Creativity, Innovation, and Change Across Cultures (Palgrave Studies in Creativity and Culture) 3031282051, 9783031282058

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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN CREATIVITY AND CULTURE

Creativity, Innovation, and Change Across Cultures Edited by David D. Preiss Marcos Singer James C. Kaufman

Palgrave Studies in Creativity and Culture

Series Editors Vlad Petre Glaveanu Department of Psychology and Counselling Dublin City University Dublin, Ireland Brady Wagoner Communication and Psychology Aalborg University Aalborg, Denmark

Both creativity and culture are areas that have experienced a rapid growth in interest in recent years. Moreover, there is a growing interest today in understanding creativity as a socio-cultural phenomenon and culture as a transformative, dynamic process. Creativity has traditionally been considered an exceptional quality that only a few people (truly) possess, a cognitive or personality trait ‘residing’ inside the mind of the creative individual. Conversely, culture has often been seen as ‘outside’ the person and described as a set of ‘things’ such as norms, beliefs, values, objects, and so on. The current literature shows a trend towards a different understanding, which recognises the psycho-socio-cultural nature of creative expression and the creative quality of appropriating and participating in culture. Our new, interdisciplinary series Palgrave Studies in Creativity and Culture intends to advance our knowledge of both creativity and cultural studies from the forefront of theory and research within the emerging cultural psychology of creativity, and the intersection between psychology, anthropology, sociology, education, business, and cultural studies. Palgrave Studies in Creativity and Culture is accepting proposals for monographs, Palgrave Pivots and edited collections that bring together creativity and culture. The series has a broader focus than simply the cultural approach to creativity, and is unified by a basic set of premises about creativity and cultural phenomena.

David D. Preiss  •  Marcos Singer James C. Kaufman Editors

Creativity, Innovation, and Change Across Cultures

Editors David D. Preiss Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile Santiago, Chile

Marcos Singer Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile Santiago, Chile

James C. Kaufman Neag School of Education University of Connecticut Storrs, CT, USA

ISSN 2755-4503     ISSN 2755-4511 (electronic) Palgrave Studies in Creativity and Culture ISBN 978-3-031-28205-8        ISBN 978-3-031-28206-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28206-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Abstract Aerial Art / Getty Images This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For Daniela Bolivar, with love —David For my family —Marcos For Christa L. Taylor, from student to close collaborator and dear friend —James

Preface

Human action has impacted the natural environment to a degree that could not have been envisioned 100 years ago. Among the most concerning consequences of human actions are a changing climate, the destruction of ecosystems, and the extinction of many animal and vegetal species that we once took for granted. These are just some of many crises that face the generations to come. We are still mired in an ongoing global pandemic amidst sporadic threats that it might suddenly worsen again (or have a new virus take hold). There remain socioeconomic inequality and outgroup hatred (ranging from issues of ethnicity to gender to culture to sexual orientation) to the point of nuclear war no longer seeming like a long-dormant threat. With new technological and digital advances come new challenges, such as figuring out how to maximize the benefits of such innovations while holding onto our humanity. One of the few common threads among these disparate challenges is that they will need individual, group, and societal creativity and innovation to effect change. There are also many positive outcomes from creativity and innovation. These range from the personal benefits of individual creativity to larger-scope possibilities. For example, innovation in products, services, processes, and business models has been at the heart of economic development. One of the founders of modern economic thought, Joseph Schumpeter, conceptualized innovation and entrepreneurship as the engine of history. The driving force behind creativity and vii

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innovation is change. We typically think of this concept as moving toward positive change. It can also refer to mobilizing to avoid negative change. We can create and innovate to change our environment, our work, and ourselves. The final piece of this puzzle is the interlocking relationships between creativity, innovation, change, and culture. There is a vast literature on creativity and culture. Many of the most influential theories and models emphasize the impact of culture in the development of creativity and how creativity impacts on and mobilizes cultural change across several domains. Similarly, research on innovation has remarked how the cultural context can foster or limit the development of invention and entrepreneurship. Culture is a term that can have many meanings. In this volume, “culture” refers to sociocultural differences, educational culture, media culture, organizational culture, technological culture, ethnic differences within a culture, and digital culture, among many others. The chapters ahead offer insights on how creativity, innovation, and change can propel us forward and offer hope for the future across these many different forms of culture. Part One of the book is devoted to educational and developmental explorations of creativity, innovation, and change. It includes three chapters. The first chapter, by Grigorenko, takes an evolutionary perspective on the innovativeness of Homo sapiens. It concatenates diverse lines of evidence from three types of innovation that generate new skills: spoken language, written language, and the language of digital communication. These three types of language skills are compared with a focus on the origin and timeline of their emergence; their acquisition, functional properties, and utility for Homo sapiens; and their biological bases. The second chapter by Plucker, Meyer, and Makel takes a sociocultural approach to discuss some developmental factors which are important in the assessment of creative potential and ability: attitudes toward creativity, the specificity of creative processes, levels of creative expression, and the need for creative articulation. The authors present a developmental framework for designing creativity assessment systems that can inform planning and development. The third chapter in this part, by Tymms and Bolden, proposes that the most effective educational innovations happen within classrooms, but as researchers aggregate up to the school, district,

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or country level, the innovations have barely detectable effects on students’ progress. The authors propose that researchers have made major methodological advances but have failed to fully understand the educational system well enough to predict the impact of interventions. They specify what policymakers and researchers need to do to enhance education. Part Two of the book is devoted to creativity, innovation, and change in organizations and work. The first chapter, by Maliakkal and Reiter-­ Palmon, introduces an overview of organizational culture, discusses the mechanisms by which organizational culture theoretically impacts creativity, and highlights dimensions of organizational culture that have been empirically found to facilitate and hinder creativity. The authors pay particular attention to culture dimensions encompassed in (1) the five determinants of organizational culture, (2) the Competing Values Framework, and (3) Hofstede’s cultural dimensions. Next, Singer presents three strategic considerations through well-known company cases: (1) the importance of not overloading oneself with innovation, as illustrated by the LEGO case; (2) the convenience of delegating creativity to the competitor, as in the case of the Cola Wars, so that the competitor assumes its risks; and (3) the usefulness of accepting the mistakes of the creation process in a timely manner to abort problematic projects, as in the case of Google. The final chapter of this part, by Cropley and Singh, discusses how in the era of digital transformation, soft skills and creativity are more important than technology per se in engineering innovation. The authors review how change has been the driver of innovation in engineering and how this has propelled the work of engineers to problem solving. The authors propose that there is now a growing acknowledgment that engineers must be set with a capability focus (CF) compelled by creativity and other soft skills, joined by conventional technology fluency (TF). The third part of the book contains sociocultural explorations of the main topics of the book. The first chapter of this part, by Kapoor and Henderson, introduces an anecdotal account of the use of innovative deception in diverse cultures. The authors present several illustrations of financial fraud and other illegal activities to discuss innovative deception. Thus, they introduce a description of innovative deception which

