Intelligence, Creativity, and Wisdom: Exploring their Connections and Distinctions 3031267710, 9783031267710

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Intelligence, Creativity, and Wisdom Exploring their Connections and Distinctions Edited by Robert J. Sternberg James C. Kaufman Sareh Karami

Intelligence, Creativity, and Wisdom

Robert J. Sternberg James C. Kaufman  •  Sareh Karami Editors

Intelligence, Creativity, and Wisdom Exploring their Connections and Distinctions

Editors Robert J. Sternberg College of Human Ecology Cornell University Ithaca, NY, USA

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

Sareh Karami Educational Psychology Faculty Mississippi State University Starkville, MS, USA

ISBN 978-3-031-26771-0    ISBN 978-3-031-26772-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26772-7 © 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. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Preface

To many of us, it feels different to (a) understand a difficult reading passage or to solve a complex mathematical problem, (b) generate a novel and useful idea, or (c) give advice to someone, including ourselves, about a difficult life problem they (or we) are dealing with. Perhaps as a result of the different feeling each kind of mental processing generates, laypersons and professionals alike have viewed intelligence (as in problem “a”), creativity (as in problem “b”), and wisdom (as in problem “c”) as being different psychological constructs. But are they really different? Intelligence, creativity, and wisdom have been studied by scholars in a wide variety of areas of investigation, including psychology, of course, but also philosophy, anthropology, business, education, and many other fields. Their investigations are certainly nothing new. The ancient Greek philosophers, Plato and Aristotle, were students of these constructs. Moreover, indigenous people have had ideas about these constructs extending as far back in history as we possibly can go. In this volume, we seek to understand what these constructs are and how they are interrelated. We asked leading experts who study intelligence, creativity, and wisdom to provide their insights on the relations of these constructs. Some of the experts specialize more in intelligence, others focus more on creativity, and still others emphasize wisdom. But the experts all touch upon all three constructs in their work. All these experts agreed that the v

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constructs are interrelated, but they had a variety of views on the exact nature of the interrelation. We hope you enjoy reading about their varied perspectives. Why is it even important to understand the interrelations among the constructs? The main reason is that, in today’s world, individuals need some of all three to succeed in life. They need to be able to analyze existing problems, to create novel and useful solutions to intractable problems that have resisted easy solutions, and to provide sage advice to people and organizations facing challenging real-world problems. But if someone is good at doing one of these things—thinking intelligently, creatively, or wisely—can we count on them being good at others? If society, through its systems of education and assessment, places the most emphasis on intelligence, how will this emphasis impact the development of other constructs? Will it delay their development? Have no effect? Could an early emphasis on intelligence even potentially benefit creativity or wisdom down the line, or might they actually impede the development of wisdom by leading students to ignore the importance of wisdom in life? We are grateful to our editors at Palgrave Macmillan for supporting the development of this book. Because the world so desperately needs future young citizens who develop as fully as possible their intelligence, creativity, and wisdom, we dedicate the book to our children: Bob Sternberg: Seth, Sara (Green), Samuel, Brittany, Melody; James Kaufman: Jacob, Asher; and Sareh Karami: Termeh (Ghahremani). Ithaca, NY, USA Storrs, CT, USA  Starkville, MS, USA 

Robert J. Sternberg James C. Kaufman Sareh Karami

Contents

1 Introduction:  Intelligence, Creativity, and Wisdom—A Brief Intellectual History of the Theory and Research on their Interrelationships  1 Robert J. Sternberg 2 An  Interdisciplinary Exploration Revealing Phenomena That Facilitate or Prevent Interconnections Among Intelligence, Creativity, and Wisdom 21 Don Ambrose 3 Navigating  with Intelligence, Creativity, Personality, Emotion, and Wisdom in the Space-Time Continuum 49 Giovanni Emanuele Corazza and Todd Lubart 4 Looking  at Intelligence, Creativity, and Wisdom in the Chinese Way: A Troika Model of Mind Power 79 David Yun Dai and Weihua Niu 5 Is  Being a Smart, Creative, and Intellectually Humble Scientist Possible?103 Gregory J. Feist vii

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6 Wisdom,  Intelligence and Creativity: An International Historical Perspective125 Michel Ferrari, Fengyan Wang, Rasool Kord Noghabi, Zhe Feng, and Pouria Saffaran 7 Wisdom,  Intelligence, and Creativity Are Not the Same: But the World Needs Them All153 Judith Glück 8 Intelligence  and Wisdom’s Role in Moral Versus Amoral Creativity177 Hansika Kapoor, Simon Henderson, and James C. Kaufman 9 Intelligence,  Creativity, and Wisdom: The Three Musketeers of Positive Change199 Maciej Karwowski 10 Intelligence,  Creativity, and Wisdom: A Case for Complex Problem Solving?225 Florian Krieger and Samuel Greiff 11 Determining  the ‘Common Good’ in Educating for Intelligence, Creativity, and Wisdom251 Zane M. Diamond and Shane N. Phillipson 12 Integrating  Intelligence, Creativity, Wisdom: The Role of Emotions287 Zorana Ivcevic and Garo Green 13 Wise  Choices for Children: Enabling Students to Develop Their Creative Productivity and Wisdom with Opportunities, Resources, and Encouragement315 Sally M. Reis, Joseph S. Renzulli, and Julie Delgado

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14 Intelligence,  Creativity, Wisdom: A 6P Analysis339 Robert J. Sternberg and Sareh Karami 15 Intelligence,  Creativity, and Wisdom Are Situated in the Interaction Among Person × Task × Situation367 Robert J. Sternberg, Catrinel Tromp, and Sareh Karami I ndex387

Notes on Contributors

Don Ambrose, PhD is a scholar of creative intelligence at Rider University, and editor of the Roeper Review. He initiates and leads numerous interdisciplinary projects on giftedness, creativity, and talent development involving eminent researchers from diverse fields (e.g., ethical philosophy, neuroscience, history, political science, mathematics, theoretical physics…). Don has won international, national, and institutional awards from the American Creativity Association, the International Center for Innovation in Education, and the National Association for Gifted Children (distinguished scholar award), among others. He has done keynote presentations throughout the world. Giovanni Emanuele Corazza  is a Full Professor at the Alma Mater Studiorum University of Bologna, President of the Fondazione Guglielmo Marconi, founder of the Marconi Institute for Creativity (MIC), Member of the Board of the International Society for the Study of Creativity and Innovation (ISSCI). He was Member of the Board of Directors of the University of Bologna in the years 2012–2018, President of the CINECA consortium for supercomputing in the years 2017–2019, Head of the Department of Electronics, Computer Science and Systems (DEIS) in the years 2009–2012, Chairman of the School for Telecommunications in the years 2000–2003. His research interests are focused on the development of the Dynamic Creativity Framework and on the relationship xi

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between intelligence and creativity. The Marconi Institute for Creativity (MIC) was founded in 2011 with the purpose of establishing creative thinking as a science. The three pillars upon which MIC operates are those of scientific research, education activities, and support to the process of creativity and innovation. David Yun Dai, PhD is Professor of Educational and Counseling Psychology at University at Albany, State University of New York. Dr. Dai’s research interests include psychology of talent development, conceptual foundations of gifted education, and research methodology in gifted education and talent development. Dr. Dai was the recipient of the Distinguished Scholar Award in 2017 conferred by the National Association for Gifted Children (USA). He currently serves on the editorial boards of Gifted Child Quarterly, Journal for the Education of the Gifted, Roeper Review, Gifted Education International (Turkey), and Journal of Special Education (Taiwan). Julie Delgado is a PhD student in Educational Psychology at the University of Connecticut dual majoring in Giftedness, Creativity, and Talent Development and Special Education, currently serving as a graduate research assistant on Project 2e-ASD. She received her BA from the University of Montana in Elementary Education with areas of emphasis in Mathematics and Psychology (2005) and her MA in Curriculum and Instruction Mathematics Major (2013) from University of Texas Arlington. Delgado taught elementary general education in Montana for 15 years. Her research interests involve underserved populations, emphasizing in students who are twice- exceptional and from lower socio-­ economic backgrounds. Zane M. Diamond (Faculty of Education at Monash University) researches wisdom in the field of sociology of education (sub-field crosscultural and comparative pedagogy). She employs theoretical perspectives drawn from ancient wisdom traditions, Indigenist, social exchange, organizational change, and intelligent complex adaptive systems theories to develop an understanding of how to incorporate diverse wisdom pedagogies into modern education systems.

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Gregory J. Feist  is Professor of Psychology at San Jose State University (PhD, 1991, University of California at Berkeley). His work is widely published in creativity and the psychology of science. He is co-author of the Psychology: Perspectives and Connections, Theories of Personality, and co-editor of the Handbook of the Psychology of Science and The Cambridge Handbook of Creativity and Personality Research. Zhe Feng  is a fourth year PhD candidate in Developmental Psychology and Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, Canada. Taking cross-cultural and mixed method approaches, she has been conducting research in areas of wisdom and imagination under the supervision of Dr. Michel Ferrari and Dr. Gerald Cupchik. Her PhD thesis focuses on changes in personal and life aspirations since COVID-19 and their implications on one’s plans for education and career development, with a comparison between the United States, Canada, mainland China, and Taiwan. Fengyan Wang  is a professor at the School of Psychology of Nanjing Normal University and also deputy director of the Institute of Moral Education at Nanjing Normal University. Fengyan studies Chinese cultural psychology and the psychology of wisdom. Michel Ferrari  is professor in the Department of Applied Psychology and Human Development at the University of Toronto’s Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE). As Director of the Wisdom and Identity Lab, he explores the meaning of personal wisdom in people at different ages (from children to the elderly) from different nations. In applied practice, he and his students have studied wisdom and personal identity in marginalized populations; most notably, of people diagnosed with autism. He and his students and colleagues have published over 80 articles and book chapters and edited 14 books, most recently: Coping Wisely with Adversity (with M. Munroe, in press). Judith Glück  is professor of developmental psychology at University of Klagenfurt, Austria. Her main topic of research is wisdom: how it develops, how it can be measured, and what can be done to foster it in individuals as well as communities.

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Notes on Contributors

Garo Green  received his bachelor’s in psychology from California State University, San Bernardino. He is currently a doctoral student in the Clinical Psychology program at Midwestern University. His clinical and research interests include the relationship between emotion regulation and, personality and mood disorders, psychedelic therapy, creativity, and technology. He is the co-­editor of Video Games and Creativity from Elsevier Science. He was also one of the founding employees of Lynda. com, an online education company purchased by LinkedIn in 2015. Samuel Greiff is Full Professor of Educational Assessment and Psychology at University of Luxembourg. He holds a PhD in cognitive and experimental psychology from the University of Heidelberg, Germany. Greiff has been awarded research funds by diverse funding organizations; he was Fellow in the Luxembourg research programme of excellence, and has published articles in national and international scientific journals and books. He serves (or has served) as editor for several journals, for instance as editor-in-chief for Learning & Individual Differences and European Journal of Psychological Assessment, as associate editor for Intelligence and Journal of Educational Psychology. His work mainly focuses on educational and psychological assessment, cognitive and non-­cognitive skills, and education in the twenty-first century. Zorana Ivcevic, PhD  is a Senior Research Scientist at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence. Her research examines the role of emotion and emotional intelligence in creativity and well-being. Hansika Kapoor, PhD is Research Author at the Department of Psychology at Monk Prayogshala—a not-for-profit academic research institution in Mumbai, India. She holds a PhD from IIT, Bombay in the area of dark creativity; specifically, her thesis explored the measurement, facets, and process components of negative creativity through behavioral and electrophysiological methods. She is the recipient of the FulbrightNehru Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship (2019–2020). Kapoor has been cited as a subject matter expert in numerous features on social and cognitive psychology in the Indian context. Her research interests lie in cognitive, social, and moral psychology.

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James C. Kaufman  is an American psychologist known for his research on creativity. He is a Professor of Educational Psychology at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, Connecticut. Previously, he taught at the California State University, San Bernardino, where he directed the Learning Research Institute. Sareh Karami is Assistant Professor of Educational Psychology at Mississippi State University. Her PhD is from Purdue University. She won the Carolyn Callahan NAGC Doctoral Student Award. Maciej Karwowski, PhD  is an Associate Professor of Psychology and Director of Psychology of Creativity Lab at the University of Wrocław, Poland. His research explores the possibilities of enriching creativity in education and the role of creativity in more effective learning and teaching. Karwowski studies cognitive and non-cognitive antecedents and correlates of creative functioning, with a particular emphasis on creative self-beliefs and intelligence. He co-edits the open-access journal “Creativity: Theories-Research-Applications” and serves as an associate editor of the Journal of Creative Behavior. Rasool Kord Noghabi  obtained his PhD Degree (2004) in Educational Psychology from the Allameh Tabataba’i University, and is currently an associate professor in the Department of Psychology at the Bu-Ali Sina University in Iran.He has published several books to date, including Theories in Education (with Dr. Fariborz Dortaj; 2012), Psychology of Wisdom (2017), and Wisdom Therapy (2021), in addition to publishing more than 80 academic research articles. Kord Noghabi is the founder of the Wisdom Education School System in Iran, which strives to incorporate scientific concepts of wisdom into the elementary school curriculum. There are currently three schools in Iran operating based on this model. Florian Krieger is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Luxembourg. His research focuses mainly on human intelligence, specifically on assessments, contributing factors, and implications for contemporary societies. Todd Lubart  professor of psychology, University of Paris, president of the international society for the study of creativity and innovation

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(ISSCI). His research focuses on creativity, its development, and individual differences. Weihua Niu, PhD is Professor of Psychology at Pace University, New York. Niu’s primary research areas are creativity, critical thinking, educational testing, cultural influence on higher cognitive functioning, and comparative education. She has published more than 50 articles and book chapters in these areas. She currently serves on the editorial boards of Journal of Creative Behavior, Psychology of Popular Media Culture, Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, and Frontiers in Psychology. Shane N. Phillipson (Faculty of Education at Monash University) research interests focus on the link between culture and academic achievement. His most recent authored publication (with Sivanes Phillpson) tests theoretical models of expertise by drawing on expert teachers from Australia, Finland, Hong Kong, and the US (The Power of Expert Teaching: Lessons for Modern Education). Sally M. Reis  holds the Letitia Neag Chair in Educational Psychology, is a Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor in the Neag School of Education and the former Vice Provost for Academic Affairs at the University of Connecticut. She has authored and co-authored over 280 articles, books, book chapters, monographs and technical reports, and works as part of a research team that has generated over 60 million dollars in grants in the last 15 years. Joseph S. Renzulli  is a leader and pioneer in gifted education and applying the pedagogy of gifted education teaching strategies to all students. He received the Harold W. McGraw, Jr. Award for Innovation in Education and was a consultant to the White House Task Force on Education of the Gifted and Talented. His work on the Three Ring Conception of Giftedness, the Enrichment Triad Model and curriculum compacting and differentiation were pioneering efforts in the 1970s, and he has contributed hundreds of books, book chapters, articles, and monographs to professional literature, many of which have been translated to other languages.

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Pouria Saffaran  completed his undergraduate studies in Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of Toronto (2020) and is enrolled in the Master of Education in Developmental Psychology program at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE). Saffaran is currently involved in research examining implicit theories of wisdom in non-­ Western countries, such as Iran. Robert J. Sternberg  is Professor of Psychology at Cornell University and Honorary Professor of Psychology at the University of Heidelberg, Germany. His PhD is from Stanford and he holds 13 honorary doctorates. He is a past-winner of the Grawemeyer Award in Psychology and has won the James and Cattell Awards from the Association for Psychological Science. Catrinel Tromp  is Associate Professor of Psychology at Rider University. Her PhD is from Princeton University. She studies constraints in creative thinking.

