, 2014): Besides incorporating personality and motivational factors along with diverse ability factors, this model employs deliberate practice to explicitly define not just “better faster effects” but also “more bang for the buck effects” (e.g., given two persons with the same domain-specific expertise, the one who is more creative would have likely enjoyed a stronger genetic disposition toward openness to experience, where h2 = .57 according to McCrae & Greenberg, 2014).
When the above three efforts are combined with other established findings, I believe that Winner’s minority position at that 1995 conference has been immensely reinforced (see also Johnson & Bouchard, 2014). Innate talent exists—and not just in the visual arts. 2
Artists’ Life Cycles
It should be obvious by now that I am innately (and dogmatically) opposed to any kind of dogmatism. Although advocating narrow-minded positions may be an excellent route to obtaining lots of citations (Simonton, 2000), it is not a valid means to doing good science (Simonton, 2003). And it was another instance of extreme dogmatism that caused Winner’s and my sea journeys to intersect yet a second time. In 2006, I was invited to present a paper for the “New Ideas about New Ideas Conference” at the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts (moored less than a nautical mile from where Project Zero is berthed). Despite the offbeat disciplinary venue, I was already more than 30 years into my career, and thus felt confident when I delivered my talk on “Combinatorial Models of Creativity: The Chance Baseline.” After all, my morning presentation built upon work published in both Psychological Review and Psychological Bulletin, two rigorously peer-reviewed journals in my own discipline (Simonton, 1997, 2003). Yet my confidence was woefully misplaced. Later that day, David Galenson, an economist from the prestigious University of Chicago, began his own presentation with a vicious personal attack on my ideas! In my entire career, I never encountered an open intellectual assault so nasty. Normally such viciousness is reserved for internet trolls.
I soon learned that a somewhat more temperate version of this attack had just recently been published as part of a larger book on the subject of life cycles in artistic creativity (Galenson, 2005). This book argued for a distinction between old masters (experimental artists) and young geniuses (conceptual artists) that represented two divergent forms of creative thought (see also Galenson, 2001). For both theoretical and empirical reasons, I found his argument problematic. Fortunately, I also discovered that I was not the only researcher to question his grand theory (Ginsburgh & Weyers, 2005; see also Accominotti, 2009), nor was I the sole scholar who directly experienced this pugnacious personality—for one colleague it nearly escalated to fisticuffs!
I don’t remember the specific context, but somehow this subject arose in an e-mail exchange with Winner (2004), who sent me one of her publications that touched upon Galenson’s ideas. Among other important points, she criticized the arbitrary nature of his dichotomous classifications, such as designating Pablo Picasso a conceptual artist.
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As she indicated, we do have evidence inconsistent with his classification. Not only did Picasso make many preliminary sketches for ‘Guernica,’ painted when he was 56, but we know he made major changes in the painting after he began, because we have photographs of initial and interim states of the painting. (p. B11; see also Simonton, 2007b)
Her critique got me to think about how I might best respond scientifically (rather than pugnaciously) to the 2006 incident. My eventual solution was simple: I would analyze his own data using statistical methods more sophisticated than he was wont to do. My published secondary analysis showed that his theory was found wanting (Simonton, 2007a). More specifically, his hypothesized distinction could not fully account for the creative life cycles that he himself observed in great poets and novelists. Whatever subjective bias he may have introduced into his published observations, my own theoretical model was still needed for a complete explanation. I sent a copy to Winner, who chose Shakespeare’s military (rather than maritime) metaphor to proclaim that the Chicago economist had been “hoisted by his own petard.” 4
Conclusion
Despite many shared interests, Winner and I never collaborated on a project, and thus we largely remain two ships passing in the night, only rarely sending up a flair when so inclined. But that separation says more about me than about her, given that I am no admiral of a fleet but rather a lone-wolf buccaneer (a.k.a. 93% of my publications are single authored). Even so, we have directly contributed to our respective publication lists in other ways. On my part, when I edited the very first handbook devoted solely to genius, I invited Winner (2014) to write what became an excellent chapter on child prodigies. And on her part, she identified me as a potential contributor to this Festschrift in her honor—so here I am! You can spot me off the starboard side, waving hundreds of yards away, through your spyglass.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.