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integrate research in creativity, innovation, and morality across cultures and discuss existing and emerging consequences of this phenomenon. The next chapter by Tang, Bai, and Hofreiter reports a cross-cultural study carried out among Chinese and German university students about their creative activities and those they observed from others during the lockdown periods of the pandemic. The authors report that six major creativity categories arise from their data: Artistic Creativity, Inventions & Business Ideas, Intellectual Creativity, Social Interactions, Sports, and Challenges. They report similarities and differences between their samples. In the third chapter of this part, Lebuda and Karwowski focus on how media across cultures display a perspective on the nature of abilities and examine a specific case of the so-called talent shows. The authors explore mindsets presented in “… Got Talent!” programs in China, Poland, and the US. Finally, they discuss the opportunities and threats associated with the role of social factors in our understanding of abilities and their development. The last two chapters of this part focus on theater and poetry. Using the structure of the Systems Model of Creativity, Panero explores parts of theater history from the sixth century BCE to the seventeenth century CE. Further, the Four C Model of Creativity is invoked to complement the “individual” element. The author proposes that taking into consideration multiple creativity models to examine theater history could advance our understanding of the thoughts, actions, and processes related to creativity. Finally, Preiss discusses the limitations of intelligence research to understand creativity and introduces a model of innovation as problem solving which utilizes both abilities and attentional dispositions. This model is then applied to creative writing, specifically poetry. The fourth part of the book is devoted to creativity and innovation as a vehicle for cultural change. The first chapter of this part, by Jackson, Luria and Kaufman, looks at how art reflects culture—including the biases and inequity of a society. Art can reflect the worst of humanity, the authors note, but it can also enable the types of conversations and engagements that can connect people and potentially move toward positive change. Next, Greenfield applies a theory of social change, cultural evolution, and human development for understanding creativity in diverse cultural settings. She presents evidence from the Mayans of Chiapas and

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the Ethiopian immigrants to Israel to show that innovation is not a valued form of creativity in subsistence settings, whereas creativity as innovation is a cultural adaptation to a commercial ecology in which formal education is important. She notes that her findings suggest that the definition of human creativity is not fixed but shifts across generations to adapt to evolving historical and ecological circumstances. Finally, Sternberg introduces the notion of cultural creativity, which he defines as the ability to be creative across cultural boundaries, both of space and of time.  In his chapter, he presents the concept and a description of the challenges that people face when they seek to be creative across cultures. Then he discusses the components of cultural creativity and draws conclusions regarding why cultural creativity is so critical in contemporary society. The final part of the book is devoted to creativity, innovation, and change that help us look forward. The first chapter in this part, by Hartley and Viskontas, explores the ways in which digital technologies can both assist and spoil human creativity. The authors argue that as Artificial Intelligence moves to machine learning, computers are now potential innovators and creative partners. The authors propose that human collaboration with machines fosters innovation but might also have a negative impact on the work of skill development that is required for eminent creativity. Next, Beghetto discusses what motivates change and innovation. He describes different types of uncertainty, including those that are resolvable and those that are not, and then discusses how uncertainty serves as a lever for innovation and change. He also comments on possible personal changes, social innovations, and negative and unintended consequences that can result from engaging with uncertainty. Finally, closing the book and this part, Canina, Bruno, and Glaveanu present a framework that redefines creativity in the post-Anthropocene era and highlights four relevant dimensions that are needed to maintain a dynamic balance: regenerative creativity, digital creativity, ethics, and futures thinking. The authors posit that it is necessary to ask how to expand the definition of creativity to make it more inclusive to non-­ human agents and to rethink the values and ethics involved in this process. We will not solve the exhausting problems we face as a society if we continue doing the same old thing—hence the urgency of harnessing the

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immense creative potential of the human mind. It is therefore urgent that companies, organizations, and governments adopt an innovation strategy. But strategy is not enough, because as the legendary management author Peter Drucker said, culture eats strategy for breakfast. So, we need to better understand whether culture is in our favor or whether, on the contrary, it will eat away at our hope for progress. Also, we need to understand the set of values underlying when innovation happens since not all innovation or change is necessarily positive. In this book, we have attempted to provide a broad overview of the creation and innovation chain for change, within the various cultural contexts in which it can take place. We hope it will be useful to our readers, who we trust share not only our concern for the future of our society, but also our conviction that a deeper understanding of creativity, culture, and change, together with a commitment to work for the common good, will forge a better future for our children. We conclude this preface by thanking the wonderful authors and researchers that contributed to this volume, as well as to the fantastic Palgrave Press team that supported the development of this book. The work of David D. Preiss in this book was supported by grant FONDECYT no. 1181095. He expresses his gratitude to Agencia Nacional de Investigación y Desarrollo (ANID). David D. Preiss Marcos Singer James C. Kaufman

Contents

Part I Educational and Developmental Explorations of Creativity, Innovation, and Change   1 1 The  Never-Ending Innovativeness of Homo Sapiens  3 Elena L. Grigorenko 2 Supporting  Innovation: Sociocultural and Developmental Considerations in the Assessment of Creativity 29 Jonathan A. Plucker , Melanie S. Meyer , and Matthew C. Makel 3 Innovation  and Change Within Education 51 Peter Tymms and David Bolden Part II Creativity, Innovation, and Change in Organizations and Work  69 4 Creativity  and Organizational Culture 71 Nadine T. Maliakkal and Roni Reiter-Palmon

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5 Strategic  Considerations for Enhancing Creativity in the Firm 99 Marcos Singer 6 Engineering  Innovation: The Impact of Digital Transformation115 David H. Cropley and Chanvi Singh Part III Sociocultural Explorations of Creativity, Innovation, and Change 141 7 Innovative  Deception across Cultures143 Hansika Kapoor and Simon Henderson 8 Creative  Activities During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Chinese and German Observations175 Min Tang, Xinwen Bai, and Sebastian Hofreiter 9 Who’s  Got Talent and How They Got it: How Culture and Media Might Shape (Creative) Mindsets207 Izabela Lebuda and Maciej Karwowski 10 Theater  History and Models of Creativity239 Maria Eugenia Panero 11 Mind  Wandering and Mindfulness During Innovation: An Outline and an Illustration in Poetry267 David D. Preiss Part IV Creativity and Innovation as a Vehicle for Cultural Change 295 12 A  Mirror to the World: Art, Creativity, and Racial Bias297 Barbara-Shae Jackson, Sarah R. Luria, and James C. Kaufman

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13 Social  Change and Creativity Change: How Creative Products and the Nature of Creativity Differ in Subsistence Ecologies with High Mortality and Commercial Ecologies with Low Mortality315 Patricia M. Greenfield 14 Cultural  Creativity: A Componential Model363 Robert J. Sternberg Part V Creativity, Innovation, and Change Looking Forward 389 15 How  Technology Is Changing Creativity391 Isabella Hartley and Indre Viskontas 16 Uncertainty  as a Lever for Change and Innovation413 Ronald A. Beghetto 17 Innovating  in the Post-Anthropocene Era: A New Framework for Creativity439 Marita Canina, Carmen Bruno, and Vlad P. Glaveanu I ndex461

Notes on Contributors

Xinwen  Bai is Associate Professor of Industrial/Organizational Psychology at the Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences. He received his PhD from the Chinese Academy of Sciences. His research interests include organizational creativity and innovation, work motivations, job design, and work teams. Ronald  A.  Beghetto  serves as Pinnacle West Presidential Chair and Professor in the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College at Arizona State University. His research focuses on creative thought and action, the role of uncertainty in creativity and innovation, and the possible. He is a fellow of the American Psychological Association (Div. 10) and the International Society for the Study of Creativity and Innovation. David  Bolden is Associate Professor and Lecturer in Mathematics Education in the School of Education, Durham University, UK.  His research interests include, among other things, mathematics teaching and learning, including understanding, and the use of representations in developing young children’s understanding. Carmen Bruno  holds a PhD in Design and is a researcher and adjunct professor at the Department of Design, Politecnico di Milano. Her research focuses on investigating the influence of digital technologies on the creative design process, and how the digital evolution is evolving crexvii