List of Figures

Fig. 2.1

Three-circle Venn diagram showing examples of ways in which intelligence, creativity, and wisdom can separate or overlap23 Fig. 2.2 The Trek: Visual metaphor capturing and conveying the essence of interdisciplinary academic research pertaining to twenty-first century trends and issues (from Ambrose, 2022b) 38 Fig. 3.1 The Space-Time Continuum (STC) and its four quadrants 51 Fig. 7.1 Relationships of crystallized intelligence, fluid intelligence, creativity, and wisdom with age (data from Staudinger & Baltes, 1996) 164 Fig. 7.2 Relationships of wisdom with crystallized intelligence, fluid intelligence, and creativity (data from Staudinger & Baltes, 1996)168 Fig. 8.1 A summary of the AMORAL model of dark creativity 180 Fig. 9.1 A place and role played by wisdom in the creative agency 217 Fig. 10.1 Result from Web of Science search (August 2022) 232 Fig. 10.2 The CPS task “Climate Control,” which was part of the PISA 2012 problem solving assessment (OECD, 2014). Copyright 2014 by OECD 237 Fig. 10.3 Summary of our view on the relations between concepts of this chapter and problem-solving processes. Thicker lines indicate a stronger relationship 238

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Fig. 11.1 Fig. 11.2 Fig. 13.1 Fig. 15.1

List of Figures

The three dimensions of the Australian Curriculum Three values in five languages Operation Houndstooth From abilities to meta-intelligence: a hierarchical representation of the translation of propensities into action

261 276 333 374

List of Tables

Table 1.1

Five models of the relationship between intelligence, creativity, and wisdom 2 Table 1.2 Correlations of ratings for behaviors associated with intelligence, creativity, and wisdom 3 Table 1.3 Dimensions of implicit theories of ratings of intelligence, creativity, and wisdom: positive and negative polarities 4 Table 1.4 How propensities become elements of higher-order constructs14 Table 5.1 Mean IQ scores of different groups of scientists 108 Table 8.1 Deception case studies and the presence of creativity, intelligence, and wisdom 186 Table 11.1 Elements and expectations of Australian students after their completion of Year 10 263 Table 11.2 Example of integration of themes and topics for the Awareness program 274

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1 Introduction: Intelligence, Creativity, and Wisdom—A Brief Intellectual History of the Theory and Research on their Interrelationships Robert J. Sternberg

The history of theory and research on the interrelationships among intelligence, creativity, and wisdom is a brief one. There simply has not been much research simultaneously attempting to interrelate all three. It might be useful, at the outset, to survey five models of the relationship and then to review the literature in terms of what it suggests about the relative validities of the models. The models are summarized in Table 1.1.

R. J. Sternberg (*) Department of Psychology, College of Human Ecology, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. J. Sternberg et al. (eds.), Intelligence, Creativity, and Wisdom, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26772-7_1

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Table 1.1 Five models of the relationship between intelligence, creativity, and wisdom Description of Model Model

What the Model Claims

Model Labeling Model Intelligence, creativity, and wisdom are I whatever they are labeled to be Model Fully Convergent Intelligence, creativity, and wisdom are II Model: Intelligence essentially the same thing, and can be Dominates wrapped up into intelligence Model Partially Convergent Intelligence, creativity, and wisdom overlap but III Model are not the same thing; rather, they share propensities that are determined through theoretical analyses of each construct Model Fully Divergent Intelligence, creativity, and wisdom are distinct IV Model phenomena that happen to overlap in some of their functions

F ive Models of the Relationship among Intelligence, Creativity, and Wisdom Model I. Labeling Model This model states that intelligence, creativity, and wisdom are whatever they are labeled to be. They are essentially labels for behavior. Their nature is decided by folk theories, sometimes called implicit theories (Sternberg, 1987). Implicit theories on this view are related exactly as people say they are. This model was first articulated by Sternberg (1985b). Sternberg examined the interrelations in several different ways. A first way was to look at the intercorrelations between ratings of a master list of behaviors for intelligence, creativity, and wisdom. In other words, how similar were the ratings of behaviors when presented as characterizing intelligence, creativity, or wisdom? The correlations differed by the population that was doing the ratings. Table 1.2 summarizes the correlations Sternberg obtained for the various groups. Here are the key findings: 1. All of the correlations are statistically significant. It thus appears that both professors in the various occupations studied (art, business, phi-

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Table 1.2  Correlations of ratings for behaviors associated with intelligence, creativity, and wisdoma Profession (Professors in Different Fields)

Intelligence with Creativity

Intelligence with Wisdom

Creativity with Wisdom

Art Business Philosophy Physics Laypersons

0.55 0.29 0.56 0.64 0.33

0.78 0.51 0.42 0.68 0.65

0.48 −0.34 0.27 0.14 0.27

a

Data from Sternberg (1985b). All correlations are statistically significant (p < 0.05)

losophy, and physics) and laypersons all see intelligence, creativity, and wisdom as behaviorally intertwined—that is, as non-independent. 2. All of the correlations are positive except one—that between creativity and wisdom for those specializing in business. The business professors seem to have believed that higher creativity is associated with lesser wisdom. In a world in which creativity has been used by business, and in many cases for ends that negatively impact the world, the finding is worth heeding. So many products have been marketed creatively but aggressively that are bad for people’s health—such as cigarettes, foods that are high in sugar and saturated fat, alcohol, and more recently, social media—that one may sometimes wonder whether those in business heed responsibilities to humanity as carefully as they should. 3. In every case except philosophy, intelligence is viewed as closer to wisdom than to creativity. Perhaps this is because creativity, according to the standard definition, requires an idea to be novel (as well as compelling) (Kaufman & Sternberg, 2019), whereas neither intelligence nor wisdom requires novelty. 4. For every group, the lowest correlation is creativity with wisdom. Perhaps this is because wisdom requires achievement of a common good (Sternberg & Glück, 2019), whereas creativity is often deployed without regard to the common good. 5. Although there are differences in patterns of correlations between groups of professors in different professions, on the one hand, and between professors in different professions and laypersons, on the

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other, with the exception of the negative correlation between creativity and wisdom for business professors, the patterns seem to be quite similar across groups. A second way to look at the results of the study is simply in terms of the factors elicited by nonmetric multidimensional scalings from ratings, in this case of college students. The names of the factors are shown in Table 1.3. The factors obtained for intelligence are similar to those obtained by, but more elaborated than those from, Sternberg et al. (1981), where the main factors were practical problem solving, verbal ability, and social competence. What is perhaps most interesting in both studies (Sternberg, 1985b; Sternberg et  al., 1981) is that implicit theories of intelligence Table 1.3  Dimensions of implicit theories of ratings of intelligence, creativity, and wisdom: positive and negative polaritiesa Intelligence  Practical problem-solving ability  Verbal ability  Intellectual balance and integration  Goal orientation and attainment  Contextual intelligence  Fluid thought Creativity  Nonentrenchment  Integration and intellectuality  Aesthetic taste and imagination  Decisional skill and flexibility  Perspicacity  Drive for accomplishment and recognition  Inquisitiveness  Intuition Wisdom  Reasoning ability  Sagacity  Learning from ideas and environment  Expeditious use of information  Perspicacity  Judgment Data from Sternberg (1985b). In each category, dimensions are listed from strongest to weakest

a

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seem to go well beyond what is measured by standardized tests of intelligence. Implicit theories are broader than most explicit theories of intelligence, which tend to emphasize general intelligence and its subfactors (Carroll, 1993; McGrew, 2005; see summaries of theories in Sternberg, 2020b, 2020c). This greater breadth in implicit theories is not limited to the United States but appears to occur around the world (Sternberg, 2020a). The implicit theories of creativity and wisdom are also quite broad in comparison with traditional theories of creativity and wisdom (Kaufman & Sternberg, 2019; Sternberg & Glück, 2019). They also are highly related, as the correlations showed. Implicit theories of intelligence seem to have at least some aspects of implicit theories of creativity (e.g., “fluid thought,”) which is used to deal with relatively novel tasks and situations, and of wisdom (e.g., “Intellectual balance and integration”), which is used to center oneself so as not to become too extreme in one’s thinking. Implicit theories of creativity seem to have some aspects of implicit theories of intelligence (e.g., “Integration and intellectuality”) as well as of wisdom (e.g., “perspicacity”). And implicit theories of wisdom seem to have some aspects of implicit theories of both intelligence (e.g., “Reasoning ability” and “Judgment”) as well as of creativity (“perspicacity”). At least in people’s implicit theories, the three constructs are clearly interrelated. Can people actually use their implicit theories of intelligence, creativity, and wisdom to make judgments about others? Apparently, they can. When Sternberg (1985b) asked people rate the intelligence, creativity, and wisdom of hypothetical individuals based on verbal descriptions of the people, the multiple squared correlations (percentage of variance accounted for) were 0.85, 0.87, and 0.92, for intelligence, creativity, and wisdom, respectively. No IQ, creativity, or wisdom test predicts at that level. So people can use their implicit theories to make judgments about people in a way that they cannot use any conventional test of these constructs. On the one hand, such theories would suggest that intelligence, creativity, and wisdom are broader in people’s folk theories than they are in traditional explicit theories, as posed by experts. They are also interrelated but distinct. On the other hand, one could argue that folk theories are what they are—conceptions of people without any particular expertise in

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the construct about which they are theorizing—so one should scarcely pay attention to them. Such an argument would be wrong, however. First, implicit theories are the basis of how people actually make the most of their judgments. When people converse with each other or when they interview others for jobs, or for romantic liaisons, they typically do not give the others a formal test of intelligence, creativity, or wisdom. They judge the others on the basis of their implicit theories of the constructs. So, to the extent we are interested in how such judgments are made in the world, implicit theories may tell us more than formal explicit ones. Second, the results of Sternberg (1985b) show that people can make judgments others quite accurately, at least based on their own implicit theories. So, people not only have the implicit theories, but also can used them with a fair degree of accuracy. That, of course, assumes the implicit theories are accurate, which they may or may not be. The problem is that it is unclear what the “standard” would be for judging their accuracy. Finally, implicit theories are the bases of formal, explicit theories in any case. When psychometricians, cognitivists, or any other psychologists decide what tasks to use to study intelligence, creativity, or wisdom, their implicit theories guide them in the selection of tasks. When they interpret the results of participants taking these tasks, the researchers’ implicit theories guide them. In other words, there really is no escape from implicit theories. Even trained scientists use them to guide their research, whether or not they realize what they are doing. Yet, most scientist would want to go beyond implicit theories in their research—to have other bases for deciding what the overlap is between intelligence, creativity, and wisdom. So, it is time to look at some of the other models of the overlap between the constructs.

 odel II. Fully Convergent Model (or Intelligence is M What Really Matters) The closest theorists seem to come to a fully convergent model—given that there is not a large literature on the convergence of constructs, is not that intelligence, creativity, and wisdom are exactly the same thing, but

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rather, that the only one that practically matters is intelligence. That is, with regard to practical prediction, on this view, intelligence is what matters, and creativity and wisdom, to the extent they even exist as separate constructs, might as well be folded into it. The form this literature generally takes is to show that general intelligence is highly predictive of many future outcomes and swamps any other measures. That is, the psychologists in this camp do not say there is nothing else, but rather, that there is not much else that clearly matters, except perhaps for conscientiousness, in predicting future outcomes. Examples of such literature include  Herrnstein and Murray (1994), Brand (1996), Schmidt and Hunter (1998), Gottfredson (1997, 1998), Jensen (1998), Lubinski (2004), Deary et al. (2009), and Sackett et al. (2020) (see various arguments regarding the g factor in Sternberg & Grigorenko, 2002). A more modulated view was taken by Ceci (1996). There is a smaller literature on the use of creativity tests to predict life achievement, and especially creative achievement (e.g., Jauk et al., 2014), but even that literature tends to examine additionally intelligence as measured by conventional tests. In the case of Jauk et al., it is suggested that intelligence may modulate how effectively creativity is used in life. There are various studies on the predictive validity of creativity tests, and they do seem to predict future creative performance, at least to some extent (e.g., Carson et  al., 2005; Cseh & Jeffries, 2019; Gajda et  al., 2017; Primi et al., 2019). The issue this work raises is why intelligence predominates in the study of intelligence, creativity, wisdom, and their interrelationships. A first reason might be that intelligence is dominant. It may simply be the origin or an origin from which the others spring. A second reason might be that, in some form, it predominates. For example, it has recently been suggested that meta-intelligence—which is the coordination of intelligence, creativity, and wisdom (Sternberg, 2021b; Sternberg et al., 2021)—dominates our higher-order thinking. On this view, meta-intelligence controls when and how intelligence, creativity, and wisdom are used to solve real-world problems. And a third possible reason is simply that intelligence testing is more advanced, and that because the operationalization predominates, the conceptualization is given prominence.

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Model III. Partially Convergent Model According to Model III, intelligence, creativity, and wisdom are all part and parcel of the same thing. All of them are aspects of a unitary phenomenon that may serve different purposes or different functions at different times or in different places. The theories that come closest to such a model are the theories that attempt to account for intelligence, creativity, and perhaps wisdom through expansive models of general intelligence (see also Lynch & Kaufman, 2019; Sternberg & O’Hara, 2000; Sternberg et al., 2019). On this view, “intelligence” is seen as a broad category that can encompass much or all of creativity, wisdom, and other human abilities. Generally, the idea is that creativity is a part of intelligence as conceived in terms of a multi-faceted model of some kind. J. P. Guilford’s (1967, 1982) Structure-of-Intellect (SOI) theory identified creativity as primarily residing within the portion of his cube-like structure dealing with divergent production. The model consisted of, at various times, 120, 150, or 180 cubes, divided into three categories of operations, contents, and products. Divergent thinking often has been seen as a, if not the, cornerstone of creative thinking (Runco, 2014). In the model, divergent thinking could be applied to visual, auditory, symbolic, semantic, and behavioral contents, and to products including units, classes, relations, systems, transformations, and implications. Thus, in this model, creativity could be incorporated, in large part, into intelligence. In Raymond Cattell’s (1971) original model of fluid and crystallized intelligence, creativity was mostly associated with fluid intelligence, which involves the ability to think in novel ways. Examples of problems measuring fluid intelligence are letter series, figure classifications, verbal analogies, and figural matrix problems. Sternberg (2017) suggested that creativity could be measured by the kinds of problems sampled by fluid intelligence tests, but that the tests had to increase their novelty beyond the usual level for them truly to measure creative thinking. He used information-processing analysis to study nonentrenched thinking, that is, thinking in ways that defy

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ordinary expectations. For example, in one task, participants were asked to imagine the planet Kyron, where some people are born young and die young, others are born young and die old, still others are born old and die young, and finally, others are born old and die old. They had to reason with these nonentrenched concepts (Sternberg, 1982). In another task (Sternberg & Gastel, 1989a, 1989b), participants had to solve analogies, but they were nonentrenched. For example, the participant might be asked to imagine that money really did fall off trees and then solve an analogy as though it were true. The Cattell-Horn-Carroll model (McGrew, 2005) is an expansion of Carroll’s (1993) three-stratum model of intelligence. According to this model—one of a number of hierarchical factorial models of intelligence (see, e.g., Macintosh, 2011)—intelligence can be understood in terms of factors of differing levels of generality. At the top would be general intelligence, or g, and at the intermediate level would be factors of intermediate generality. More specific factors would be at bottom level. Creativity in this model has been understood primarily in terms of long-term storage and retrieval (Avitia & Kaufman, 2014). More recently, this long-­ term storage and retrieval factor has split into having a learning efficiency component and a retrieval fluency component; it is in the latter aspect where creativity is placed (Kaufman et al., 2019). Howard Gardner (1983, 2011b) proposed a theory of multiple intelligences, according to which intelligence is conceived not as unitary but rather as multiple. In the expanded version of this theory, there are eight multiple intelligences: linguistic, logical-mathematical, spatial, musical, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalist (added in the 2011 account). Gardner (2011a) also proposed an account of creativity. He never claimed that intelligence is all there is to creativity, but he sought to understand the works of seven great creators in history through his multiple intelligences, with each creator exemplifying an extremely high level of one of the intelligences. For example, T. S. Eliot was alleged to show how linguistic intelligence could be applied in an exceptionally creative way; Martha Graham was alleged to exhibit an exceptionally creative fashion a high level of bodily-kinesthetic intelligence. Robert J.  Sternberg (1985a, 2020a) also never claimed that intelligence could be used fully to understand creativity, but he suggested that

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an aspect of intelligence, broadly conceived, is creative intelligence. Creative intelligence would encompass those aspects of creativity that are cognitive, including but not limited to divergent thinking and especially nonentrenched thinking, as described above. Insightful thinking, in particular, would be a point of intersection between intelligence and creativity (Sternberg & Davidson, 1999). Processes of insight would be ones like selective encoding—deciding what information in a large field of information is relevant for one’s particular problem-solving purposes; selective comparison—deciding what information stored in long-term memory is relevant; and selective combination—putting together newly encoded information with information from long-term memory that, together, can be used to solve a challenging problem. An example of a selective encoding problem would be found in the “socks problem”: You have blue and black socks in a drawer mixed in a ratio of 4:5. “How many socks would you have to take out of the drawer to be guaranteed of having a pair of matching colors?” In this problem, selective encoding would be used to recognize that the ratio of 4:5 is irrelevant. No matter what the ratio, one always would have a pair after withdrawing three socks, as even if the first two were of different colors, the third always would match the color of one or the other. I have discussed theories in which intelligence and creativity are seen as being capable of incorporation into an overarching theory of intelligence (or in Gardner’s case, multiple intelligences). The relationship of intelligence to wisdom has not been as well defined but nevertheless it has emerged from the literature (Lynch & Kaufman, 2019; Sternberg, 1990; Sternberg et al., 2019). Once again, a broad model of intelligence can incorporate aspects of wisdom. In Gardner’s (1983) theory, interpersonal and intrapersonal intelligences intersect with wisdom. Interpersonal intelligence involves one’s understanding of other people and of how to relate effectively to other people. Intrapersonal intelligence involves one’s understanding of oneself and of how to relate effectively to oneself. Gardner et al. (2002) have suggested that good work—which we might here call “wise” work—is at the intersection of excellence, and especially intellectual excellence—and wisdom. People who do good work are wise, at least in part, in the sense

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that they use their multiple intelligences to produce work that is both excellent and distinctively ethical. The most recent iteration of Sternberg’s theory of successful intelligence (Sternberg, 2020a; see also the precursor, Sternberg, 2003) incorporates wisdom into his broad theory of intelligence. On this view, successfully intelligent people are creatively intelligent in generating novel and useful ideas; analytically intelligent in ascertaining whether these ideas are logical, coherent, and rational; practically intelligent in applying the ideas effectively to the world and in persuading other people to believe in the ideas; and wise in seeking to ensure that the ideas help to promote a common good, in the long-term as well as the short-term, by balancing one’s own with others’ and larger interests. In a newer version of his theory (Sternberg, 2021a) has suggested that society’s greatest mistake has been to promote conventional views of intelligence, whereby people learn to use their intelligence to promote their own success and well-being, rather than the well-being of humanity and other species collectively. Indeed, collective intelligence (Malone & Woolley, 2020; Varshney & Barbey, 2021) might be seen as a manifestation of intelligence applied wisely, in that it needs to satisfy some collective interest.