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ativity too. She merges a human-centered perspective, design thinking, futures thinking and co-design methodologies to facilitate radical innovation. She took part in EU and national projects collaborating with relevant companies. Marita Canina  is Associate Professor in Design at Politecnico di Milano. As Scientific Director of IDEActivity Center, she coordinates various EU research, national and international projects. She was a postdoc associate at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2006, contributing to wearable tech research for an Extravehicular Activity (EVA) spacesuit. Current research is focused on developing methods and tools that combine research in design and design futures, studies on creativity, and a peoplecentered approach to enhance the creative design process for innovation. David Cropley  is Professor of Engineering Innovation at the University of South Australia in Adelaide. His research in creativity spans the assessment of product creativity, creativity in education, malevolent creativity, and, most recently, the use of Artificial Intelligence to automatically score figural creativity tests. Vlad P. Glaveanu  is Full Professor of Psychology, School of Psychology, Dublin City University, and Professor II at the Centre for the Science of Learning and Technology, University of Bergen. His work on creativity, culture, and human possibility has been published in more than 200 articles, chapters, and books. Patricia M. Greenfield  is Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and a visiting scholar in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University. She is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and has received awards for research, scholarship, and teaching from the American Psychological Association, the German Society for Cultural Psychology, the Society for Research in Child Development, and the Jean Piaget Society. Elena  L.  Grigorenko received her PhD in General (Cognitive) Psychology from Moscow State University, Russia; her PhD in Developmental Psychology and Genetics from Yale University; and her

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re-specialization in Clinical (Forensic) Psychology from Fielding University. Dr. Grigorenko has authored more than 500 published peerreviewed articles, book chapters, and books. Isabella Hartley  is a Psychology major with a Neuroscience minor at the University of San Francisco. Her interests are directed toward the neuronal effects of dance and music, and how we can benefit from their application to therapies. Simon Henderson  is an independent deception consultant working in the UK and the US. His career has involved researching, teaching, and consulting on deception, counter-deception, information operations, and cyber operations within a variety of government, military, and law enforcement organizations. He is passionate about novel and pro-social applications of these fields. Sebastian Hofreiter  is a doctoral candidate working at the Institute for Creativity and Innovation, University of Applied Management, Germany. His research focuses on exploring the psychology of creativity, malevolent creativity, and the application of creativity at work. Barbara-Shae  Jackson is a doctoral candidate in the Psychology Department, University of Alabama. Her research focuses on the activation of race-based perceptions during aesthetic experience and their influence on art judgment and relationship to openness, racism, and cognitive ability. Hansika Kapoor  is a research author at the Department of Psychology, Monk Prayogshala, Mumbai. She holds a PhD from IIT, Bombay, is the recipient of the Fulbright–Nehru Post-doctoral Research Fellowship (2019–2020), and is an affiliate at the University of Connecticut. Dr. Kapoor has been cited as a subject matter expert in numerous features on social and cognitive psychology in the Indian context. Hansika has also been featured in the book 31 Fantastic Adventures in Science: Women Scientists in India. Maciej  Karwowski is Professor of Psychology at the University of Wrocław, where he directs the Creative Behavior Lab. Karwowski’s research focuses on creative self-beliefs and their role in fulfilling creative

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potential, as well as the possibilities to enrich creativity among children, youth, and adults. Karwowski is an author of more than 200 articles and chapters and the incoming editor of the Journal of Creative Behavior. James  C.  Kaufman is Professor of Educational Psychology at the University of Connecticut. He is the author/editor of more than 50 books, which include the Cambridge Handbook of Creativity and the forthcoming The Creativity Advantage and Lessons in Creativity from Musical Theatre Characters (with Dana Rowe). Izabela  Lebuda  is Associate Professor at the Creative Behavior Lab, University of Wrocław, and the Creative Cognition Lab, University of Graz. Her research focuses on creative self-beliefs, creative metacognition, and the social context of creative achievement. Sarah  R.  Luria is a PhD candidate in Educational Psychology at the University of Connecticut. Her research focuses on the relationship between creativity and educational equity as well as human rights education. Sarah is a Philanthropic Educational Organization (PEO) scholar and was honored to receive the Gavin Dissertation award. She has a passion for antioppressive teaching practices and culturally sustaining pedagogy. Matthew  Makel is Associate Research Professor at the School of Education, Johns Hopkins University. His research focuses on academic talent development and research methods. Nadine Maliakkal  is a doctoral candidate of Industrial/Organizational (I/O) Psychology at the University of Nebraska at Omaha (UNO). She received her Master’s of Arts in I/O Psychology from UNO. Her research interests include creativity, leadership, emotions, and diversity, equity, and inclusion. Melanie  S.  Meyer  is a postdoctoral research fellow in the School of Education, Johns Hopkins University, and holds a PhD in Educational Psychology from the University of North Texas. She has been a classroom teacher for over 20 years and teaches graduate courses in creativity and research methods. Her research focuses on education policy and schoolbased talent development.

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Maria Eugenia Panero  is a former actor and singer turned research psychologist with a PhD in Social Psychology from Boston College. Her studies explore the psychological effects of entering fictional worlds and characters through acting on stage, watching performances, or reading literature. She has published and presented her award-winning work throughout the globe, and was featured in major news outlets, including CNN, Time magazine, and The Atlantic. Jonathan Plucker  is Julian C. Stanley Professor of Talent Development at Johns Hopkins University, where he works at the Center for Talented Youth and School of Education. His work focuses on creativity and innovation in education, education policy, and talent development. His most recent book is the second edition of Creativity and Innovation. David D. Preiss  is a psychologist interested in the psychology of creativity. He is Professor of Psychology at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. He holds a PhD in Psychology from Yale University, which he attended as a Fulbright scholar. He is a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science. Preiss is the author of more than 50 papers and book chapters in the fields of cultural psychology and educational psychology, and the co-editor of five international books in different areas of psychology. Roni  Reiter-Palmon is Distinguished Professor of Industrial/ Organizational Psychology. Her research focuses on individual and team creativity, creative problem-solving processes and team processes that facilitate creativity and innovation, creative skills development, and organizational factors that facilitate or inhibit creativity and innovation. She is a fellow of the American Psychological Association (APA; Divs. 10 and 14). She is incoming president of Division 10 of the APA. Marcos Singer  is Full Professor of Operations Management and Dean of the MBA at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (PUC). He holds a BA in Industrial Engineering and an MS in Computer Science from PUC, and a PhD in Operations Research from Columbia University. Professor Singer has co-­authored several papers in management journals and books, such as A Practical Optimization Theory. He also works as a board member and a consultant for several Chilean firms and institutions.