Model IV. Fully Divergent Model According to this model, intelligence, creativity, and wisdom are distinct phenomena that happen to overlap in some of their functions but that are nevertheless entirely independent of each other. There is one overriding curiosity. On the one hand, I am aware of no overarching model that makes this claim; on the other hand, intelligence, creativity, and wisdom are largely three distinct fields with relatively little overlap in the people who specialize in them. Thus, the field of psychology, broadly defined, has treated intelligence, creativity, and wisdom as largely distinct and has generated three, largely although not totally independent, lines of inquiry. There are various ways in which such independence seems to manifest itself at the level of the field (Csikszentmihalyi, 1988). First, the textbooks of the fields are distinct. In the last decade or so, there have been textbooks on intelligence (e.g., Hunt, 2010; Macintosh,

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2011; Sternberg, 2020c, 2020d), on creativity (e.g., Kaufman, 2016; Kaufman & Sternberg, 2021; Plucker, 2016; Runco, 2014; Sawyer, 2012), and on wisdom (Sternberg & Glück, 2022). The fact that there are separate textbooks pretty much assures that students will learn about the fields as separate disciplines. I have taught courses on intelligence and creativity, and will be teaching a course on wisdom in the coming academic year. A perusal of the contents of the textbooks in the three fields reveals very little overlap: They really are teaching about different things. And they are used in distinct courses. Second, the handbooks of the fields are distinct (which, I’m sorry to say, is partly my own doing). The most recent ones are, for intelligence, Sternberg (2020b); for creativity, Kaufman and Sternberg (2019); and for wisdom, Sternberg and Glück (2019). Previous ones have generally been earlier editions of these (for intelligence and creativity), although Wolman (1985) and Goldstein et al. (2015) also edited handbooks of intelligence and Flanagan and McDonough (2018) edited what was essentially a handbook of intellectual assessment. The contents of these handbooks, like those of the textbooks, are largely distinct, although often the handbooks will have one chapter interrelating two or more of the constructs of intelligence, creativity, and wisdom (e.g., Glück, 2020; Lynch & Kaufman, 2019; Plucker et al., 2020; Sternberg et al., 2019). Third, the professional societies are largely distinct. Intelligence has, for example, the International Society for Intelligence Research (ISIR) (and of course, there are various “high-IQ” societies that use IQ as a basis for admission). Creativity has, for example, the Society for the Neuroscience of Creativity (SfNC), the International Society for the Study of Creativity and Innovation (ISSCI), and Division 10 (Society for the Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts) of the American Psychological Association. Wisdom has The Wisdom Society and the American Wisdom Association (which is Buddhist in orientation). Fourth, intelligence and creativity have distinct journals. Although there are some crossover articles that could go in one kind of journal or another, for the most part, the journals are completely distinct. Intelligence has, for example, the journal Intelligence and the Journal of Intelligence. Creativity has the Creativity Research Journal, the Journal of Creative Behavior, Thinking Skills and Creativity, and Psychology of Aesthetics,

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Creativity, and the Arts. There is at present no broad-reaching journal for the field of wisdom, although it is my understanding that one has been proposed. There is a journal called The Wisdom Journal, which is Buddhist in its orientation. Finally, the researchers themselves are, for the most part, different. Most researchers study intelligence, creativity, or wisdom, but not some combination. That said, there are a number of exceptions. All three editors of this book are among the exceptions. Indeed, we have put together this book in order to encourage researchers of each construct to explore the other constructs as well. But if one looks at contributors in the respective handbooks, they are, for the most part, different scholars (with some overlap). In summary, although I have been unable to find a theory that states that all three constructs—intelligence, creativity, and wisdom—are separate, in psychology, they have been treated as largely separate. We editors hope that this volume will be a step toward providing more integration than there has been in the past.

 ow Are Propensities Elevated to Becoming H Part of Intelligence, Creativity, and Wisdom? Researchers and practitioners who study or work with intelligence, creativity, and wisdom get used to certain propensities being tied to each. These propensities are summarized in Sternberg and Karami (2021a, 2021b, 2021c). How do propensities get intertwined with higher-order constructs? Table 1.4 addresses this issue. First, at what I have referred to as Level I, there is a conceptualization of a propensity. It can be a cognitive propensity, a personality-based one, or some combination of the two (such as a cognitive style). Examples, as in the table, are verbal or spatial skills (both cognitively based) or openness to experience (personality-based). Second, at Level II, the propensity is somehow operationalized. A test is created to measure it. Without some kind of operationalization, the propensity usually does not go very far in the field. It remains hypothetical. The test may not be a

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Table 1.4  How propensities become elements of higher-order constructs Level What Happens

Formalization

Examples

Level Conceptualization I of Propensity

Cognitive Intrapersonal Interpersonal Personality

Level Operationalization II of Propensity Level Identification of III Propensity as Adaptive

Cognitive Tests Personality Tests Test Shows Reliability, Internal Validity, External Validity

Level Labeling of IV Propensity as Part of a Higher-­Order Construct

Test Is Included on Measures of Intelligence, Creativity, Personality, etc.

Verbal Skills Spatial Skills Divergent-Thinking Skills Openness to Experience Extraversion IQ Tests; SAT, ACT, GRE, MMPI, Big-5 Measures Tests Are Found to Have Internal (Factorial) Validity and External Validity: To Predict School or Work Performance, Usually Above 0.3 Level of Correlation The Actual Test Items and Subtests Found on Standardized Tests of Intelligence, Personality, Creativity, etc.

psychometrically great one—but there is some way of operationalizing whatever the propensity is so that it can be measured. Cognitive and personality tests are formalizations of propensities. Examples are IQ tests, college and university admissions tests, and various personality tests. The ability tests tend to be maximum-performance, the personality tests, typical-­performance, although not always. At Level III, the propensities are found to be “valid” in some way—to be more than just speculations inside a person’s head. It is shown that they can be measured with internal (usually factorial) and external validity (usually measures of convergent and discriminant validity). Finally, at Level IV, the propensities are elevated to being part of a higher-order construct, such as intelligence, creativity, and personality. The propensities then are measured on standardized tests of the construct and used in real-world classifications of people. On this view, much depends on the professional judgments of researchers and practitioners. There is no acid test for whether a given propensity is or should be associated with intelligence, creativity, wisdom, personality, or anything else. Rather, professionals reach some kind of consensus

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to elevate certain propensities through the levels and to leave others behind. Some propensities ultimately “make it”; others do not. For example, Galton (1883/1907/1973) proposed a number of psychophysical propensities—such as acuity of hearing and vision—as parts of intelligence (Level I). He operationalized them, measuring them in his exhibition at London’s Kensington Museum. But they failed at Level III—they did not show proper convergent/discriminant validity (Wissler, 1901). Hence, they were never successfully elevated to Level IV. In contrast, the cognitive tasks of Binet and Simon (1905) measuring judgment and related skills, successfully made it through all four levels and became part of the canon of what constitutes intelligence. In the same way, various tests of divergent thinking, such as the Torrance Tests (Torrance, 1974, 2008), were found to have some construct validity, and so divergent thinking was elevated to Level IV as an integral part of creativity. The Big Five (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism) similarly passed many tests of construct validity, and came to be viewed as core components of personality. In sum, there is a certain arbitrariness to what comes to be called “intelligence,” “creativity,” and “wisdom.” As time goes on, some propensities make it through the four levels; others do not. And others that may be important simply are never operationalized, so do not make it up the levels. This book will discuss many of the propensities, where they have ended up in terms of intelligence, creativity, and wisdom, and which ones have been uniquely assigned to one of the three and which have been viewed as jointly part of two or all three of these constructs.

References Avitia, M. J., & Kaufman, J. C. (2014). Beyond g and c: The relationship of rated creativity to long-term storage and retrieval (Glr). Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 8(3), 293–302. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0036772 Binet, A., & Simon, T. (1905). Méthodes nouvelles pour le diagnostic du niveau intellectuel des anormaux. L’Année psychologique, 11, 191–336. Brand, C. (1996). The g factor: General intelligence and its implications. Wiley.

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Carroll, J. B. (1993). Human cognitive abilities: A survey of factor-analytic studies. Cambridge University Press. Carson, S. H., Peterson, J. B., & Higgins, D. M. (2005). Reliability, validity, and factor structure of the Creative Achievement Questionnaire. Creativity Research Journal, 17, 37–50. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15326934crj1701_4 Cattell, R.  B. (1971). Intelligence: Its structure, growth, and action. Houghton-Mifflin. Ceci, S. J. (1996). General intelligence and life success: An introduction to the special theme. Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, 2(3–4), 403–417. https:// doi.org/10.1037/1076-­8971.2.3-­4.403 Cseh, G. M., & Jeffries, K. K. (2019). A scattered CAT: A critical evaluation of the Consensual Assessment Technique for creativity research. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 13(2), 159–166. https://doi.org/10.1037/ aca0000220 Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1988). Society, culture, and person: A systems view of creativity. In R.  J. Sternberg (Ed.), The nature of creativity (pp.  325–339). Cambridge University Press. Deary, I.  J., Whalley, L.  J., & Starr, J.  M. (2009). A lifetime of intelligence: Follow-up studies of the Scottish Mental Surveys of 1932 and 1947. American Psychological Association. Flanagan, D. P., & McDonough, E. M. (Eds.). (2018). Contemporary intellectual assessment. Guilford Press. Gajda, A., Karwowski, M., & Beghetto, R. A. (2017). Creativity and academic achievement: A meta-analysis. Journal of Educational Psychology, 109(2), 269–299. https://doi.org/10.1037/edu0000133 Galton, F. (1883/1907/1973). Inquiries into human faculty and its development. AMS Press. Gardner, H. (1983). Frames of mind: The theory of multiple intelligences. Basic Books. Gardner, H. (2011a). Creating minds: An anatomy of creativity seen through the lives of Freud, Einstein, Picasso, Stravinsky, Eliot, Graham, and Gandhi. Basic Books. Gardner, H. (2011b). Frames of mind: The theory of multiple intelligences (rev ed.). Basic Books. Gardner, H., Csikszentmihalyi, M., & Damon, W. (2002). Good work: When excellence and ethics meet. Basic Books. Glück, J. (2020). Intelligence and wisdom. In R. J. Sternberg (Ed.), Cambridge handbook of intelligence (2nd ed., pp. 1140–1158). Cambridge University Press.

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Goldstein, S., Princiotta, D., & Naglieri, J. A. (Eds.). (2015). Handbook of intelligence: Evolutionary theory, historical perspective, and current concepts. Springer. Gottfredson, L.  S. (1997). Why g matters: The complexity of everyday life. Intelligence, 24(1), 79–132. Gottfredson, L.  S. (1998, Winter). The general intelligence factor. Scientific American Presents, 9(4), 24–29. Guilford, J. P. (1967). The nature of human intelligence. McGraw-Hill. Guilford, J. P. (1982). Cognitive psychology’s ambiguities: Some suggested remedies. Psychological Review, 89(1), 48–59. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-­ 295X.89.1.48 Herrnstein, R. J., & Murray, C. (1994). The bell curve. Free Press. Hunt, E. (2010). Human intelligence. Cambridge University Press. Jauk, E., Benedek, M., & Neubauer, A. C. (2014). The road to creative achievement: A latent variable model of ability and personality predictors. European Journal of Personality, 28(1), 95–105. https://doi.org/10.1002/per.1941 Jensen, A. R. (1998). The g factor. Praeger. Kaufman, A.  S., Schneider, W.  J., & Kaufman, J.  C. (2019). Psychometric approaches to intelligence. In R.  J. Sternberg (Ed.), Human intelligence (pp. 67–103). Cambridge University Press. Kaufman, J. C. (2016). Creativity 101 (2nd ed.). Springer. Kaufman, J. C., & Sternberg, R. J. (Eds.). (2019). Cambridge handbook of creativity (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press. Kaufman, J. C., & Sternberg, R. J. (Eds.). (2021). Creativity: An introduction. Cambridge University Press. Lubinski, D. (2004). Introduction to the special section on cognitive abilities: 100 years after Spearman’s (1904) ‘General Intelligence,’ objectively determined and measured. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 86(1), 96–111. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-­3514.86.1.96 Lynch, S. F., & Kaufman, J. C. (2019). Creativity, intelligence, and wisdom: Could versus should. In R. J. Sternberg & J. Glück (Eds.), Cambridge handbook of wisdom (pp. 455–464). Cambridge University Press. Macintosh, N.  J. (2011). IQ and human intelligence (2nd ed.). Oxford University Press. Malone, T. W., & Woolley, A. W. (2020). Collective intelligence. In R. J. Sternberg (Ed.), Cambridge handbook of intelligence (2nd ed., pp. 780–801). Cambridge University Press. McGrew, K. S. (2005). The Cattell-Horn-Carroll theory of cognitive abilities: Past, present, and future. In D.  P. Flanagan & P.  L. Harrison (Eds.),

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Contemporary intellectual assessment: Theories, tests, issues (2nd ed., pp. 136–181). Guilford Press. Plucker, J. A. (Ed.). (2016). Creativity & innovation: Theory, research, and practice. Routledge. Plucker, J. A., Karwowski, M., & Kaufman, J. C. (2020). Intelligence and creativity. In R. J. Sternberg (Ed.), Cambridge handbook of intelligence (2nd ed., pp. 1140–1158). Cambridge University Press. Primi, R., Silvia, P.  J., Jauk, E., & Benedek, M. (2019). Applying man-facet Rasch modeling in the assessment of creativity. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 13(2), 176–186. https://doi.org/10.1037/aca0000230 Runco, M. A. (2014). Creativity: Theories and themes: Research, development, and practice. Academic Press. Sackett, P. R., Shewach, O. R., & Dahlke, J. A. (2020). The predictive value of general intelligence. In R. J. Sternberg (Ed.), Human intelligence: An introduction (pp. 381–414). Cambridge University Press. Sawyer, R. K. (2012). Explaining creativity: The science of human innovation (2nd ed.). Oxford University Press. Schmidt, F.  L., & Hunter, J.  E. (1998). The validity and utility of selection methods in personnel psychology. Psychological Bulletin, 124(2), 262–274. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-­2909.124.2.262 Sternberg, R. J. (1982). Natural, unnatural, and supernatural concepts. Cognitive Psychology, 14, 451–488. Sternberg, R.  J. (1985a). Beyond IQ: A triarchic theory of human intelligence. Cambridge University Press. Sternberg, R. J. (1985b). Implicit theories of intelligence, creativity, and wisdom. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 49(3), 607–627. Sternberg, R. J. (1987). Implicit theories: An alternative to modeling cognition and its development. In J.  Bisanz, C.  Brainerd, & R.  Kail (Eds.), Formal methods in developmental psychology: Progress in cognitive development research (pp. 155–192). Springer–Verlag. Sternberg, R. J. (1990). Wisdom and its relations to intelligence and creativity. In R.  J. Sternberg (Ed.), Wisdom: Its nature, origins, and development (pp. 142–159). Cambridge University Press. Sternberg, R.  J. (2003). Wisdom, intelligence, and creativity synthesized. Cambridge University Press. Sternberg, R. J. (2017). Measuring creativity: A 40+ year retrospective. Journal of Creative Behavior. https://doi.org/10.1002/jocb.218

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Sternberg, R. J., & Grigorenko, E. L. (Eds.). (2002). The general factor of intelligence: How general is it? Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Sternberg, R. J., & Karami, S. (2021a). An 8P theoretical framework for understanding creativity and theories of creativity. Journal of Creative Behavior. https://doi.org/10.1002/jocb.516 Sternberg, R. J., & Karami, S. (2021b). Integrating diverse points of view on intelligence: A 6P analysis and its implications. Journal of Intelligence, 9(33). https://doi.org/10.3390/jintelligence9030033 Sternberg, R. J., & Karami, S. (2021c). What is wisdom? A unified 6P framework. Review of General Psychology https://doi.org/10.1177/1089268020985509. Online Version. Sternberg, R. J., Kaufman, J. C., & Roberts, A. M. (2019). The relation of creativity to intelligence and wisdom. In J. C. Kaufman & R. J. Sternberg (Eds.), Cambridge handbook of creativity (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press. Sternberg, R.  J., & O’Hara, L.  A. (2000). Intelligence and creativity. In R.  J. Sternberg (Ed.), Handbook of intelligence (pp.  609–628). Cambridge University Press. Torrance, E.  P. (1974). Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking: Norms-Technical Manual. Scholastic Testing Service. Torrance, E.  P. (2008). Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking: Norms-Technical Manual. Scholastic Testing Service. Varshney, L. R., & Barbey, A. K. (2021). Catalyzing collective intelligence, societal problem solving, and global wellbeing through individual metacognition interventions. Journal of Intelligence, 9(4), 54. https://doi.org/10.3390/ jintelligence9040054 Wissler, C. (1901). The correlation of mental and physical tests. Psychological Review, Monograph Supplement, 3(6), 1–62. Wolman, B. B. (Ed.). (1985). Handbook of intelligence: Theories, measurements, and applications. Wiley Interscience.