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Chanvi  Singh  is completing her PhD from the University of South Australia in Adelaide, focused on innovation and digital transformation. Outside of her graduate studies, Chanvi is a Senior Associate at the professional services firm PriceWaterhouseCoopers. Robert  J.  Sternberg  is a psychologist interested in the psychology of intelligence, creativity, and wisdom. He is Professor of Psychology at Cornell University and Honorary Professor of Psychology at the University of Heidelberg, Germany. His PhD is from Stanford University and he holds 13 honorary doctorates. He is a past winner of the Grawemeyer Award in Psychology and the James and Cattell Awards from the Association for Psychological Science (APS). Min Tang  is Professor of International Management and Director of the Institute for Creativity and Innovation at the University of Applied Management, Germany. She holds a PhD in Psychology from the University of Munich. Her research focuses on systems approach to creativity, implicit theories of creativity, management of creativity and innovation, team creativity, and cross-cultural studies. Peter  Tymms is an emeritus professor. His main research interests include monitoring, assessment, performance indicators, ADHD, reading, and research methodology. He started the Performance Indicators in Primary Schools (PIPS) project, which is designed to monitor the affective and cognitive progress of children through primary (elementary) school. It has been used with more than five million children.  Peter Tymms was Director of the Curriculum, Evaluation and Management (CEM) Centre until 2011 when he took over as Head of Department in the School of Education. Indre Viskontas  is Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of San Francisco, where she runs the Creative Brain Lab. She is also an accomplished opera singer and stage director, and the Director of Communications for the Sound Health Network. She holds a Master’s of

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Music in Voice Performance from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and a PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). In ­addition to authoring more than 50 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters, she is also an avid science communicator, having hosted and co-created four podcasts with more than 14 million downloads and 450 episodes.

List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Fig. 6.1 Fig. 6.2 Fig. 6.3 Fig. 6.4 Fig. 6.5 Fig. 10.1 Fig. 11.1 Fig. 12.1

Areas of Emphasis for Creativity Assessment by Developmental Level. Note. Plucker et al. (2022, February 2). Reprinted with permission 45 Change drives innovation 118 The Black Death as a catalyst for innovation 119 Change as a driver of more than innovation 121 New technology driving digital transformation and the future of work 123 Divergent and convergent cognition (based on Cropley, 2015)133 Timeline of historical events related to theater 242 The toolkit of the mind 272 Willie Porter Jr. (2015). COPS. Acrylic on Canvas. Flushing NY/US. Note. Artist Willie Porter Jr. conveys through this painting a malignant moral issue plaguing American Society, Police brutality. The image reflects how state-­ sanctioned violence haunts both the oppressor and the oppressed. If used as a tool, paintings like this one can be a mirror by which viewers connect with the imagery and intentionally examine racists systems and ideals, in hopes of finding creative solutions for dismantling them 305

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Fig. 13.1 Fig. 13.2 Fig. 13.3 Fig. 13.4 Fig. 13.5 Fig. 13.6 Fig. 13.7 Fig. 13.8 Fig. 13.9 Fig. 13.10 Fig. 13.11 Fig. 13.12 Fig. 13.13 Fig. 13.14

List of Figures

Zinacantec woman‘s huipil or blouse, 1948. From the Petul Vasquez family. Collection of the author, UCLA. Photograph by Don Cole 318 Zinacantec woman‘s huipil or blouse, 1960. Museum of Us. Photograph courtesy of the Museum 318 A Zinacantec girl from Nabenchauk wearing a huipil, 1966. Photograph courtesy of Frank Cancian 319 Huipiles. Zinacantan Center, 1971. Photograph by Frank Cancian from Another Place. Reproduced courtesy of Frank Cancian320 Huipil embroidered by Lupa Z’us at the same time as her mother made the blouse shown in the next figure. Nabenchauk, 1993. Photograph by Patricia Greenfield 321 Huipil embroidered by the mother of Lupa Z’us. Nabenchauk, 1993. Photograph by Patricia Greenfield 321 Cousin Loxa’s original version of the huipil made for the Guadalupe fiesta in December 1992. Acrylic. Photographed in Nabenchauk by Patricia Greenfield 322 Loxa’s mother’s version of the huipil made for the December 1992 fiesta. Acrylic. Photographed in Nabenchauk by Patricia Greenfield 322 Huipil made by Maruch, a teenage girl, for the May 1993 fiesta. Photographed in Nabenchauk by Patricia Greenfield 323 Huipil woven by Paxku’ Pavlu. Acrylic. (24″ high by 30 1/2″ wide) Nabenchauk, 2004. Collection of the author, UCLA324 Huipil embroidered on store-bought cloth by Paxku’ Pavlu. Acrylic. (24 1/2″ high by 30″ wide) Nabenchauk, 2004. Collected by the author in 2005 324 First woven huipil, made by Paxku’ Pavlu for her daughter Marielena, then one year old. Nabenchauk, 2004. Acrylic (12″ high by 16″ wide). Collection of the author, UCLA 325 Woven huipil, made by Paxku’ Pavlu for her daughter Marielena. Nabenchauk, 2004. Acrylic (15 3/4″ high by 16 1/2″ wide). Collection of the author, UCLA 326 Marielena’s cotton huipil, woven by her mother Paxku’ Pavlu. Acrylic (13 1/2″ high by 16 1/2″ wide). Collected by the author in Nabenchauk, August 2005  327

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Fig. 13.15 A copy of Paxku’ Pavlu’s cotton huipil woven in Nabenchauk for Sna Jolobil in 2005, woven by Paxku’. (24 1/2″ high by 29″ wide); collected by Patricia Greenfield in February 2006 327 Fig. 13.16 A copy of a second cotton huipil woven by Paxku’ Pavlu in Nabenchauk for Sna Jolobil in 2005, woven by Paxku’. (25″ high by 29 1/2″ wide); collected by Patricia Greenfield in February 2006 328 Fig. 13.17 Cotton bags by Paxku’ Pavlu, originally designed for Sna Jolobil. Red one (6 1/4“ high by 7” wide) woven in Nabenchauk in 2005, and blue one (7 ¼“ high by 7 ¼” wide) in 2006. Collection of author 328 Fig. 13.18 Man’s woven poncho (pok’ k’u’ul). Woven and embroidered by Maruch Xulubte’, Nabenchauk, 2015. Collected and photographed by the author. Note the innovation of embroidering with ribbon, highlighted in the detail close-­up on the right. However, the background design goes back to the standardized poncho weave from the 1960s and even earlier (Greenfield, 2004) 329 Fig. 13.19 Beta Israel woman winnowing grain, Wallaka, Ethiopia, 1984. Photo: Doron Bacher. The Museum of the Jewish People at Beit Hatfutsot, The Oster Visual Documentation Center338 Fig. 13.20 Jewish woman making pottery in a village, 20 km from Gondar (Lake Tana), on the road to Dabat, Ethiopia, April 1983. Photo: Sandro Carabelli, Italy. The Museum of the Jewish People at Beit Hatfutsot, The Oster Visual Documentation Center, courtesy of S. Carabelli 339 Fig. 13.21 Beta Israel members selling clay artifacts in the local market, Wallaka, Gondar Region, Ethiopia, 1984. Photo: Doron Bacher. The Museum of the Jewish People at Beit Hatfutsot, The Oster Visual Documentation Center 340 Fig. 13.22 Pottery figurines made by Beta Israel women, Wallaka, Ethiopia, 1960s. Photo: Ya’akov Brill. The Museum of the Jewish People at Beit Hatfutsot, The Oster Visual Documentation Center, courtesy of Harel family 341 Fig. 13.23 Mother with babes in both arms. By Adiseh Baruch, 2016. (Dates here and in subsequent slides are dates of purchase. Date of creation is not known.) Photograph by Patricia Greenfield342

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List of Figures

Fig. 13.24 Pregnant woman with a necklace and a high neck decoration. Unknown artist, 2016. Photograph by Patricia Greenfield343 Fig. 13.25 Baking clay rabbi figurines, Wallaka, Gondar Region, Ethiopia, 1984. The Museum of the Jewish People at Beit Hatfutsot, The Oster Visual Documentation Center 344 Fig. 13.26 Kes (Ethiopian rabbi) with Torah. By Adiseh Baruch, 2016. Photograph by Patricia Greenfield 345 Fig. 13.27 Kes (Ethiopian rabbi) bringing home sheep. By Adiseh Baruch, 2016. Photograph by Patricia Greenfield 346 Fig. 13.28 Pupils from Ethiopia studying computers in “Mikvah Israel” Agricultural High School, Israel, March 1986, Photo: Doron Bacher. The Museum of the Jewish People at Beit Hatfutsot, The Oster Visual Documentation Center 347 Fig. 13.29 Rabbi reading Torah, grandson listening. By Mamit Sheto, Ethiopian Jewish Arts Workshop, Be’er Sheva, Israel, 2016. Photograph by Patricia Greenfield 348 Fig. 13.30 Pounding wheat to separate it from the chaff. By Tziona Yahim, Ethiopian Jewish Arts Workshop, Be’er Sheva, Israel, 2016. Photograph by Patricia Greenfield 349 Fig. 13.31 Pregnant woman with baby on her back. By Mamit Sheto, Ethiopian Jewish Arts Workshop, Be’er Sheva, Israel, 2019. Photograph by Patricia Greenfield 351 Fig. 13.32 Boyfriend and girlfriend. By Mamit Sheto, Ethiopian Jewish Arts Workshop, Be’er Sheva, Israel, 2016. Note that this piece is signed, a mark of a movement away from art as a community expression and toward art as an individual expression. This is the only signed piece. Photograph by Patricia Greenfield 354 Fig. 13.33 Family of three sharing a piece of Ethiopian bread. Unknown artist, Ethiopian Jewish Arts Workshop. Photograph by Patricia Greenfield 355 Fig. 13.34 Family. By Adiseh Baruch. 2016. Ethiopian Jewish Arts Workshop. Photograph by Patricia Greenfield 356

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Fig. 16.1 Fig. 17.1

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Types of uncertainty. Shaded portions represent potentially resolvable uncertainties 415 The three dimensions of the post-anthropocentric creativity 450

List of Tables

Table 6.1 Table 6.2 Table 6.3 Table 8.1 Table 8.2

Time (%) spent on core activities, by industry sector (US) 127 The stages of creative problem solving 131 The roles of human and artificial creativity 134 Sample demographic information 183 Coding scheme for creative ideas/activities and the relevant examples 185 Table 8.3 Number of participants with valid responses and the frequencies of ideas/activities mentioned in the whole sample 187 Table 8.4 Comparison of the reported creative activities across countries188 Table 8.5 Comparison of the self-reported creative activities and those of others 189 Table 14.1 A theory of individual modifiability 375 Table 16.1 Potential creative and innovative outcomes from acting on uncertainty424

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Part I Educational and Developmental Explorations of Creativity, Innovation, and Change

1 The Never-Ending Innovativeness of Homo Sapiens Elena L. Grigorenko

The meaning of the word “innovation” is multifaceted. More specifically, both Merriam-Webster and the Oxford Dictionary converge on the centrality of the word “new” in their definitions by diverging on the examples used (e.g., new idea, method, product, device, application, action, process). In this chapter, I elect to focus on a particular type of innovation, manifested in the emergence of a new human skill that transforms human cognitive capacity and provides opportunities not only for cultural and technological but also for biological advantage. Here, innovation is embedded in the context of biological and cultural evolution, the ongoing development of Homo sapiens, the wise man. As the wise man is the only representative of the genus Homo that did not go extinct, it seems reasonable to assume that this species has learned to change with and within its ever-changing environment. In other words, as change

E. L. Grigorenko (*) Department of Psychology and Texas Institute for Measurement, Evaluation, and Statistics, University of Houston, Houston, TX, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 D. D. Preiss et al. (eds.), Creativity, Innovation, and Change Across Cultures, Palgrave Studies in Creativity and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28206-5_1

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necessitates the generation of something new, Homo sapiens have been innovating to react to, predict, and generate change. To illustrate this line of thinking, I concatenate diverse lines of evidence from three connected but different types of innovation generating new skills—spoken language, written language, and the language of digital communication, d-language, also known as electronics or e-language. I compare and contrast these three types of language skills focusing on three dimensions: (1) the origin and timeline of their emergence; (2) their acquisition, functional properties, and utility for the wise man; and (3) their biological bases. I provide brief comments for each of the skills, each of the dimensions of comparisons, and then offer a general discussion on the role of innovation of new skills in the well-being of the wise man.

Origin and Emergence Timeline Spoken Language The emergence of spoken language is a fundamental innovation in the genus of Homo; its origins are thought to be tightly related to the origins of human behavior (Holloway, 2017). As science as the source of methods for studying the origin of language emerged much much later than language itself, there is a severe shortage of direct empirical evidence usable for apprehending the origin of language. The evidence used in such a study includes indirect evidence such as historical (e.g., fossil records, archeological artifacts) and comparative (e.g., studies of animal and human communication; diverse languages around the world; and language acquisition at different stages of human development). Given these constraints, the modern scientific stance on the emergence timeline and origin of spoken language is driven primarily by indirect evidence and theoretical assumptions. With regard to language emergence, its timeline estimates are broad. Based on the fossil-based evidence on language’s anatomical prerequisites, the timeline extends over a period from the phylogenetic divergence of Homo (2.3–2.4 million years ago, mya) from Pan (5–6 mya) to the

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emergence of full behavioral modernity some 50,000–150,000 ya. Although there is a general agreement that Australopithecus was unlikely to possess vocal communication skills substantially different from that of great apes (Arcadi, 2000), there is a wide range of positions regarding the presence and characteristics of primitive language-like systems, proto-­ language at later evolutionary junctions. What predecessor of the wise man, Homo habilis (2.3 mya), Homo erectus (1.8 mya), or Homo heidelbergensis (0.6 mya), possessed proto-language and how the evolution led to the development of language proper in Homo sapiens (< 200,000 ya) are highly disputed issues. However, even for Homo sapiens, there is a range of estimates based on various computational models placing that time point around 50,000–150,000 ya (Atkinson, 2011; Perreault & Mathew, 2012). With regard to theorizing about the origin of language, in broad strokes, there are two dimensions on which different theories cluster. Specifically, continuity theories assume that the emergence of spoken language was preceded by the manifestation of other cognitive skills that made the appearance of spoken language possible. Thus, one of such theories (Fitch, 2018) puts forward two hypotheses. One, the “phonological continuity hypothesis” posits that these evolutionarily conserved capacities are detectable in nonhuman animal species (Kikuchi et  al., 2018; ten Cate, 2018; Zuidema & de Boer, 2018) underpin human combinatorial phonology—the organization of phonemes into complex sequences. The second one, the “dendrophilia hypothesis,” refers to the hierarchical phrasal syntax (the building of “trees”) requiring a higher-­ level supra-regular grammar. Fitch (2018) argues that for this capacity, at least currently, there is no convincing evidence in any nonhuman species. Therefore, this capacity, although anchored in sequencing capacities, needs to be augmented by an additional accessory of a memory “stack,” which is functionally achieved in Broca’s area through its connections with parieto-temporal storage areas and through its capacity for hierarchical syntax (Flinker & Knight, 2018; Friederici, 2018; Rouault & Koechlin, 2018). The common thread of discontinuity theories is the argument that language is unique to wise men, and its very uniqueness indicates that it must have manifested in human evolution rather suddenly. Thus,

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Chomsky (1996) argues that a single chance mutation occurred in one individual in the order of 100,000 ya, installing the language faculty in a “perfect” or “near-perfect” form via the recruitment of hypothetical components of the mid-brain. Despite an early celebration of some genetic findings that were interpreted as candidates for such a mutation (Pinker, 1994), the mood has been tempered down both by technical issues (Atkinson et al., 2018) and by a flurry of new genetic, paleontological, and archeological data. Thus, focusing on the extent of differences between Neanderthals and modern humans, which, arguably, now appear to be substantially less than previously thought, Dediu and Levinson (2018) refer to Neanderthals as “fully articulate beings” with advanced linguistic capacities and provide a strong gradualist account of the emergence of human and human-like language and communication.