2 An Interdisciplinary Exploration Revealing Phenomena That Facilitate or Prevent Interconnections Among Intelligence, Creativity, and Wisdom Don Ambrose

Introduction Effectively employing intellectual capacities always has been important but it is even more so in today’s complex the world. As we move further into the twenty-first century, the problems and opportunities facing humanity and the larger ecosystem are growing more powerful (Ambrose & Sternberg, 2016a, 2016b; DeBoom, 2021; Ord, 2020; Rees, 2018). These challenges require (a) wise perceptions of the approaches humanity should take while addressing complex issues; (b) the creation of new socioeconomic, ideological, and technological initiatives; and (c) thoughtful refinement of those initiatives to make them actually work as intended. Consequently, effectively navigating through the years to come will demand the strengthening and combining of intelligence, creativity, and wisdom.

D. Ambrose (*) Rider University, Lawrenceville, NJ, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. J. Sternberg et al. (eds.), Intelligence, Creativity, and Wisdom, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26772-7_2

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Overview of Intelligence, Creativity, and Wisdom The capacities known as intelligence, creativity, and wisdom have been defined in various ways over the years. A comprehensive portrayal of these definitions would be too extensive for this chapter but, fortunately, there have been condensed descriptions that capture their essence. This analysis employs one of these helpful condensations (Sternberg, in press): • Intelligence is comprised of high-level cognitive processes (learning concepts, reasoning, problem solving, judgment); metacognition (understanding and exerting some control over our own cognitive processes); and adaptation to the environment (also see Kaufman et al., 2013; Sternberg, 2020a, 2020b). • Creativity involves the production and implementation of ideas or innovations that are novel, useful, effective, and appropriate to the context or situation they are designed to address (also see Kaufman & Sternberg, 2019). • Wisdom involves valuing and promoting a common good, recognizing multiple viewpoints to avoid entrapment within a single perspective, demonstrating intellectual humility, adapting to various life contexts as appropriate, and considering both short-term and long-­ term consequences of one’s actions (also see Glück & Weststrate, 2022; Grossmann et  al., 2020; Sternberg, 2019; Sternberg & Glück, 2019, 2022). It is possible for individuals or groups to develop some capacity for intelligence but not creativity or wisdom; or creativity but not intelligence or wisdom; or even wisdom but not creativity and intelligence. They also can combine two of the three capacities. In more rare cases, they can combine all three in a combination known as wisdom, intelligence, and creativity synthesized (WICS, see Sternberg, 2003a, 2003b, 2003c, 2005, in press).

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 ome Examples of the Blending and Separation S of Creativity, Intelligence, and Wisdom Most scholars of creativity, intelligence, or wisdom can recall some ways in which individuals they have known, studied, or read about provide examples of the ways in which these three important attributes can be forced into separation or blended together in more productive combinations. The examples shown in Fig. 2.1 illustrate just a few combinations and separations. Numbers one, two, and three in the diagram show where individuals who exhibit only some levels of creativity, or intelligence, or wisdom would be placed. Numbers four, five, and six show where individuals who combine two of the three attributes would be situated. Finally, number seven shows where the most impressive individuals who combine creativity, intelligence, and wisdom would reside. One thing to keep in mind is that the creativity, intelligence, and wisdom in the outer regions of the diagram likely are mediocre at best because significant creativity or wisdom requires some intelligence, and wisdom requires some

Fig. 2.1  Three-circle Venn diagram showing examples of ways in which intelligence, creativity, and wisdom can separate or overlap

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creativity and intelligence (Sternberg, 2021). When individuals are able to position themselves closer to the center of the diagram, their creativity, intelligence, and wisdom magnify considerably. The following are some examples of actions that can fit onto the Venn diagram. The number of each example shows its location on the figure. 1. College students who performed very well on standardized admission testing but they don’t do anything innovative and are very selfish. 2. Dual exceptional (2e) individuals who use their quirky visual-spatial skills to come up with novel ideas. Their cognitive barriers (e.g., learning disabilities, ADHD, autism spectrum disorder, etc.) make them mediocre at best on intelligence tests and on other standardized tests (Olenchak et al., 2016). While many of these individuals are compassionate and ethically aware, a few of them care little about the needs and wants of others. These are the ones who show up in this position on the diagram. 3. Individuals whose altruistic compassion inclines them to support creative efforts to help the deprived; however, they aren’t capable of creating and intelligently refining the altruistic ideas and initiatives themselves. 4. Highly accomplished Wall Street financiers creatively design and intelligently refine new, deceptive financial instruments that severely damage the lives of billions during the 2008 economic collapse (see Ambrose, 2015; Stiglitz, 2010, 2016). 5. A highly proficient academic achiever in college inherits her family fortune and continues the philanthropic donations her parents set up to support ethically positive projects, but she does no significant creative work in the world. 6. A former school dropout and deprived, incarcerated street-gang leader benefits from counseling that helps him become a creative mentor who then dissuades current street-gang members from following his previous, devastating life path (see Ambrose, 2022a). 7. An architect who uses his highly intelligent, creative biomimicry thought processes to design enormous buildings that integrate with environmental systems, so they create energy instead of wasting it, and work against environmental degradation. His sense of purpose is

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driven by ethical awareness derived from interdisciplinary exploration that incorporates biology, urban planning, architecture, and the environmental sciences (see Ambrose, 2022b). Keep in mind that portrayals of these individuals and actions can have limitations. For example, none of the individuals in these examples is completely devoid of intelligence, creativity, or wisdom, even if they are severely limited in one or two of these areas. But the portrayals do illustrate how diminished or strengthened potential in one or more of them can lead to high-impact effects on the world.

The Need for Panoramic Scanning Short-term thinking is a large barrier preventing the establishment of more creativity-intelligence-wisdom overlap. In contrast, an individual or group with panoramic scanning ability can engage in long-term, broad-­ scope thinking (Ambrose, 1996a, 2009, 2022a). Panoramic scanners can look far into the future and appreciate the implications of a creation or phenomenon over decades, centuries, or even millennia. They also can look far beyond the boundaries of the domain-specific intellectual path they are traversing to make interdisciplinary connections that reveal more about the phenomena than they can understand from within their fields (see the forthcoming section on interdisciplinary exploration). An example of a disturbing lack of panoramic scanning ability is the tendency for neoclassical economists to emphasize the importance of short-term materialistic gain that arises from economic innovations while ignoring the long-range environmental and sociocultural problems caused by those innovations (see Herrington, 2020; Piketty, 2014; Stiglitz, 2010, 2016). Analyses from leading scholars in various disciplines have magnified the importance of these forms of long-range vision. Bjornerud (2020), a geologist, argues that twenty-first century societies tend to be bound up in chronophobia, which is the inability or unwillingness to think in the long term. She uses an “island of now” metaphor to portray us as trapped on an island representing the present and immediate future and past while large bodies of water separate us from other islands representing the

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distant future and past. The inability to look across the metaphorical water to see the needs of those residing on the distant future island prevent us from developing and embracing “intergenerational justice,” which means those living today have the duty to protect the life prospects of future generations. Rees (2018), an astrophysicist, argues that humanity must escape from short-term thinking and ideological polarization so we can appreciate the long-range implications of scientific and technological developments. If we can make this escape, we can use technology to protect the ecosystem while enriching the lives of all. If we can’t escape, the prospects for survival are not good. MacAskill (2022), a philosopher, describes the need for more attention to longtermism, which means ensuring that our thoughts and actions are designed to positively influence long-term trends and issues. Adopting this moral priority will largely determine the future of humanity and all life on earth. If societal decision makers and ordinary citizens pay sufficient heed to longtermism, the chances of bolstering the well-being and self-fulfillment of future generations become stronger. If they don’t, widespread misery and even societal collapse could be on the horizon. Given the alarming nature and strength of global twenty-first century macroproblems (see Ambrose & Sternberg, 2016a, 2016b), the need for strengthening and artfully using panoramic scanning capacities is evident. Fortunately, interdisciplinary work can help in this regard.

 ow Interdisciplinary Exploration Can H Strengthen the Overlapping Creative, intelligent professionals can suppress their own creativity and intelligence while limiting the manifestation of their own wisdom if they lock themselves too firmly within their disciplinary silos. Using the metaphor of “creative intelligence city,” the author of this chapter illustrated some ways in which domain-specific expertise and interdisciplinary work can augment each other (Ambrose, 2019b). Domain-specific professionals have plenty to do within their metaphorical domain high-rises, so they seldom go out into the streets to visit other office towers. For

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example, some of them firmly lock themselves within their psychology skyscraper so they don’t get to visit the nearby neuroscience high-rise, or the history and philosophy of science office building. But the few who do go out onto the streets and wander into other office towers can bring back intriguing concepts that can enrich the creative thinking of their domain-­ specific colleagues through the process of creative association. In an example of this creative association through interdisciplinary wandering, the author of this chapter provided explanations of 89 theories and research findings from 29 different academic disciplines and professional fields and then connected each of the constructs with another concept from a different field to produce cross-disciplinary creative connections (Ambrose, 2009). Here is an example of one of these interdisciplinary connections. Work in the history of science shows that important scientific discoveries often have both beneficial and harmful effects. But the intelligent, creative scientists making these discoveries often push aside the ethical responsibility for recognizing the possible dangers that could emerge from their findings. Instead, they claim that ethical recognition is the duty of policymakers, even though politicians lack the knowledge necessary to understand the implications of the discoveries. In one example, a leading evolutionary biologist (Rose, 1998) showed how Darwinian Theory produced benefits such as enhanced agricultural production, but it also gave fuel to eugenics and Aryan supremacy movements. The connection with another discipline arose from portrayals of the ubiquity of self-deception that came from the work of a leading philosopher (Mele, 2001). The creative association emerging from the collision of these concepts from the history of science and philosophy illuminated the possibility that many of today’s scientists might be caught in a form of self-deception in which they recognize the importance of their discoveries but completely ignore, minimize, or marginalize their possible harmful effects. This connection, and many of the other cross-disciplinary links made in this interdisciplinary project (Ambrose, 2009), showed how the creativity, intelligence, and wisdom of leading thinkers can be pushed apart on the diagram in Fig. 2.1 when those thinkers will not or cannot perceive and appreciate the creative insights that can emerge when constructs from other fields connect with their own. Consequently, augmenting the

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development of domain-specific expertise with interdisciplinary exploration is important.

 xamples of Phenomena That Can Strengthen E or Weaken the Overlap and Vigor of Creativity, Intelligence, and Wisdom Interdisciplinary exploration can reveal a wide range of phenomena that can influence the extent to which creativity, intelligence, and wisdom overlap and strengthen, or separate and weaken. The 89 cross-­disciplinary connections made in the aforementioned project (Ambrose, 2009) just scratch the surface, and this chapter can only address a few other examples. Hopefully, scholars in “creative intelligence” fields will engage in their own interdisciplinary explorations to bring about creative, new revelations. The examples provided in this section include insights about twenty-first century macroproblems including climate change, dogmatic entrapment within a single, philosophical worldview; and technology-­ fueled ideological distortions that erode democracy. These and other macroproblems are enormous because they are long-range and likely will take decades to solve; international because they don’t confine themselves within national borders; and interdisciplinary because understanding and solving them requires a combination of insights from diverse academic disciplines and professional fields.

Climate Change Throughout most of the twentieth century and the early part of the twenty-first century, human activities such as the burning of fossil fuels, factory farming, and deforestation have brought about long-term, large-­ scale changes in weather patterns that cause more severe drought, wildfires, hurricanes, and sea-level rise, among other effects (Bush, 2020; DeBoom, 2021; Franta, 2021; Lewis & Maslin, 2018). A huge driver of climate change is the tendency for creative, intelligent, unethical leaders in the fossil fuel industry to create and disseminate highly influential,

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deceptive messaging to the public so they can continue to profit from the toxicity they spread throughout the global environment (Franta, 2021). This might be one of the most powerful examples of dark creativity (see Cropley, 2010; Cropley et al., 2010; Runco, 2017), with a relatively small number of creative, unethical individuals bringing the ecosystem close to collapse. The terrifying phenomenon of climate change seems to create an extreme separation of creativity and intelligence from wisdom. But it also can create a much stronger overlap with wisdom when creative, intelligent individuals engage in highly ethical actions to address the problem (see Delina, 2022).

Worldviews Individuals can be intelligent, creative, and altruistic but they can weaken their intelligence and creativity while doing harm in the world if their minds are trapped within powerful, implicit conceptual frameworks. Dogmatism is any blend of narrow-minded, shortsighted, superficial, rigid thinking (see Ambrose & Sternberg, 2012; Ambrose et al., 2012). One potent framework that can either trap us within dogmatism or free us from it emerges from a set of four philosophical, root-metaphorical world views (see Ambrose, 1996b, 2000, 2012, 2014a, 2014b; Overton, 1984; Pepper, 1942). Each root metaphor inclines individuals or groups to think in a particular way about phenomena and events in the world. The four root metaphors and the aspects of reality they emphasize are listed here: • Mechanism—root metaphor is the machine; emphasizes reductionism, precision, detail, the search for linear causality, and objectivity in research. Examples of mechanistic influence are the reduction of intelligence to an IQ score, and strongly favoring quantitative-empirical research methodology in the social sciences. • Contextualism—root metaphor is an ongoing event within its context; emphasizes the unpredictably evolving, contextually shaped nature of phenomena. Examples of contextualist influence are the context sensitivity of complexity theory, and cognitive scientists studying

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the context-embedded mind instead of focusing entirely on intracranial phenomena. • Organicism—root metaphor is an organism developing through stages toward a particular end; emphasizes holism with the whole transcending its parts, interacting systems within systems, and the importance of long-term developmental processes. An example of organismic influence is a holistic approach to interpretations of giftedness that includes physical and social-emotional characteristics along with intelligence, creativity, and talent development. • Formism—root metaphor is the ubiquitous nature of similarities that align with Plato’s ideal forms; emphasizes the discovery of patterns of similarity in diverse phenomena. Examples include work in complexity theory showing similarities in the behaviors of very diverse complex, adaptive systems (e.g., human minds, animal populations in ecosystems, traffic patterns in cities) that oscillate along a continuum from excessive chaos to excessive order while finding productive complexity in the middle. While spreading knowledge about the worldviews, Pepper (1942) showed how entrapment within a single worldview harms creativity and intelligence. He argued that incorporating insights from multiple world views is an important way to strengthen the effectiveness of thoughts and actions while avoiding falling prey to dogmatism. He used a helpful metaphor to portray this insight: Post-rational eclecticism is simply the recognition of equal or nearly equal adequacy of a number of world theories and a recommendation to not fall into the dogmatism of neglecting any one of them…. Four good lights cast fewer shadows than one. (p. 342)

Individuals and groups can limit their intellectual capacities, and/or suppress their creative potential, and/or do significant harm in the world if they trap themselves within a single root metaphor. An example is the tendency for self-appointed school reformers to require educators to

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comply with hyper-mechanistic, quantitative measures of educational attainment. The resultant high-pressure accountability systems make students proficient in superficial, narrow-minded academic content learning and this amounts to a weakened version of intelligence (Kohn, 2015; Koretz, 2017). In addition, creativity goes to the wayside because it doesn’t align well with the exclusively mechanistic assessments imposed by the reformers. Wisdom also is suppressed because the accountability system itself is unethical, and it marginalizes ethical awareness due to the narrow-minded nature of the assessments. All of these school-reform effects push educators, students, citizens, and policymakers out to the margins of the diagram in Fig. 2.1 where the overlap is minimal and the chances for growth of intelligence, creativity, and wisdom are suppressed. Of course, there is a hopeful flipside to the serious problems caused by the reformers. Most professionals who spend time navigating throughout schools can identify a few creatively subversive teachers who smile and nod when they are told to comply with hyper-mechanistic processes imposed by the reformers but do highly creative work within the four walls of their classrooms. Compelling examples of this promising phenomenon came from Dintersmith (2018), who described the very impressive, creative, intelligent, and ethical work of highly innovative teachers throughout the 50 states. The instructional processes and mentorship provided by these teachers draw from all four of the worldviews, not just one of them. These creatively subversive teachers are fighting an uphill battle when it comes to pulling the education system inward from the periphery of the diagram in Fig.  2.1 but they are exerting strong, positive influences in their locales throughout the nation. They are excellent examples of the powerful combination of creativity, intelligence, and wisdom in the middle of the diagram. Another example of entrapment within the mechanistic worldview is the use of gross domestic product (GDP) as a primary measure of economic vibrancy. This measure assesses the extent to which national economies are growing or shrinking; however, its excessively mechanistic nature ignores important dimensions of those economies, including the severity of inequality (Cohen, 2018; Coyle, 2015; Fullbrook, 2016; Philipsen, 2015; Piketty, 2014). As a result, it actually can suppress creative economic growth and intelligent decisions about economic policies.

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These weaknesses erode the ethical awareness of policymakers, citizens, and innovators so most of the economic resources are funneled up into the pockets of the already extremely affluent. Considering the model in Fig. 2.1, dogmatic faith in GDP generates large-scale economic pressures that separate intelligence, creativity, and wisdom while weakening all three. On the positive side of economics, there are dissenting economists who criticize the weaknesses of the GDP measure and the neoclassical economic theory that promotes it. To fight back against the dogmatism in their field, these dissenters created a rebellious movement known as real-world, post-autistic economics, which portrays the field of mainstream economics as autistic due to the narrow vision of economic phenomena (Brueckner et  al., 2018; Fullbrook, 2006). The dissenting economists are working to pull the intelligence, creativity, and wisdom of their field into the center of the diagram in Fig. 2.1 so that economies will operate more efficiently, in more innovative ways, and with ethical goals in mind. They are doing this by revealing the narrow, superficial nature of adhering only to mechanistic concepts that ignore the contextualism, organicism, and formism that permeate economies.

Deceptive, Corrupt Social Media Democracies decline toward totalitarianism when their populations become polarized (Ambrose, 2019; Galston, 2018; Hacker & Pierson, 2005, 2020; Morson & Schapiro, 2021). Enormous and tribalized warring camps form with very little middle ground in between. A democracy is under severe threat when one of these camps becomes far more extreme than the other, and then becomes powerful enough to pull the entire system down toward fascism or some other form of totalitarianism. Currently, far-right ideology is exerting considerable pressure on democracies in various parts of the world (Morson & Schapiro, 2021). Hacker and Pierson (2020) call the American version of this democratic erosion “plutocratic populism.” The health of a democracy relies on the extent to which the electorate is accurately informed about policies and issues, but social media in

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recent years has become a powerful source of virally spread disinformation (Bail, 2021; Gehl & Lawson, 2022; Hasen, 2022). The social interactions of much of the population take place through social media platforms that distort the identities of individuals and groups, give outsized power to extremists, and marginalize moderates who make up the majority until many of them are pulled into one of the ideological camps. Algorithms in the social media platforms contribute to this radicalization. As the spread of disinformation continues, the social networks create memory convergence through which “the development of Internet-based misinformation, such as recently well-publicized fake news sites, has the potential to distort individual and collective memories in disturbing ways” (Schacter, cited in Spinney, 2020, p. 52). The social engineers who create and spread this powerful disinformation are examples of creative and somewhat intelligent individuals who are devoid of ethical awareness and wisdom. The owners and operators of the social media platforms also can be creative and intelligent while conveniently ignoring the fact that their enterprises are contributing strongly to the destruction of democracy. These are just a few phenomena that are influencing the overlap and strength of intelligence, creativity, and wisdom. Many others could reveal even more dimensions of these capacities. Here are a few examples of other phenomena for future analysis (from Ambrose, 2016a, 2016b; Ord, 2020): • Resource shortage problems such as the petrochemical industry engaging in more environmentally destructive extraction processes. • The need for shifts from particularist morality (being ethically aware within one’s own identity group but ignoring or abusing outsiders, e.g., racism and ethnocentrism) to universalist morality (extending ethical awareness and compassion to all of humanity). • Runaway technology with high-potential benefits but also potentially devastating side effects (e.g., artificial intelligence). • Engineered pathogens that could lead to increasingly destructive pandemics.

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In view of these frightening possibilities, it will be important to strengthen and synthesize intelligence, creativity, and wisdom on the large scale.

 ow to Strengthen the H Intelligence-Creativity-­Wisdom Overlap So We Can Deal with Macroproblems More Effectively Integrating and strengthening our intelligence, creativity, and wisdom while solving the world’s macroproblems is a tall order. Fortunately, there are some ways to make it happen, and there are some examples to follow.

Make the Corporate World More Ethical The aforementioned entrapment of neoclassical economics in the sterile certainty of the mechanistic worldview has enabled corporate leaders to ignore the harmful effects of their enterprises for decades. Consequently, environmental pollution, severe economic inequality, and other huge problems created and magnified by corporate corruption have run rampant in the twenty-first century (see Ambrose, 2015; Cohen, 2018; Franta, 2021; Piketty, 2014; Stiglitz, 2010, 2016). Fortunately, the aforementioned dissenting economists who criticize the neoclassical paradigm are shifting some economic minds in more ethical directions (see Fullbrook, 2016; Stiglitz, 2010, 2016; Piketty, 2014). There also are impressive examples of transformational giftedness (TG), which means using impressive intellectual capacities and talents to make the world a better place (Sternberg, 2020c; Sternberg et al., 2022). Spreading awareness of these TG individuals and groups can inspire many others to strengthen the overlap of their own creativity, intelligence, and wisdom while teaching and mentoring others to do the same. Here are some examples. Eugene Tssui, the architect positioned in the ideal intelligence-­ creativity-­ wisdom overlap in the center of Fig.  2.1, shows how an

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individual can do impressive work in the world while employing strong panoramic scanning to design ways to make the architectural projects environmentally friendly. The highly creative biomimicry processes he uses to invent buildings based on phenomena in nature include highly intelligent refinements of those designs and purposeful work ensuring that they improve the environment instead of harming it (Ambrose, 2022b). Going beyond individuals to contemplate TG groups brings us to an impressive blending of creativity, intelligence, and wisdom in “net positive” corporations that engage in panoramic scanning to identify large-­ scale problems in the world and contribute to their solution while also making a profit (see Polman & Winston, 2021). These corporations strive to benefit all individuals and groups they influence including suppliers, customers, employees, and the communities in which they are embedded. They take responsibility for the impact of their businesses on society and the environment while working to design and implement beneficial innovations. This TG work enhances their reputations as ethical organizations and strengthens shareholder returns over the long term. In essence, they are win-win entities that can serve as positive examples in a largely corrupt corporate world.

Recognize the Benefits of Cognitive Diversity Page (2007, 2010, 2017), an economist and complex theorist, reported the benefits that emerge from the formation of cognitively diverse teams in organizations. When it comes to complex problem solving, diverse teams consistently outperform homogenous teams, even when the latter are considered to be intellectually superior. A cognitively diverse team includes diverse theories, beliefs systems, backgrounds, and problem-­ solving heuristics. If the members of the team can accept the very different perspectives represented by their peers, they can produce highly creative, intelligent work due to the intermixing of very different thoughts. In contrast, the members of a homogenous team are confined within a single perspective and they cannot break out of that cognitive silo. The “rational actor” theory that dominates the aforementioned neoclassical economics is an example of this confinement. The theory has suppressed

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economic innovation and harmed the economy in multiple ways because it portrays selfish individualism as beneficial (see Piketty, 2014; Stiglitz, 2010, 2016). Another form of cognitive diversity comes from online, scientific networking (Bozeman & Youtie, 2017; Nielsen, 2011). Increasingly, today’s STEM experts are posting their results online and asking for ideas for refinement and elaboration. These ideas flow in from very diverse sources around the world. And while many of the ideas come from prominent scholars in a relevant scientific field, some of them come from unanticipated sources such as high school science teachers or college students in faraway nations. According to Nielsen, while many of the contributions won’t be useful, some will represent highly valuable pieces of “microexpertise,” which are small but valuable parts of a large, complex intellectual puzzle. The unpredictable nature of the contributions and the creative connections generated by the combinations of diverse thoughts lead to discoveries that even the best isolated minds could not come up with on their own. The creation and refinement of these discoveries represent highly productive blending of creativity and intelligence. If those leading these innovative projects can guide their work with ethical awareness, they also can inject some wisdom into the mix, thereby pulling their work into the highly desirable middle of the diagram in Fig. 2.1.

 et up Powerful, Thoughtful Networks S of Ethical Experts While there is no guarantee that cognitively diverse groups will inject some wisdom into their work, there are some international, interdisciplinary teams of leading thinkers who are very concerned about the colossal threats facing today’s world. One example is the Center for the Study of Existential Risk, an international, interdisciplinary organization made up of academic researchers, technologists, and policymakers who communicate about the nature and nuances of large-scale threats to the environment and to societies (https://www.cser.ac.uk/about-­us/). Their primary purpose is to identify and mitigate serious risks that emerge from new technologies and human activities. The interdisciplinary

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nature of the center generates some creative cognitive diversity and the prominence of the experts involved in the work injects high levels of intelligence into their innovations. The core purpose of the center has to do with solving large-scale global problems, so wisdom is an obvious element of this work. Consequently, the center pulls itself into the middle of the diagram in Fig. 2.1, where intelligence, creativity, and wisdom synthesize. Hopefully, the presence and increasing prominence of this center will inspire other teams around the world to create similar organizations.

 ake, Complex, Inaccessible Academic Publishing M Visible to a Much Larger Population While the work of creative, intelligent, wise scholars is impressive and valuable, even to the point of being crucial to the survival of humanity in the decades to come, it has a limited audience because citizens and policymakers seldom access and understand complicated academic work. If they want to impact the world enough to facilitate large-scale changes that will address twenty-first century existential threats, these scholars need to find ways to reach out to the minds of non-academics, and to other scholars who aren’t in their fields. This is a difficult task; however, there are some ways to make academic work more accessible. Two strategies are the use of musical and visual mode switching. Switching thought modalities involves turning verbal or numeric content into another form of thought, such as musical or visual interpretations. Music can be an important element of creative, scientific thinking (Root-Bernstein, 2001). Translating academic content into a musical performance can help outsiders (those without the deep expertise of the leading academics in a field) understand the essence of important discoveries (Eady & Wilson, 2004). The creators of a musical mode switch would replace the wording of existing lyrics of a song with their own wording to creatively represent the research findings. The performances can mimic Broadway musicals, rock music, and more. Visual metaphors and concept cartoons are graphical forms of mode switching. Complex academic ideas can be turned into intricate pictures or simpler cartoons in which the symbolism represents abstract theories

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Fig. 2.2  The Trek: Visual metaphor capturing and conveying the essence of interdisciplinary academic research pertaining to twenty-first century trends and issues (from Ambrose, 2022b)

and research findings (Ambrose, 2019a). For example, the visual metaphor in Fig. 2.2 captures and portrays the essence of scores of articles and books from diverse disciplines that deal with twenty-first century trends and issues. It shows the mass of humanity walking backward on a road leading from the twentieth century into the twenty-first century, where today’s macroproblems are represented by deep valleys and the macro-­ opportunities are tall mountains. Leaders of the mass of humanity also are walking backward with blinders on, so they have little appreciation for the environments they are moving through. If they continue to march backward into the twenty-first century, they will fall off precipice point into the devastating depths of despair below. But if they follow the twenty-first century leaders who have removed their blinders and turned to face the front, they will be able to climb up panoramic trail toward the

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macro-opportunities. More detail about the meaning of this visual metaphor is available in the Appendix. While creating visual metaphors looks like a strange way to make complex, academic material visible to “outsiders,” they actually have been useful for this purpose. For example, the author of this chapter once served as an “interdisciplinary conceptual translator” for a group including many of the world’s top creative intelligence researchers who met at a couple of week-long conferences in a resort setting in efforts to unify theories of creative intelligence. The members of this interdisciplinary group didn’t have ready access to the expertise of their collaborators because the group was interdisciplinary, so their knowledge bases were separated by the intellectual chasms between disciplines. The disciplines represented by the members of the group included psychology, economics, philosophy, neuroscience, biology, theoretical physics, and gifted studies. The interdisciplinary conceptual translator read samples of publications produced by all of the prominent participants and then turned them into visual metaphorical drawings (one for each conference participant) like the one in Fig. 2.2. The visuals were posted around the conference venue, as if in an art gallery, so the participants could wander around, look at the pictures, read the accompanying stories explaining the meaning of the symbolism, and understand the essence of concepts from the foreign disciplines (see Ambrose, 1992). While some of the conference participants thought the visual metaphors were silly and useless, others thought they were excellent ways to build bridges between disciplines.

Concluding Thoughts Given the nature and growing power of twenty-first century opportunities and existential threats, pulling intelligence, creativity, and wisdom into the overlapping region in the center of Fig. 2.1 is becoming more necessary and urgent. Humanity needs to make a cognitive evolutionarily leap into this overlapping region. We no longer can afford to have the vast majority of citizens and most societal policymakers demonstrating minimal to mediocre levels of creativity and intelligence while showing very few signs of wisdom. We also cannot afford to have highly

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impressive creativity and intelligence working together without any evidence of wisdom, as in the aforementioned example of innovative, unethical professionals in the financial industry. In summary, academics, policymakers, and citizens will have better opportunities to synthesize intelligence, creativity, and wisdom if they (a) use interdisciplinary exploration to reveal the nuances of ethical dilemmas and WICS solutions, (b) identify and use examples of transformationally gifted individuals and ethical organizations to inspire others to support and engage in ethical problem solving, (c) strive to inject cognitive diversity and scientific networking into group actions aimed at solving twenty-first century macroproblems, and (d) use differing thought modalities (e.g., visual, musical) to help others appreciate the importance and complexity of these macroproblems. Encouraging individuals and groups to develop the inclination to strengthen their panoramic scanning capacities through interdisciplinary exploration should help with these initiatives.

Appendix A description of the visual metaphor in Fig. 2.2, which includes symbolism representing insights derived from several thousand pages of academic research exploring twenty-first century trends and issues. THE TREK Don Ambrose

Abstract Human progress over the past several centuries is portrayed as a mass journey across shifting terrain. The mass of humanity follows a path across a vast plain of industrial-age standardization, which abruptly transforms into the ruggedly unpredictable terrain of the postindustrial era.

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The Story The mass of humanity has marched for thousands of years over vast distances through ever-changing terrain. Several hundred years ago, during the industrial revolution, the billions of individuals and groups in the “crowd” left the pastoral serenity of the agrarian meadowlands to find themselves in the concrete and steel canyons of industrialism. During a period of chaotic flux, the crowd reorganized itself and became accustomed to the flat, standardized plain of mechanistic materialism, which lay beyond the initial disruption of the canyons. Now, the members of the crowd march backward on “progress” road while focusing their vision on the path they’ve just traversed so they can replicate the lockstep actions of the recent past. These actions are guided by their “nineteenth century” leaders who also walk backward because their minds are saturated with the selfish, materialistic notions arising from their neoliberal ideology and neoclassical economic beliefs. The members of the crowd also wear blinders of habit-bound dogmatism that block the peripheral vision needed for perceiving other possible pathways through the terrain. In the mid-late twentieth century, the crowd came upon the most abrupt change of terrain ever faced by humanity. The flat, predictable landscape quickly gave way to a postmodern, globalized region, which featured massive, rugged peaks of opportunity and deep, precipitous chasms of catastrophe. In the early twenty-first century, we are now reaching decision forks, a point at which a choice must be made by a significant part of the crowd, a critical mass, to climb up panoramic trail, which is the path that leads toward optimal human development in the chaotic times ahead. Failure to achieve the critical mass could lead the crowd to plunge disastrously over precipice point. There will still be an opportunity for a few who go beyond decision forks to escape the precipice point disaster if they are creative and intelligent enough to perceive last chance ladder. But this final escape route will be much more difficult than moving up on panoramic trail.