Written Language Writing is a significant innovation unique to the wise man. Unlike the research into spoken language, the research into written language is much more “evidence-based,” as it is rooted in the discovery of ancient scripts. In fact, the very presence of these scripts is the only evidence that recognizes the evidence for this innovation in a given civilization. Similar to the theorizing about spoken language, the theorizing about writing also contained the idea of monogenesis, that is, a single source of this invention. Although the focus on spoken language was on a single mutation that led to the rise of spoken language, the focus for writing was on a single civilization, the ancient Sumer of Mesopotamia. Although the mechanisms driving these single origins were assumed to be different (population genetics for the former and cultural diffusion for the latter), the notion of monogenesis unifies both fields of study. Yet, the current accumulation of evidence (Olson & Torrance, 2009) indicates that writing had been invented more than once, being developed autonomously in at least four ancient civilizations on different time scales. Specifically, it is stated that writing emerged in Mesopotamia somewhere between 3400 and 3100  BCE (Adkins, 2004); in Egypt somewhere around 3250 BCE (Regulski, 2016); in China about 1200 BCE (Boltz, 1994);

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and in lowland areas of Southern Mexico and Guatemala by 500 BCE (Fagan et al., 1996). Notably, more complete and modern (i.e., true) writing systems were preceded by proto-writing systems that included ideographic or mnemonic symbols. Although both systems intended to communicate a message, when spoken language was insufficient, the precision of reconstructing this message for the two systems is very different. True writing assumes an unambiguous interpretation of the message and relies on an encoded linguistic utterance reconstructable with a fair degree of accuracy. Proto-writing, on the contrary, does not encode utterances exactly, making the exact meaning intended by the writer either only able to be constructed or reconstructed with less precision if a great deal of context is already known in advance. Importantly, encoding true writing requires prior knowledge of a spoken language. Proto-writing, like any symbolic system (e.g., mathematics), does not require such knowledge. The origin of proto-wring is associated with the usage of clay tokens to record specific amounts of livestock or commodities during the start of the pottery phase of the Neolithic. Initially, these tokens were impressed upon and stored in round clay envelopes, which were gradually replaced with flat tables and impressions—with a record and with a stylus. True writing is first recorded in Uruk at the end of the fourth millennium BCE and soon after in various parts of the Near East (Hallo & Simpson, 1971).

Digital Language The language of electronics (e-language1) or digital language (d-language) refers to a cluster of text-based phenomena involving an exchange of information among users of electronic devices. Unlike the timelines for spoken and written language, the emergence of d-language is pinpointed by some authors down to the year. Whereas the roots of e-language go back to the late nineteenth century to the development of wireless telegraphy, telex, and other related innovations, Friedman (2016) spots  Not to be confused with Chomskyan “external language,” that is., language as transmitted and shared in the world or community rather than as perceived and understood in the individual (i.e., “internal language,” l-language). 1

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2007 as the year of change, referring to the fact that it was the year Apple launched its iPhone, Twitter expanded globally, and Amazon released the Kindle. These events both solidified the market and created the environment for the rapid development of d-language. Friedrich (2020) draws an analogy between that time of the invention of the digital printing press. Importantly, d-language has congealed the status of English as its nucleus, as it permitted users of different language backgrounds and at different levels of communicative competence in English to engage with d-language and other English(es) users. In turn, the status of English, due to its highly abbreviated nature and the absence of graphic accent marks, has been elevated (Friedrich, 2020). There are different forms of d-language, among which is text messaging, referred to as messaging or texting. Texting is real-time “interactive written discourse” (Ferrara et al., 1991, p. 8), “a one-to-one synchronous form of computer-mediated communication” (Baron, 2004, p. 13), the act of composing and sending electronic messages containing alphabetic and numeric characters over a cellular or Internet network. It is “direct, immediate, casual online contact” (Schiano et al., 2002). In its original usage, it referred to using the Short Message Service (SMS). As devices and their media have grown more sophisticated, so did messaging; in addition to SMS, Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) containing digital images, videos, sound content, and ideograms (e.g., emoji) emerged. The attitudes toward digital language are diverse. The popular press appraisal of messaging had been harsh, claiming that it leads to a “breakdown in the English language,” “the bastardization of language” (O’Connor, 2005), and even “the linguistic ruin of [the] generation” (Axtman, 2002). On the contrary, linguists refer to texting as an instance of a general “linguistic whatever-ism” (Baron, 2003, p. 5), suggesting that d-language is a “new species of communication,” complete with its own lexicon, graphology, grammar, and usage conditions (Crystal, 2001, p. 48). The first usage of SMS is dated 1992 (Hillebrand, 2010). The initial usage of messaging was low, with 0.4 messages per GSM customer per month. Since 2007 text messaging has been the most widely used mobile data service. That year, 74% of all mobile phone users worldwide (or 2.4 billion out of 3.3 billion phone subscribers) were active users of

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SMS.  Today 4.2+ billion people around the world have the ability to send and receive messages via SMS (Vnučec, 2022).

Innovativeness: Timeline It has been stated that both the degree and the speed of accumulation of innovations and evolutionary novelty in the genus Homo are unprecedented (Tattersall, 2017). Yet, species of Homo sapiens are different both from their predecessors and from their contemporaries as they continue to develop new skills at a tremendously accelerated rate, as evident by the differential time scale for the emergence and development of spoken, written, and digital languages. The acceleration is from millions for spoken, thousands for written, and only decades of years for d-language.

Functional Properties and Acquisition Spoken Language Spoken language is not innate to a wise man. No babies are born with a mastery of language; language needs to be mastered anew. This “instinctive tendency to acquire an art is not peculiar to man” (Darwin, 1871, p. 59). The open question, however, is why the wise man “generated” this skill and institutionalized it as a natural, although acquired, skill for every representative of Homo sapiens. The key property and the quintessential function of human language are to convey complex meanings; this function both generates and substantiates the critical need to communicate socially, that is, communicate to communicate rather than to exchange high-stakes signals about danger, pleasure, or other essential needs (Smith, 2018). As communicational capacities are present in many nonhumans, the question is what kind of social conditions were generated by early humans to provide a window of opportunity for language to evolve. Some scholars argue that this social transformation has opened opportunities for extensive communication that called for means stronger than those available before. “Ritual/speech

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coevolution theory,” according to which language evolved with or in service of some social behaviors such as rituality, exemplifies this approach (Shotwell, 2017). An important facet of this argument is that even if a chance genetic mutation in an evolving bipedal primate were to introduce a language system, it could not have been utilizable under all known primate social conditions (Smail, 2008). Thus, what has emerged is not only the speaker but also a recipient who was able to support a conversation and the context in which a situation-free conversation could emerge. Like the song of birds or any other animal communication skill, language has to be mastered by imitation from the parents (Levelt, 2018). Yet, although there is a general agreement on the need to master a language, there is a major diversification of opinions regarding whether the acquisition of language is similar to or drastically different from learning any other skill. Largely, there are two groups of theories reflecting the polar positions. According to the language-as-skill viewpoint, mastering a language is like acquiring any other skill (Chater & Christiansen, 2018). Learning any skill to mastery requires practice, gradually changing in terms of its complexity and intensity. Mastering language skills is no different, as children are engaged in multiple conversational interactions through repeated and extensive communicative exchanges with adults and other children around them. Importantly, language learning does not stop as the process of acquisition continues through learning new names, technical terms, and idioms and modifying speech patterns and syntactic constructions (Christiansen & Chater, 2016). Whereas there are a plethora of benefits, as with mastery of any new skill, to acquire language early in life, there is no ceiling for language acquisition. In fact, there is no sufficient evidence for the previously conjectured (Lenneberg, 1967) critical periods. It has been shown that foreign languages can be mastered on the foundation of the first language later in life, although not completely without some undesired first-language interference (Arnon & Christiansen, 2017) if the languages differ phonetically, morphologically, or prosodically. It has been argued that such traces are no different from any other traces common in the transfer of skills in different domains of learning, such as music or dance (Chater & Christiansen, 2018).