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Hints of the choice ahead first became visible at the chasms of early warning where persistent, large-scale environmental and socioeconomic problems became much stronger and new ones emerged. Those who wore the blinders of habit-bound, dogmatic insularity didn’t heed the early warnings and marched inexorably backward toward precipice point. They did so in spite of exhortations by twenty-first century foreshadowing leaders who were early visionaries in the ethical awareness Anthropocene foothills. These leaders encouraged members of the crowd to toss aside their blinders of habit-bound thinking, turn around, and elevate their gaze beyond the next steps in the path for perception of the dangers and opportunities ahead. Panoramic trail is a path toward greater success, self-fulfillment, and societal progress. It affords a view from a height, providing a better perspective on our aspirations, possibilities, and interrelations. Leading to the pinnacle of ethical purpose, the trail involves considerable risk because it requires us to go beyond safe, predictable behavior patterns. But it also promises great excitement, creative adventure, and opportunities for long-term survival. Oblivious to the promise of panoramic trail and the dangers of precipice point, shortsighted leaders still urge the crowd to continue marching backward, following mechanistic-materialist “progress” road. Fortunately, a few visionary, ethical twenty-first century leaders are convincing significant numbers to step off the beaten path and to find the inner resources necessary for energetic exploration of the pinnacle of purpose.

References Ambrose, D. (1992). An analysis of the interdisciplinary theory summit conferences on optimal development of mind: Effective processes and emerging syntheses. Doctoral dissertation, University of Oregon. Ambrose, D. (1996a). Panoramic scanning: Essential element of higher-order thought. Roeper Review, 18(4), 280–284. Ambrose, D. (1996b). Unifying theories of creativity: Metaphorical thought and the unification process. New Ideas in Psychology, 14, 257–267.

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Rees, M. (2018). On the future: Prospects for humanity. Princeton University Press. Rose, M. R. (1998). Darwin’s spectre: Evolutionary biology in the modern world. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Root-Bernstein, R. (2001). Music, creativity, and scientific thinking. Leonardo, 34(1), 63–68. https://doi.org/10.1162/002409401300052532 Runco, M. A. (2017). The dark side of creativity: Potential better left unfulfilled. In J. A. Plucker (Ed.), Creativity & innovation: Theory, research, and practice (pp. 49–59). Prufrock. Spinney, L. (2020). The shared past that wasn’t: How Facebook, fake news and friends are altering memories and changing history. Scientific American, 29(4), 50–55. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ the-­shared-­past-­that-­wasnt/ Sternberg, R. J., Ambrose, D., & Karami, S. (Eds.). (2022). The Palgrave handbook of transformational giftedness for education. Palgrave Macmillan. Sternberg, R.  J. (2003a). WICS: A model for leadership in organizations. Academy of Management Learning & Education, 2, 386–401. Sternberg, R. J. (2003b). WICS as a model of giftedness. High Ability Studies, 14(2), 109–137. Sternberg, R.  J. (2003c). Wisdom, intelligence, and creativity synthesized. Cambridge University Press. Sternberg, R.  J. (2005). WICS: A model of giftedness in leadership. Roeper Review, 28(1), 37–44. Sternberg, R. J. (2019). Where have all the flowers of wisdom gone? An analysis of teaching of wisdom over the years. In R. J. Sternberg, H. Nusbaum, & J. Glück (Eds.), Applying wisdom to contemporary world problems (pp. 1–20). Palgrave Macmillan. Sternberg, R. J. (Ed.). (2020a). Cambridge handbook of intelligence (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press. Sternberg, R. J. (Ed.). (2020b). Human intelligence: An introduction. Cambridge University Press. Sternberg, R. J. (2020c). Transformational giftedness: Rethinking our paradigm for gifted education. Roeper Review, 42(4), 230–240. https://doi.org/10.108 0/02783193.2020.1815266 Sternberg, R. J. (2021). Adaptive intelligence: Surviving and thriving in a world of uncertainty. Cambridge University Press. Sternberg, R. J. (in press). WICS: The super (necessary) constraints of creativity, intelligence, and wisdom synthesized. In C.  Tromp, R.  J. Sternberg, & D. Ambrose (Eds.), The paradox of constraints on creativity. Sense.

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3 Navigating with Intelligence, Creativity, Personality, Emotion, and Wisdom in the Space-Time Continuum Giovanni Emanuele Corazza and Todd Lubart

Introduction Observing human behavior with the eye of the scientist is a breathtaking experience. The associated complexity is astounding, the number of possible nuances is indefinite, and yet it is possible to try to understand it and predict it, always with a considerable amount of possible error, which should be considered more a result of rich individual differences than a problem of our inability to build perfect models (Cooper, 2002). A perfect model could perhaps be built for the behavior of a machine, but

G. E. Corazza DEI-Marconi Institute for Creativity, University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy Université Paris Cité and Univ Gustave Eiffel, LaPEA, Boulogne-Billancourt, France T. Lubart (*) Université Paris Cité and Univ Gustave Eiffel, LaPEA, Boulogne-Billancourt, France © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. J. Sternberg et al. (eds.), Intelligence, Creativity, and Wisdom, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26772-7_3

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never for a human, and this fundamental difference should always be kept in mind as we are approaching higher and higher levels of human-­ machine interactions (Brynjolfsson & McAfee, 2014). As is well known, the key conceptual tool for a scientific approach to the analysis of human behavior is represented by psychological constructs. In this chapter, we will consider six fundamental constructs: intelligence (Sternberg, 1999, 2000), creativity (Kaufman & Sternberg, 2010), personality (Corr & Matthews, 2020), emotion (Salovey & Grewal, 2005), wisdom (Sternberg & Glück, 2019), and navigation, a higher level construct very similar to meta-intelligence (Sternberg et al., 2021), but with a few differences that will be highlighted. We identify this kind of investigation as a cross-construct analysis. Due to the extreme adaptiveness of human beings, we argue that all the above constructs depend fundamentally on the embedding context, which reveals itself to be the key for discussing and understanding cross-­ construct relationships, as already shown by Corazza and Lubart (2021) when analyzing the relationship between intelligence and creativity. As a consequence, it is of the utmost importance for scientific research to be able to model and empirically control context, in order to have the means for in-depth cross-construct analysis. However, this might appear to be a problem of unsurmountable complexity, given the indefinite variety of possible contexts in which humans might interact. Luckily, a parsimonious approach to modeling context in a meaningful way is possible. This approach starts by identifying two fundamental dimensions that are common to any context: conceptual space S (the culture-infused space in which thinking and associated action occur) and available time T (the time span of the experience). In our model, the characteristics of S and T can be varied continuously from extreme tightness to extreme looseness, thus forming two axes and four quadrants of the metaphor identified as the Space-Time Continuum (STC; Corazza & Lubart, 2021), as represented in Fig. 3.1. Tightness and looseness are traveling concepts inspired by the work of Gelfand et al. (2011), who introduced them to describe societies: a tight society is one with stringent norms and punishment is severe; a loose society has flexible norms and tolerates errors. Accordingly, a tight

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Fig. 3.1  The Space-Time Continuum (STC) and its four quadrants

conceptual space S is one where a single correct solution is foreseen and with little tolerance for ambiguity and errors, whereas in a loose conceptual space many alternatives are contemplated, and ambiguity is tolerated. Tight time T imposes strict planning and punishment for delay, whereas under loose time, planning is not at a prime, and there is tolerance for delays. In this chapter, we address a cross-construct touching upon intelligence, creativity, personality, emotion, wisdom, and navigation as we visit the STC quadrants. In order to proceed systematically, we believe it is essential to provide definitions for all the actors of this cross-construct discourse. Clearly, definitions for these constructs are not unique in the literature, but this is not a reason to avoid expressing them. On the contrary, given the multiplicity of alternative definitions, the differential adoption of which might lead to variable understanding and possible misunderstandings, it becomes necessary to start our discussion by clearly defining our main terms.

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Definitions of constructs Creativity We begin by considering creativity, a construct that has been defined in multiple ways, but for which a standard definition has been proposed (Runco & Jaeger, 2012): “Creativity requires both originality and effectiveness.” As discussed by Corazza (2016), this definition is actually static, requiring a snapshot judgment by some audience in some epoch to recognize the existence of a sufficient level of originality (sometimes identified as novelty) and effectiveness (sometimes identified as usefulness, utility, or adaptiveness). But this is far from covering the entire essence of the creative process: The creativity phenomenon is fundamentally dynamic, developing through time and often characterized by inconclusiveness (Corazza, 2021). For this reason, a static definition of creative success cannot be considered sufficient. Unfortunately, this observation about the standard definition of creativity appears very difficult to be heard and accepted by the creativity-studies community. The dynamic definition of creativity (Corazza, 2016) solves this problem by introducing an additional keyword, potential: • Creativity is a context-dependent phenomenon requiring potential originality and effectiveness. When the potential for originality and effectiveness is realized, an episode of creative achievement occurs: We take a snapshot and return to the standard (static) definition of creativity, and to all the vast scientific literature on creativity that studies the conditions for creative success. On the other hand, many times (or perhaps most of the time) our potential remains latent, because being creative requires an investment and a risk-­ taking attitude (Sternberg & Lubart, 1991). Also, it could happen that our ideas are too far ahead in the future, and therefore they are not understood and criticized as ineffective, inapplicable, or non-adaptive. In these cases, we enter into a state of creative inconclusiveness, which is actually a fundamental part of the creative process (Corazza, 2021). Indeed, the

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biographies of all the great minds in the arts, science, and technology share a common feature: They all show how persistent these eminent achievers had to be in the face of harsh criticism, neglect, or even outright confrontation. In other words, “Big-C” creativity requires the ability to survive and come out of prolonged states of creative inconclusiveness. Similar observations then percolate and apply to “smaller-c” forms of creativity (Kaufman & Beghetto, 2009). We should also underline that the dynamic definition of creativity provided above differs from the original given by Corazza (2016) due to the explicit addition of “context dependence,” which is clearly critical for the purposes of cross-construct analysis (Corazza & Lubart, 2021), as we will discuss later. Two critical dynamic elements of the creative process should be put into evidence, because they deeply affect the relationship between creativity, intelligence, personality, emotion, wisdom, and navigation. First, the creative process might involve inspiration from elements of information that a-priori seem irrelevant, but in hindsight might turn out to be key (Corazza & Agnoli, 2022). Whereas the selection, encoding, and use of relevant information is a linear process, opening the door to inspiration is a strongly non-linear step with unforeseeable results, which cannot be guaranteed. Accepting this form of inspiration and deciding to spend time and energy to try to derive consequences from it requires a good level of trait-Openness to experience (Corazza & Agnoli, 2020), as well as a risk-taking attitude (Sternberg & Lubart, 1991). The second dynamic element that we want to highlight can be identified as divergent creativity estimation (Corazza & Agnoli, 2022). This component of the creative process allows the estimation of the potential originality and effectiveness of an outcome to be performed with reference to a different (divergent) focus with respect to the one originally defined at the start of the process. Note that we refer to “estimation” and not “judgment,” because in reality no one can say the final word about the originality and/or effectiveness of a creative product. In fact, divergent creativity estimation requires imagining all possible futures, all possible functionalities, and all possible sociocultural consequences of a creative outcome: It is an indefinite effort that no one can master completely. The most important fact that derives from this element of the

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creative process is that one could find something that was not intended: divergent creativity estimation is the home of serendipity (Corazza & Agnoli, 2022; Ross & Copeland, 2022). In essence, the dynamic creative process is characterized by specific elements such as projection into the future, non-linearity, inspiration, openness, risk-taking, uncertainty, and divergent creativity estimation. Let’s define the other constructs of importance in this chapter, taking advantage of what has already been discussed for creativity, which can serve as a reference to immediately derive similarities and differences. It is of the utmost importance to make sure that all definitions can be logically mapped onto the same level of analysis, to ensure a fair comparison.

Intelligence The definition of intelligence has been the subject of a vast literature (see Legg & Hutter, 2007; Sternberg, 1990; and the references therein). To keep the balance with the above dynamic definition of creativity, we adopt here the definition of intelligence proposed by Corazza and Lubart (2021): • Intelligence is a context-dependent phenomenon requiring goal-driven effectiveness In Sternberg (1990), several definitions of intelligence are reported as outcomes of the 1921 symposium organized by the editors of the Journal of Educational Psychology (Sternberg, 1990, p.  35), as well as of the 1986 symposium organized by Detterman and Sternberg (Sternberg, 1990, p. 36). Several of these definitions of intelligence mention explicitly context dependence. For example, in 1921 Colvin defined intelligence as “having learned or ability to learn to adjust oneself to the environment,” whereas Sternberg defined intelligence as “providing a means to govern ourselves so that our thoughts and actions are organized, coherent, and responsive to both our internally driven needs and to the needs of the environment” (Sternberg, 1990, p.  49). Legg and Hutter (2007) collected around 70 different definitions for intelligence, both in

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the realm of psychology and in that of artificial intelligence. By properly selecting goals, context, and measures of effectiveness, the definition for intelligence provided here can be shown to be compatible with most of the existing definitions. At the same time, this definition enjoys symmetry and commonality of terminology with the dynamic definition of creativity. Let’s discuss similarities and differences between the two constructs, as they derive from their definitions. First, both phenomena are defined as context-dependent, so that the possibility to distinguish or assimilate the two constructs depends on our ability to imagine and/or create contexts with specific characteristics. This is in fact the reason why the STC model was created in the first place (Corazza & Lubart, 2020, 2021). Also, both phenomena require effectiveness, but in different terms. Being intelligent amounts to achieving clear goals in a very effective way. Even for an ill-defined problem, still one has identified the goal of solving it. Most of the time, intelligence involves a linear, brilliant, unambiguous process focused on pre-­ determined goals; it also includes brilliant adaptation to changing or uncertain conditions, as discussed by Sternberg (2019a). On the other hand, being creative involves the generation of (several) ideas that should have high potential effectiveness in the domain of interest, but the realization of that effectiveness is typically a non-linear process, with partial failures, and elements that are discovered along the way or even a-­posteriori, transcending the original person/team. In terms of certainty versus ambiguity, intelligent behavior requires the definition of adaptive goals that drive action, whereas creative behavior does not necessarily require stating all goals a-priori (problem solving is clearly an exception, but creative problem solving still involves a certain level of ill-defined conditions). Further, creativity requires potential originality, a concept that contains novelty, authenticity, and surprise. Without originality there can be no creative achievement. Intelligent behavior does not necessarily require originality: fast and very clever (but previously known) responses are a sign for high IQ (which of course is but one measure for a part of intelligence), but this is not sufficient for creativity. At times, intelligence can lead to original solutions, for example, in the case of highly complex yet unsolved problems.

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The above short discussion is already sufficient to highlight the complexity of the relationship between intelligence and creativity, pointing to the observation that they are overlapping but distinct constructs (Corazza & Lubart, 2021).

Personality So far, our discussion on creativity and intelligence might have seemed to involve different but overlapping forms of human cognition, only. However, it is a fact that humans have limited cognitive resources (Ariely & Norton, 2008; Kahneman, 2011), and that noncognitive factors play a very important role. In other words, having certain capabilities for intelligent or creative behavior is not a guarantee that they will be enacted, even when the conditions would appear to be favorable. In fact, stable individual characteristics in terms of personality traits, dispositions, attitudes, style, and self-identity all come to influence how a person might prefer to respond in a certain situational context. For this reason, when discussing how a person might navigate contexts modeled through the STC, it is important to be able to account also for personality, which therefore needs its own definition, although this is a non-trivial task, and actually the subject of a long debate (Bergner, 2020; Mayer, 2007; McCrae & Costa, 1995). • Personality is an enduring pattern of preferred behaviors, coded in terms of traits, styles, dispositions, and attitudes that an individual exhibits and that influence context-dependent interactions. It is interesting to note that thinking styles have been seen as an interface between cognition and personality (Grigorenko & Sternberg, 1995, 1997). A keyword to be underlined in the above definition is enduring (Bergner, 2020): for a characteristic to become a trait, it should be measurable with consistency over a prolonged period of time. This is not to say that personality traits are unchangeable, but that they are developed and they maintain stability over long periods of time. On the other hand, the activation of personality traits strongly depends on the surrounding

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context: the behavioral expression of a trait requires arousal of that trait by trait-relevant situational cues. (Tett & Guterman, 2000). It is therefore of interest to study how the STC could be used to model trait-­ relevant situational cues.