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According to the language-as-knowledge viewpoint (Chomsky, 1965, 1986; Pinker, 1994), mastery of language is unique and incomparable to the acquisition of any other skill. According to this point of view, children are mini-linguists who need to derive a theory of language from the linguistic environments in which they are immersed. As this derivation is impossible during the limited period of childhood, when the language is acquired, language acquisition is driven by the unfolding of an innate universal grammar. Both the existence and the characteristics of universal grammar are debated, yet the language-as-knowledge viewpoint is an active and vibrant area of research. These two points of view bifurcate the theorizing about the biological bases of language. According to the first point of view, language is connected to basic psychological mechanisms of learning and processing. In fact, it is just one example of these mechanisms in which opportunities and restrictions are common for both linguistic and non-linguistic tasks (Kidd et al., 2018). From this point of view, the biological bases of language can be shared with or re-used and re-tooled from other psychological processes, which, in turn, are shaped by the brain’s ability to learn (Christiansen & Chater, 2016). According to the second point of view, language is a specialized, distinctly human system that evolved to support this psychological process and, therefore, has distinct anatomical and functional brain bases (Friederici, 2018).

Written Language The transition from proto-writing to true writing is stated (Hallo & Simpson, 1971) and is marked by three characteristics. First, to be considered true, a writing system must be complete, so its texts can unambiguously communicate a purpose and meaning. Second, it should be embodied by a set of symbols that are visualizable and printable either physically or digitally. Third, these symbols must reflect a spoken language from and for which the system was derived. Whereas spoken language permitted unrestricted situation-free communication and, thus, has allowed for the accumulation and transmission of information, writing provided the tool by which this information can be recorded

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consistently and accurately, permitting not only accumulation but also preservation and transmission of information. The emergence of writing necessitated the emergence of reading—the ability to decode, process, and comprehend text. However, reading is a complex componential process that recruits multiple cognitive systems, most obviously, the visual, as we need to see the printed word, and the linguistic systems, as we need to map the visual printed onto the meaningful spoken word. Thus, functionally, writing and reading are two sides of one coin, as a creation of a text is driven by the need to communicate, for whatever reason, the information to a recipient, who, in turn, should be able to decode the text by exercising the skills of reading. There is a broad agreement in the field that neither writing nor reading is an innate process. Both need to be acquired, and the acquisition unfolds with a varying amount of effort and at a particular stage of development on behalf of both the learners, whose individual differences for both skills are tremendous, and the teachers, as they adopt and propel different instructional techniques. Thus, the acquisition of writing and reading requires the availability of learners who can commit time to master these complex skills systematically and the availability of teachers who can patiently and skillfully instruct the learners. All these conditions (i.e., free time in the hands of the learners and skill and committed effort in the hands of teachers) had aligned for the wise man, only very recently, speaking in evolutionary terms. Specifically, the required conditions were met by yet another human innovation—prolonged and extensive schooling, which emerged as such for the masses only in the late nineteenth century in Europe and the early to mid-twentieth century elsewhere. An important byproduct of the development of writing and reading is the emergence of literature. Whereas scholars differ in their opinion on what constitutes literature, there is a broad agreement that the very first writings from ancient Sumer, the early Egyptian hieroglyphics, and the thousands of ancient Chinese government records do not constitute literature. Although not without debate, the earliest authors recognized as literary and known by name are Ptahhotep, who wrote in Egyptian (Mourad, 2015), and Enheduanna, who wrote in Sumerian (Li et  al., 2003), who lived and wrote around the twenty-­fourth and twenty-third centuries BCE, respectively.

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Digital Language The functional properties of d-language, in their essence, are, just like it is with spoken and written language, to communicate. Examples of messaging “are expressions like my hols wr gr8 (my holidays were great), or c u 2moro on brdwy (see you tomorrow on Broadway)” (Perea et al., 2009); all are meant to communicate some information. The exponential growth of the utilization of texting has led to the inclusion of d-language in the new editions of mainstream dictionaries (e.g., the Concise Oxford Dictionary). D-language is a particular form of language filled with abbreviations that are far from obvious and need to be mastered. These abbreviations have evolved from their initial use in Internet chat rooms and instant messaging to the constrained environment of mobile phones—with a numerical keypad and a limited number of characters per message (i.e., the d-language originated as a way of reducing the typing load on a standard mobile phone keyboard). Two of the most frequent strategies (Kul, 2007) used for such abbreviations are (a) orthographic abbreviations, in particular those implying the deletion of vowels (e.g., wk., week; pls, please), and (b) phonetic respelling (e.g., c u, see you; sk8, skate). The boom in messaging has led to changes in the way we communicate, in particular for younger generations (Perea et  al., 2008; Tagliamonte & Denis, 2008). Texting has gained tremendous popularity. Over the last decade, the number of text messages sent monthly has increased by more than 7700%: the average person taps, swipes, or clicks on their phone over 2000 times per day (Winnick & Zolna, 2022). On a regular day on their cell phones, SMS users send 13 texts daily, quadrupling the number of emails sent from the same phone. Importantly, almost 60% of consumers reply with an SMS or MMS within 1–2 minutes on average; texting has a 209% higher response rate than a phone, email, or Facebook. Whether for personal or business reasons, texting on a cellular phone has become a common practice, overriding speaking on the same phone. Importantly, it reflects not only the growth of cellular coverage and the expansion of social media but also changes in lifestyles and habits. In fact, messaging rates are as high as 98%. Moreover, for many users, it is the chosen way

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to communicate; thus, 47% of US smartphone users say they cannot live without their devices. Messaging also has dramatically increased the audience of the intended communication; SMS is the only technology harmonized between all mobile operators worldwide, meaning that text messaging can connect the world. Thus, texts can reach millions of people in no time, wherever they are; they can reach virtually all the 6–7 billion mobile phones in use today. Although used by people of all ages and at all stages of life, messaging is predominantly the means of communication for younger people. Thus, research indicates that as many as 75% of millennials would rather text than talk, citing such reasons to favor texting as privacy, greater accessibility, less time-consuming, less stressful, multitasking-friendly, and affording balance between various types of activities.