Emotion In the classic subdivision identified as the trilogy of mind (Hilgard, 1980; Kant, 1790/1888; Lubart & Getz, 1998), cognition and conation (identified here as personality) must always be accompanied by affection (identified here as emotion). As compared to personality-related dispositions and attitudes, an emotional state should be intended as a shorter-term phenomenon, although there are conditions under which an individual could maintain recurring emotions over long periods of time (e.g., negative emotions related to depression or mortification). The activation and control of emotional states in turn depends on emotional traits, related to personality characteristics (Reisenzein et al., 2020; Zuckerman et al., 1999), and emotional abilities, often identified as emotional intelligence (Petrides, 2011). Actually, the question whether emotional intelligence should be considered an ability, a trait, or both has been the subject of an ample debate (Petrides, 2011; Mayer et al., 2008). In our definition here, we focus on emotion in terms of an emotional state, without forgetting that the activation of these states depends in turn on emotional traits and abilities. Indeed, emotional states are very important, and sometimes prevailing, in determining one’s behavior in a given context, especially when they are characterized by high levels of arousal. Let’s consider a definition for emotion in coherence with the ones proposed above for intelligence and creativity. • Emotion is a context-dependent reaction, subjectively experienced as feelings directed toward a specific object and accompanied by physiological and behavioral changes. Emotion is both a cultural and a psychobiologically adaptive mechanism that individuals use to react in a flexible and dynamic way to changes

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in context (Scherer, 2009). But reactions are not merely passive, rather they lead to actions, so much so that through the associated traits and abilities emotions can become short-term controllers, involving five distinct components (Scherer, 2001): appraisal, action readiness, goal-­ oriented motivation, overt actions, and subjective feelings. It should be clear that intelligence, creativity, and personality are intertwined with emotion, but with clear differences. As discussed in Agnoli and Corazza (2019), emotions can be considered to be the spinal cord of the creative thinking process, permeating it with motivation even in front of fundamental uncertainty, reacting to unexpected inspiration, guiding idea generation and selection through gut feelings, and very importantly interacting with audiences and their positive or negative reactions. However, emotions can also become very strong blocking elements for the creative process, taking the form of fear of failure and anxiety due to innovation (Campbell, 2015), or even creative mortification (Beghetto, 2014). The relationship between intelligence and emotion is definitely very intricate. On the positive side, the control of emotional states through emotional intelligence appears to be very useful in terms of intelligent performance. A positive correlation can be found, for example, between emotion-recognition ability and general-intelligence scores (Schlegel et al., 2020). On the other hand, the study of cognition and emotion has shown how both positive and negative emotional states produce effects on the performance of memory and attention systems, and therefore on intelligent behavior (Derakshan & Eysenck, 2010). In essence, we believe it would be quite limited to address cross-construct studies on creativity and intelligence without including in the discussion the underlying context-­dependent emotions. As already stated above, personality traits and emotions activated through emotional traits are deeply interconnected systems, although the respective fields of scientific enquiry have proceeded on somewhat parallel paths until the 1980s. Since then, the integration of the two fields is steadily growing, to the benefit of both (Reisenzein et al., 2020).

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Wisdom Next, we consider wisdom, which is a complex construct that contains both cognitive and noncognitive components, just as intelligence and creativity do. For a chronological overview of theories of wisdom, the reader is referred to Glück (2020), who addresses: the Berlin Wisdom Paradigm (BWP, Baltes & Smith, 1990), according to which wisdom is expertise in the pragmatics of life; Sternberg’s Balance Theory of Wisdom (Sternberg, 1998), which foresees wisdom as tacit knowledge about self, others, and situations, with an ethical orientation; Ardelt’s model (Ardelt, 2004), where emphasis is given to reflectivity, distancing from one’s point of view, and the affective component projected onto others; Webster’s approach (Webster, 2003), focused on the motivation and ability to learn from critical life experiences and to apply this knowledge for higher well-­ being, enhanced by humor; Levenson et al.’s consideration of wisdom as self-transcendence (Levenson et  al., 2005), including self-knowledge, non-attachment, acceptance, and independence; the work by Mickler and Staudinger, who underlined the distinction between general and personal wisdom and introduced the Bremen Wisdom Paradigm (BrWP, Mickler & Staudinger, 2008), her own Investment Theory of Wisdom and Intelligence (Glück, 2020), clarifying the role of both fluid and crystallized intelligence in wisdom, which are interrelated with emotional components; and finally the Wise Reasoning Paradigm (WRP) by Grossmann (2017), emphasizing the fact that wisdom depends dramatically on context, containing situational, experiential, and sociocultural element. Drawing on several elements outlined above, and in view of maintaining a parsimonious approach, our definition for wisdom is as follows: • Wisdom is a context-dependent phenomenon requiring self-transcendent, pragmatic, and ethical optimization of behavior in view of higher goals. Wisdom requires higher goals, that is, objectives that transcend the specific needs or desires of the individual, or that might even be in conflict with them. Perhaps the highest levels of wisdom are those that

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involve choices for the benefit of humanity irrespective of (although not necessarily against) one’s personal profit; in this, ethical concerns lead to self-transcendence. Very importantly for the purposes of our discussion, wisdom involves experience of a certain situation, and past episodes concur on the importance of knowledge about the pragmatics of life involved in wise reasoning. In terms of modeling, wisdom in any of the STC quadrants can only be exerted if one has had sufficient and significant experiences of those prototypical situations.

Navigation Intelligence, creativity, and wisdom, along with personality and emotion, are complex and intertwined constructs, involving a mixture of cognitive and noncognitive components, skills, and attitudes, and they can be shown to be overlapping but distinguishable. Clearly, they do not exhaust the list of psychological constructs, but we can argue they are at least sufficient for an in-depth cross-construct discussion about human performance. For a brief moment, let us reduce the complexity of our discourse by considering a much simpler system, a digital computer. A computer has a vast number of functionalities, capacities, applications, all based on a single hardware architecture but each distinguishable in purpose and roll-­ out, and that endow the machine with a high potential utility. But this potential would remain latent without an operating system: indeed, it is the operating system that boots-up the machine, runs background services, allocates resources, starts and closes applications, organizes internal and network communications, shuts down the machine, etcetera. It would be difficult to imagine that a human being, an entity which is notably much more complex than a digital computer, would perform without the means for internal and external coordination and integration. Note that we are not making any claims about the possible analogy between the brain/mind system and a digital computer (Searle, 1990): It suffices to observe that a single human brain has larger complexity than any supercomputer can have, and therefore the question of its overall control cannot and should not be dismissed.

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The concepts of executive control and meta-cognition are a step in the desired direction (Moshman, 2018; Osman, 2010); however, their scope might not be as general as needed. A stronger move toward the introduction of a “human operating system” is represented by the concept of meta-intelligence (Sternberg et al., 2021). According to Sternberg et al. (2021), meta-intelligence is in charge of controlling and coordinating intelligence, creativity, and wisdom, or in other words of orchestrating analytical, creative, practical, and wisdom-based intellectual approaches to problem solving. It is recognized by Sternberg et al. (2021) that meta-­ intelligence can involve both conscious and unconscious modes of operation. We start from this contribution to introduce the notion of the human navigation construct, or navigation in short, a concept that shares the features and level of meta-intelligence as proposed by Sternberg et  al. (2021) while adding four aspects, that we deem of fundamental importance. Before we do that, it is useful to clarify that the navigation construct considered here has some connection to the concept of Personal Navigation (Sternberg & Spear-Swerling, 1998), although the latter is more longitudinally related to finding a direction in life, whereas the former should be considered more as a real-time future-oriented operator. First, it is necessary to highlight explicitly the self-organized nature of human navigation, which is a process that emerges out of the complex system of brain-mind interaction, in order to avoid the possible misunderstanding that we are theorizing the existence of a “homunculus” (Drayson, 2014; Kenny, 2016). Second, our decisions, our creations, our intelligent actions, our wise reasoning are all deeply affected by personality and emotions. Therefore, human navigation cannot be characterized or understood without also addressing the constructs of personality and emotions. Third, as shown by Seligman et al. (2013), although human behavior is strongly influenced by past experience and present situational variables, our navigation is always projected onto a form of future prediction, irrespective of the fact that it is impossible to resolve the uncertainty in the exercise of foresight. Therefore, human navigation occurs not only over an emotionally nuanced real-time epistemic dimension, but also over a

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time dimension that spans much beyond the present instant (in both directions). Fourth and final, and in line with our previous definitions, we must mention explicitly that the same person, exposed to different contexts, might navigate (and therefore behave) in completely different ways (Sternberg, 2019a, 2019b, 2021). For example, it is much easier to invoke wisdom when reflecting upon a situation that involves others than one directly affecting oneself (Grossmann, 2017). Given all the above, we are now in the position to provide our definition for human navigation: • Navigation is the context-dependent and self-organized meta-control of mind and action, occurring both above and below the level of awareness, over multiple time scales spanning the past, the present, and possible futures.

Modeling Context: The Space-Time Continuum As can be seen, all six definitions given above for creativity, intelligence, personality, emotion, wisdom, and navigation contain the specification “context-dependent,” to highlight that it is impossible to isolate a human being and measure a construct as if an embedding context did not exist (Irvine, 1988; Sternberg, 1984; Sternberg & Wagner, 1994). Even a very artificial laboratory situation, such as being inside a fMRI machine, is still a context and will influence empirical results, thus limiting the generality and external validity of inferences and conclusions that might be drawn from the experiment. Therefore, it appears to be of critical importance to be able to discuss context in detail, going beyond the mere observation that it will impose “constraints.” In general, context represents the ensemble of situational, experiential, and sociocultural elements in which one’s experience is embedded, including all relations with fellow humans (physical or virtual), possibly mediated by technological devices. As discussed by Corazza and Lubart (2020, 2021), it is possible to introduce a parsimonious approach to modeling context by considering two fundamental dimensions: conceptual space S and available time

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T. The first dimension is epistemological, referring to the specific conceptual domain in which knowledge, thoughts, decisions, and actions exist. As an example, when one is trying to solve a geometric problem, the conceptual space S would correspond to the larger field of mathematics. The second dimension contains both a chronological sense of time (chronos in Greek philosophy) as well as an experiential sense of time (kayros), and it can refer to the present but also to projections in the past and future. The characteristics of these space S and time T variables can be described in terms of continuous variation from extreme tightness to extreme looseness. As mentioned above, the concepts of tightness and looseness have been borrowed from the work Gelfand et al. (2011), in which they were used to discuss societies in a different way with respect to the more classic dualism between collectivism and individualism. Treating looseness and tightness as “travelling concepts across the humanities” (Bal & Marx-MacDonald, 2002), it is possible to apply them to space S and time T, in order to generate the STC. Leaving details aside, a very tight conceptual space is one where a single correct solution is foreseen (albeit in a specific epistemological state-­ of-­the-art), at most with a few variations on the theme, with strong constraints and epistemic barriers, and with little or no tolerance for ambiguity and errors. On the contrary, many alternatives can be contemplated in a loose conceptual space, with little pre-conditioning of the outcomes and actions, which in turn implies a general sense of tolerance for ambiguity. Considering now the available time span, under tight T, the context imposes strict time limits, rigid schedules, and firm deadlines, so that planning is at a prime. Delay is punished and might lead to dramatic losses. On the other hand, loose T allows flexible deadlines, scattered planning, and tolerance for delays. The STC can therefore be formed by mapping space S and time T over two orthogonal axes, representing a continuous variation from extreme tightness to extreme looseness, as represented in Fig. 3.1 (Corazza & Lubart, 2021). It is evident that the STC contains an infinite number of points, giving rise to an indefinite number of possible contextual models with differential levels of tightness-looseness in S and T. However, the discussion can proceed in a simplified form by concentrating our attention on the four

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quadrants, which represent families of contexts with easily distinguishable characteristics. The four quadrants are identified as tight space-tight time (TS-TT), loose space-loose time (LS-LT), loose space-tight time (LS-TT), and tight space-loose time (TS-LT). Whereas in Corazza and Lubart (2021), the four quadrants were only used to clarify the relationship between intelligence and creativity, here we are in the position of extending our discourse to also embrace personality, emotion, wisdom, and navigation. For the ensuing discussion, it is necessary to select a general aim, one that is able to involve all six selected constructs. As a sufficiently broad example, we elect the general aim to be “making contributions in a field of knowledge.” In order to make the discussion more interesting, we will first sketch general considerations about our selected constructs in the four STC quadrants in view of this general aim, and then we will move on to consider two eminent examples of contributors: Leonardo Da Vinci, as a Renaissance polymath, and Guglielmo Marconi, as the inventor of wireless. Da Vinci and Marconi shared a very high level of the trait openness (Corazza & Agnoli, 2020), leading to curiosity and preference for novelty, but had quite different focus: very broad versus very narrow.

F reedom: The Loose Space-Loose Time Quadrant We start our analysis from the LS-LT quadrant, which is loose in both space S and time T. In this context, free and unscheduled exploration is possible, a condition that is quite rare in modern societies, at least for developed countries (Corazza & Lubart, 2021). Emotions in LS-LT can yield both an ecstatic sense of freedom, but also a feeling of being lost in a fog. Therefore, adaptive personality in the LS-LT quadrant requires high levels of openness and a strong self-identity that does not require constant confirmation by surrounding figures. Pressure on the person and on the process is very low, and this can have both positive and negative consequences: There is a high potential for originality, but also a danger for a waste of time and resources. LS-LT is a context that can be very favorable for creativity, whereas a high level of intelligence might

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find it uncomfortable, leading to question whether one should try to change his/her situation. Wise thinking in the LS-LT quadrant should take advantage of the low level of personal pressure to reflect on higher questions that go much beyond personal boundaries. Leonardo Da Vinci has represented the Renaissance man, almost by definition. In his first years, as the son of an illegal union between a notary and a peasant woman, he was left by his father Piero to roam in the Vincian countryside with his uncle, the philosopher Francesco. In this LS-LT context, he had time to develop both his openness and his passion for nature, which would later become the source of most of his inspiration. On reaching adolescence, he rejoined his father in Florence and he was immediately sent to Verrocchio’s workshop, where he learned multiple disciplines without any apparent boundary. Leonardo’s personality can be assumed to have developed in the LS-LT context. Guglielmo Marconi was the son of a relatively wealthy family, living in the outskirts of Bologna, with both Italian and Irish influences. His mother, Annie Jameson, was the daughter of the powerful family of Irish whiskey distillers. As such, he had many choices in front of him, including leading a peaceful life in a LS-LT environment, but since adolescence, he had a dream that he would become an inventor. Early on in his life, his passion and inventive self-identity grew fast and led him to leave public school and focus very narrowly on the hot topic of the time: electromagnetism, that is, a tight conceptual space S.  Apparently, Marconi’s development could have occurred in a LS-LT context, but a combination of personality, intelligence, and creativity gave him a strong desire to move away from those conditions and create a TS-LT situation, discussed next.

 igging Deeper: The Tight Space-Loose D Time Quadrant When time T is loose and space S is tight, ample periods of time are available to spend efforts to tackle very difficult questions and challenges. In terms of emotion, the TS-LT quadrant is typically dominated by experiencing passion, suffering, frustration, and often pressure from

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competition. Therefore, adaptive personality characteristics for the TS-LT quadrant include a high level of emotional stability, persistence and resistance to frustration. Both intelligence and creativity are essential for success in terms of making contributions in a TS-LT context (Corazza & Lubart, 2021), because these are conditions in which the overlap between the two constructs is more evident than their possible distinctions. In short, a high level of intelligence is needed to find answers to very complex questions, but creativity is also needed because many are searching but only a few will succeed. Wise thinking in a TS-LT context should reflect on the fact that the high challenge that has been raised should be of relevance for humanity as a whole, and it should recognize the fact that strong competition is a good thing, because in the end it is not important who wins the race, but the progress of our societies as a whole. Leonardo Da Vinci experienced a TS-LT context, for example, when he tried to develop a flying machine. Tightness came from the fact that any mistake in the design would translate into losing the prototype machine or, worse, endangering the life of the occasional pilot. Given the complexity and ambition of the goal, it was definitely a very tight space S with no tolerance for errors, but unfortunately, accidents did occur. On the other hand, time T was completely loose: in fact, there was no request from anyone to have a flying machine in the XV century! Leonardo was pursuing a creative dream, inspired by his love for nature and in particular by his marvel for the flight of birds, which very intelligently he associated to fish swimming in water, anticipating the study of fluid dynamics. Was it wise thinking on his side? Actually, everyone at his time considered these efforts to be “crazy.” Notwithstanding this, Leonardo was able to deduce and describe the principle of human flight in general, and of the helicopter in particular. Higher goals were pursued and achieved. The second part of Guglielmo Marconi’s experiences with wireless transmissions occurred on board the Elettra boat, which became his floating laboratory from which several new ideas were pursued. In fact, even though Marconi was a very busy entrepreneur for most of his life, he never stopped his scientific enquiries to develop his invention in all of its possible applications. In other words, he created a TS-LT environment for his scientific research efforts that were run in parallel to his very hectic public life. One of the experiments he devised was blind navigation into

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a port in the Liguria region. It was a clear example of a dangerous challenge, that allowed no mistakes, and that if successful would open the way to using radio signals not only for communications, but also for positioning. It was an idea projected into the long-term future, a TS-LT project, that turned out to be a precursor of modern-day GPS. Believing in himself, holding on to his persistence, and using his intelligence and creativity, Marconi was successful, and entered the port of Sestri Levante in 1934.