Innovativeness: Function and Acquisition It is rather apparent and trivial to state that the invention of the three forms of the language discussed here is to communicate. However, although their function remains arguably the same, the manner and scope in which this communication is done are rather different. The spoken language always requires the presence of the other person, the recipient of the oral communication. Notwithstanding its connectedness to nonverbal forms of cognition, oral speech is always addressed to someone, the recipient, who should be able to hear the speaker. The immediate presence of that recipient becomes substantially less important for communication in print. Moreover, simultaneously, print can extend the audience, within and across generations, to which the communication is addressed. Importantly, texting does not assume the continuous presence of the audience, and it reaches the entire population through the usage of devices that can receive text (e.g., mobile phones). Importantly, as “the coverage” of communication expands, the complexity of the acquisition process to master that particular type of language also increases. As the acquisition of spoken language arguably requires only exposure and constant immersion, the acquisition of written language requires lengthy structured instructions, and the acquisition of messaging requires not

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only the mastery of written language but also the mastery of the device making messaging possible.

Biological Bases Spoken Language It has been disputed by many that language is largely a cultural innovation that refurbishes pre-existing neurocognitive functions, inducing substantial alterations to the functional characteristics of the brain (Bourguignon, 2022). Yet, although dominant, this position is not the only one; there is an important continuum of relevant views. At one end of the continuum, the mind is said to be a structure that includes separate, highly centralized systems inclusive of lower- and higher-order skills. According to this position (Friederici, 2018), only humans possess a biologically predetermined system of rules and operations that permit the combination of words into hierarchically structured phrases and sentences. This capacity, furthermore, reduces to a basic computational mechanism—“Merge”—that binds elements into a hierarchical structure. The brain’s Brodmann area 44, BA 44, has been stated to be the critical cortical region supporting Merge (Friederici, 2018). BA44 is interconnected with the temporal cortex via the dorsal arcuate fasciculus, which develops in mid-to-late childhood to support language proficiency, uniquely distinguishing Homo sapiens as a species (Rauschecker, 2018). This position and its variations have been criticized as the “required” architecture for language (Bourguignon, 2022). It has also been stated that these views necessitate the presence of differential evolutionary trajectories for each contributing system, which is at odds with the near-instantaneous fluorescence of human cognition suggested by the anthropological record (Tattersall, 2017). On the other end, the mind is debated as a complex emergent system that arose from interactions between ontologically distinct lower-order constituents (Macwhinney, 1998); such a system’s characteristics are not entirely predictable from the sum of its parts (Bunge, 1977). The

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supporters of this position (Hagoort, 2018) are skeptical that much hinges on whether a language-related neural activity is situated in BA44 or any other Brodmann-style brain areas. They contend that the neurobiological mechanism of language can be elicited through multiple functions rather than structural levels, from the local properties of canonical microcircuits in the neocortex to the large-scale networks supporting language function across the human brain (Mars et  al., 2018). There are several advantages of the emergent over centralized computation, including reduced costs of handling and joint running of individual cognitive processes, faster information transfer at the systems level, increased adaptability, and equitable resource allocation (Crutchfield & Mitchell, 1995). Importantly, it has been stated that the evolutionary stance will be of limited value until we have mechanistic computational accounts of this multi-level processing architecture. (Hagoort, 2018). The lack of specificity, at least at this point, differentiates the “talking brain” of the wise man from either the brains of his evolutionary predecessors structurally or from an engagement of different brain areas functionally. For example, when the wise man does not speak but engages in a different cognitive activity, it is echoed in the lack of specificity related to the human genome. Similarly, the “talking” genome of the wise man differs by only 1% from the nontalking apes. The early promotion of FOXP2 as an evolutionary vehicle of the emergence of human language or as the grammar gene (Pinker, 1994) was unsupported by later work (Atkinson et al., 2018). Regarding the former, the gene network analyses from ancestral human DNA have focused on the coding regions that lie next to or interact with the FOXP2 gene, revealing new information. Such comparative studies (Kuhlwilm, 2018) identify gene “deserts” or deletions arising after different “admixture events” where archaic hominin lineages (Neanderthal and Denisovan) interbred with the ancestors of modern humans. Interestingly, the modern human genome, perhaps as a result of such events, eliminated the resulting genomic changes from particular regions. The region around FOXP2 is one of such deserts. This pattern, in turn, indicates a discordancy between humans and their archaic relatives in this region. With regard to the latter, at this point, there are multiple different genes, the variation which has been associated in different studies with an individual difference in language acquisition

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and performance (Mountford et al., 2022). However, none of them have been elevated to the status of players, with clearly elucidated functions within a system orchestrating or contributing to the biological force underlying the acquisition and manifestation of language. Correspondingly, there are genes that were initially associated with other skills, such as enhanced social and communicative skills—factors undoubtedly critical to the emergence of human language. For example, treating FOXP2 as one well-studied example, it is important to underpin aspects of verbal communication by relating differences in vocal output across primate species to variations in FOXP2 expression (Staes et  al., 2018). This line of research emphasizes the importance of the genes that are understudied, but the variation which has been associated with the regulation of social behavior also varies across humans and apes, including those linked to social communication, pro-sociality, and cooperation.

Written Language Historically, the theories of the “writing and reading brain” had developed substantially later than those of the “talking brain.” Correspondingly, the stream of thought has been based on a substantially different notion of what the human brain is like and how it masters new cognitive functions. Specifically, instead of looking for the particular brain loci where written language resides, largely, these theories are characterized by emergence, where writing and reading skills arise from systems initially geared toward other functions, such as visual recognition and spatial attention, respectively (Dehaene & Cohen, 2007). When learning to read, a beginning reader must connect spoken and written language by associating the phonological structure of speech with symbolic units of print: first at a sublexical level and then in larger and larger units, such as syllables, words, and word combinations (Liberman, 1996). Learning to read is easier (and faster) in orthographies in which symbols map consistently onto particular sounds (e.g., Finnish or Spanish) than in English, in which letters and their combinations represent different sounds depending on a word’s context. Repeated practice of the reading skill leads to the skill’s automatization, resulting in rapid

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E. L. Grigorenko

lexical processing and immediate orthographic access to meaning. The early sublexical processing engages a dorsal or higher route through the brain from the back of the brain, originating in the areas where visual processing occurs and moving forward toward the frontal lobes where meaning is assigned. The sublexical pathway going through the middle temporal and inferior parietal regions is indirect and inefficient for accessing meaning, yet this is the only way a beginning reader can assign meaning to the printed words. The lexical, ventral, or lower system for reading gets assembled in parallel but engages the left occipito-temporal region of the brain and takes advantage of an existing evolutionary system for visual processing, recycling the brain structures that have been utilized for different purposes. As soon as the beginning reader learns how to make sense of words as visual forms loaded with meaning, this ventral system begins to self-organize as a rapid orthographic processor based primarily on the statistical properties by which letters and letter combinations occur and ongoing exposure to print (Dehaene et al., 2015). If access to print is challenged or delayed, both systems do not receive the early practice needed to crystallize and automatize the skill of reading optimally. Based on the notion of these two brain systems, it is possible to predict where differences between struggling and proficient readers may arise. Thus, there are registered differences in the brain region size, thickness, or the white matter fiber bundles that connect the reading brain regions to one another (Williams et al., 2018). There is also evidence that struggling readers engage these reading-related brain regions less than their non-struggling peers do. Thus, it is important to understand how the reading brain changes over age or with skill change, the impact of learning gains or loss, and the impact of genetic risk or instructional approach on the reading brain. Indeed, there is substantial evidence substantiating the presence of genetic risk in those individuals who experience difficulties with acquiring reading skills. Yet, there is consensus that there is no causal gene(s) triggering the manifestation of these difficulties; it is likely that many hundreds of quantitative trait loci (QTL, which are regions of the genome at which genetic variation is associated with a particular quantitative trait) of small effect size (