Improvisation: The Loose Space-Tight Time Quadrant In the LS-TT quadrant, degrees of freedom are present in the conceptual space to allow exploration with divergent thinking, but this search must be completed brilliantly within the allocated time. This is therefore another hybrid quadrant (Corazza & Lubart, 2021), where both creativity and intelligence play a fundamental role in an interplay between looseness and tightness. The high pace and explosion of alternatives of the LS-TT quadrant might lead to joyous emotions and humor when one is successful, or to hard frustration if imagination runs dry or pressure becomes excessive. In terms of personality, we argue that the LS-TT quadrant calls for openness and extraversion, and a disposition toward improvisation, without fear for other people’s judgment. Wise thinking in LS-TT conditions is, for example, necessary when decisions need to be made in reaction to natural disasters: time T is tight, but adaptive ideas are badly needed in order to save lives. When the French king Francis I (Francis 1st) came into power in 1515, Pope Leo X gave Leonardo a very important task in the LS-TT quadrant: quickly realize a surprising welcome for the new king. And Leonardo generated and realized an idea that amazed the world: He conceived a mechanical robot, a moving lion that would first appear to be aggressive, rising up and showing his sharply nailed paws, but at the end of his movement his belly would open up to let a cascade of flowers fall at the feet of an astonished Francis I (Francis the first). One can only imagine

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the mix of creativity, ingenuity, wit, and tolerance for risk that must have animated Leonardo in this endeavor. Perhaps it was not the wisest possible choice, imagining what could have gone wrong if any detail had not properly worked. In the month of December 1901, Guglielmo Marconi had decided in a hurry to try an experiment that all of the world believed to be impossible: crossing the Atlantic Ocean with a wireless signal, from Cornwall in the UK to Newfoundland in Canada. It is not completely sure why he could not wait for a less difficult season, from a meteorological point of view: probably some business-related issue, always in search of new investors. His reputation was clearly at stake, and this LS-TT challenge required large amounts of courage and tolerance for risk. Conceptual space S was loose for two fundamental reasons: first, because nobody actually knew if the designed system would be able to succeed, there was not any known “correct solution”; it was pure exploration of a possibility. Second, because the gusting winds made the receiving antennas collapse, generating an unforeseen problem that called for creative solutions, but in a hurry. Marconi, who had traveled himself to St. John’s in Newfoundland with a few collaborators and foreseeing possible problems, had brought with him some balloons and kites. The balloons were rapidly blown away by the wind: another failure to face, another chance to show persistence. On December 12, 1901, the receiving antenna was tied up to a kite, and the first transatlantic radio signal was received! Once again, any trace of wisdom in facing this challenge could only be detected a-posteriori: thanks to this incredible success, Guglielmo Marconi became worldwide famous in the space of a single day, and this innovation was later the means to save thousands of human lives during accidents at sea (the most famous being the tragedy of the Titanic in 1912).

Pressure: The Tight Space-Tight Time Quadrant The TS-TT quadrant represents contexts that are purely tight, in both space and time. Perhaps unfortunately, this is the condition in which the largest part of the population lives daily in modern societies, at least in

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Western and Far-East cultures. There is a quasi-permanent feeling of pressure, agendas are dominated by urgent matters, and focus on a single task at a time is crucial, whereas important but non-urgent matters are often postponed. Given that “there is no time,” it is very important to form and manage teams to subdivide tasks, in order to reach targets. Given the need for tightly managed collaboration, agreeableness and conscientiousness are very important personality characteristics in the TS-TT quadrant. Also, it should be underlined that the traditional education system has been designed for this quadrant (Corazza et al., 2021a, 2021b), with a general goal to have every student reach the same level of competence in strictly defined disciplines at the same age. Personality of most adolescents is developed in these contexts of tight space and tight time. In these conditions, it is extremely important to have clearly defined goals that must be pursued and achieved in minimum time. Therefore, intelligent behavior, as defined above, is perfectly adaptive and desired in the TS-TT quadrant. Vice versa, creative behavior might be maladaptive: Ideas with high potential originality are not required and likely not welcome, given the tight constraints in the conceptual space, and there is a penalty for not answering in due time (Westby & Dawson, 1995). Essentially, the intelligence construct dominates in the TS-TT quadrant, and creativity often leads to behaviors that are criticized, up to the extreme point of being considered “deficits.” Wise thinking in TS-TT entails learning the rules of this game, because trying to break them would lead rapidly to the margins, with very high associated risk for reputation (in a wide-sense). Leonardo da Vinci always resisted TS-TT conditions. In fact, as soon as his reputation as a superb painter started to spread, he also became known as an artist who did not finish several of his works. He simply was working on too many projects at the same time, and he could not meet the requirements of the TS-TT context. It was for this reason that when the Pope asked Lorenzo de’ Medici to send his best painters to decorate the Sistine Chapel, Leonardo was not selected. This setback was crucial for Leonardo in deciding to leave Florence and move to Milan, to go work for Ludovico Sforza. But there again, he changed the fresco painting technique for the Cenacolo (the most famous fresco in the history of

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the arts), in order to be able to work in parallel on other projects: Single-­ task focus was not ever on the mind of Leonardo da Vinci, who always escaped TS-TT conditions. When Heinrich Hertz was able to prove that electromagnetic waves do propagate in space, as Maxwell had predicted, he unfortunately did not see any practical applications for this phenomenon. On the contrary, Guglielmo Marconi was only 21 years old when he experimented for the first time with wireless telegraphy at Villa Griffone in Bologna (Italy), and immediately he had a sense of the potential value of his invention. He moved to London, the equivalent of the “Silicon Valley” at the end of the XIX century, filed for a patent, started the Marconi company at 23 years old, transformed it into a multinational enterprise when he was 25, crossed the Atlantic Ocean at 27, reached the break-even point at 33, received the Nobel prize in physics at 35. This incredible and unique entrepreneurial adventure was achieved by Marconi in a fierce market, with competition from the large companies running wired telegraphy and underwater cables, as well as headaches from legal disputes on patents. Although it was certainly not an easy life, Guglielmo Marconi flourished in these TS-TT conditions, demonstrating to the world his leadership, commercial capacity, and vision. Even though Europe, and Italy in particular, were living in very obscure times starting from the 1920s, Marconi was able to show his wise concern for higher goals by stating that “My inventions are for the benefit of humanity, and not to destroy it.” In 1937, a few months before his death, Marconi left his scientific legacy by foreseeing that wireless communications would one day lead to personal communications, connecting people anywhere and anytime.

Navigation of the STC So far, our cross-construct discussion in the STC has touched upon personality, emotion, intelligence, creativity, and wisdom, but we have not commented on the meta-control provided by the human navigation construct. Given its associated complexity and high level of abstraction, this

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is the area where less scientific results are available, and that is more prone to a philosophical discourse. Nevertheless, or perhaps exactly for its existence at the border between psychology and philosophy, it is an area of great interest and with a high potential for future developments. To start, we could speculate that when someone’s characteristics in terms of cognition (both intelligent and creative) and personality fit well in a certain context, the emotional state should be one of comfort, and personal navigation could work to maintain that environment, as well as developing it in a coherent fashion, along trends of continuity. However, when there is contrast between cognitive and conative characteristics of a person and the surrounding context, a feeling of uneasiness should start to develop, and navigation becomes critical. One could try as hard as possible to disregard his/her discomfort. This might lead to an entire life of following other people’s directions and desires, without ever trying to express one’s latent potential. In the worst scenario, a persistent neglect of one’s true nature might lead to pathological states of mind. At the opposite extreme, a mismatch between personal characteristics and context could lead one to navigate toward rebellion, which in turn might find strong counter-reactions by institutions, starting for example at school. This might lead to a life of struggle, with happy or sad endings depending on how successful the rebellion turns out to be. In the middle ground, one might look for a wiser approach to navigating a person-context mismatch: recognize environmental conditions as they are, try to understand the possible associated values from both a personal and a societal perspective; work to adjust oneself and the context, in view of finding better harmony; reflect along the way on one’s status, always trying to look for the good. The above short discussion on the individual’s person-context match or mismatch should then be elevated into abstraction and brought to a sociocultural level. This can allow one to address questions such as, What are the optimal contextual conditions for education of a population? How can culture allow the navigation of a range of different contexts, offering diversity of conditions and developing everyone’s openness to experience? How can ethics and moral sensitivity be developed, so that

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technological advancements are always in the direction of benefiting humanity, and not harming it? Of course, we cannot address these questions here, but actually, we feel it is valuable to have open questions in mind.

Conclusions Psychological constructs are excellent tools to understand human behavior in different contexts. In this Chapter, we have touched upon the entire trilogy of mind (cognition, conation, and affect) by considering intelligence, creativity, personality, and emotion, and then adding to this framework the consideration of wisdom and human navigation. According to our definitions, all of these constructs are entangled with context in which an individual or a population is immersed. Therefore, cross-construct studies need a unified approach to context, and the space-­ time continuum offers this possibility. Future work can start from these considerations and develop empirical studies contemplating both qualitative and quantitative approaches.

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4 Looking at Intelligence, Creativity, and Wisdom in the Chinese Way: A Troika Model of Mind Power David Yun Dai and Weihua Niu

As overseas Chinese, we often witness different ways the Westerners express their concerns with and interests in “Chinese ways.” For example, in a graduate seminar class, an American professor is often frustrated by her Chinese students’ lack of participation and unexpressive faces, yet is impressed by their ability to write a reflective paper. These students’ intellectual abilities seem to be often mixed with other traits such as personalities, interpersonal relationships, and social norms, and would be perceived as the “Chinese way.” In this chapter, we discuss the Chinese way of conceptualizing intelligence, creativity, and wisdom. As will be illustrated in the following section, these three words are almost inseparable in Chinese and are, etymologically speaking, from the same source, dao. In contrast, these D. Y. Dai Department of Educational and Counseling Psychology, University at Albany, State University of New York, Albany, NY, USA W. Niu (*) Department of Psychology, Pace University, New York, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. J. Sternberg et al. (eds.), Intelligence, Creativity, and Wisdom, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26772-7_4

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three words are from different sources in English, with three distinct names. Here we can see the power of naming. Naming leads people automatically assume independence among the three and believe they should be studied exclusively. Gilbert and Malone (1995) called it the correspondence bias in social attributions, which reflects the analytic tradition of the Western civilization to explore each concept objectively under the assumption that for every phenomenon observed, there is an essence underneath. Spearman (1904) also recognized the importance of providing a clear naming and definition for intelligence, allowing it to be “objectively determined and measured.” In a favorable scenario, such a way of thinking gains excellent insight into capturing cognitive processes or dispositions of each concept. It also facilitates a systematic scientific investigation to identify individuals’ genetic makeup for a particular behavior (e.g., chromosome disorders). In a less desirable scenario, the correspondence bias and analytic apparatus may decontextualize a process and lead to an erroneous attribution or naming fallacy, reifying an abstract concept (like intelligence) as if it is a capacity and has a material existence. Thus, someone acting wisely can be reified as having a lot of wisdom, and someone solving a problem creatively is seen as possessing more creativity. This is a psychometric approach to quantifying a construct as a variable in a population. A less radical form of this correspondence bias is to see intelligence, creativity, and wisdom inherently involving different cognitive processes, yet they may be somewhat related; an example would be a creative act that cannot be fully executed without a certain level of intelligence. For example, Sternberg et al. (2021) proposed using meta-intelligence to capture the shared core attribute and mental abilities among intelligence, creativity, and wisdom. Nevertheless, the three have been historically conceptualized as separate constructs in the Western tradition, particularly through the lens of psychometrics. Many measurements have been developed to capture individual differences in intelligence, creativity, and wisdom. Researchers have long tried to establish their construct and discriminant validity. Such a practice of separating the three may stem from the Western cultural tradition of analysis-reduction. Examining intelligence, creativity, and wisdom from

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other cultures may provide complementary perspectives and enrich our understanding of the nature of these critical constructs. One way to identify cultural differences is to discern different ways of carving nature at its joints, that is, their distinct epistemologies. Miller (1984), for example, has found that Hindu individuals are less prone to correspondence bias compared to their American counterparts. Instead, they are more likely to make a situational rather than dispositional attribution regarding achievement or social behavior. In this way, Indians (and likely the Chinese, who share the collectivist tradition) are more likely to develop situation-based models of performance in situ rather than identifying its structural or functional properties as having its unique essence or psychological underpinnings. Is this where we speculate that a different take on the exercise of mind power will occur, which is more tuned into situational demands that constrain one’s performance? Of course, such a model can also obscure dispositional or capacity aspects of cognitive performance and becomes less “analytic” in terms of clarifying distinct psychological processes involved. This is the assumption we build to develop the Chinese ways of looking at the three concepts.

The Chinese Epistemology The Chinese culture has been deeply rooted in an agricultural society for thousands of years. Capitalism and massive urban development did not happen until 1840, when trade disputes led to the Opium War and the semi-colonization of parts of China (mainly coastal regions by Western powers). Up to that point, three philosophical and religious traditions had enjoyed the status of dominant ideologies in China, namely, Confucianism, Taoism, and Zen Buddhism. The first two are indigenous, and the third was imported from another culture (India) and adapted to Chinese culture. Although there was no scientific investigation into understanding the nature of intelligence, creativity, and wisdom, there was never a lack of reflections on and examinations of these concepts, especially from the Chinese intellectuals (shi, 士). Three primary schools of thought mentioned above profoundly influenced how the Chinese, especially Chinese scholars, understood themselves and the world around them.

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As we discuss later, Confucianism was probably most responsible for naming something close to what we now understand as “intelligence” (zhi, 智), which is one of the five cardinal virtues (ren, yi, li, zhi, xin, 仁 義禮智信) according to Confucianism. However, in this context, the word has a solid moral overtone: to tell right from wrong. The word (hui, 慧), closest to the term “wisdom,” often refers to a state of deep understanding and enlightenment of the nature and sources of human suffering and the way of gaining freedom from it, which has more elaboration in both Taoism (especially Laozi’s Taoism) and Zen Buddhism. There was no word equivalent to “creativity” in ancient China. However, Taoists, especially Zhuangzi (莊子, 369–286 BC), wrote many essays and fables that full of endless imagination and creativity. Those essays also expressed his idea of living creatively, that is, to follow the Dao, or the way of heaven (Zhuangzi, The Way of Heaven).To follow the Dao, people need to respond precisely according to the situation (concerning our thoughts, feelings and overall circumstances) to create what we want to create. Moreover, since life is filled with randomness, rather than seeking originality, it is important to live spontaneously, integrating contrasting aspects of lives and arrange them to form a rich and variegated whole (Chung, 2020, September 1). Although the three schools of thoughts made their own explanations of the nature of intelligence, creativity, and wisdom, they all came from the same tradition to seek the Way (dao, 道). In other words, there is a common source for intelligence, creativity, and wisdom, according to the Chinese ideology. Dao refers to the way how everything in the universe operates and relate to one another, close in meaning to “law” or “principle” in English. Therefore, being able to follow the Way is the indication of intelligence, creativity, and wisdom. Etymologically, the Chinese character of dao (道) is composed of two elements: head (shou, 首) suggesting “to lead,” and foot or walking (ya, 辵, 辶) suggesting “to walk through.” Taken together, the compound character literally means leading through from the beginning to the end. The word of dao in modern Chinese has multiple meanings. As a noun, dao means path, road, way, law, and rule whereas, as a verb, it means to say. The last use of dao resembles the legislative power of some transcendental existence, like “In the beginning is the Word” (in Genesis and John). Generally speaking, dao has two broad

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meanings: “the origin of everything” and “the paths that people later walked on.” In other words, the word of dao implies “the principle of the nature,” both the origins of new things and continued production of new things, and all humans can do is to follow the Nature’s Way (道法自然, 天人合一) as the highest attainment of human spirit and the source of mind power. In this sense, there has been a consensus among the Chinese intellectuals over millennials in cognizing the common source for mind power, dao. They differ in their understanding of different manifestations of the dao, in the form of intelligence, creativity, and wisdom, depending on which school of thoughts they are most self-­identified with.

 hinese Interpretations of Intelligence, C Creativity, and Wisdom from the Three Schools of Thoughts The following section provides a brief overview of how the three major Chinese schools of thought interpret intelligence, creativity, and wisdom, with a caveat that our accounts are tentative and by no means represent a comprehensive understanding of these ideologies.

Confucianism Confucius (551—479 BC) was one of the first Chinese intellectuals who articulated the concept of intelligence and spoke about the importance of individual differences in intelligence. His teaching and philosophy have profoundly influenced on Chinese culture over two millennials, and they remain influential today. To Confucius, there seems to be no distinction between intelligence, creativity, and wisdom, although his theory appears to contribute the most to the understanding of intelligence. Confucius equated “intelligence” (Zhi, 智) to “knowledge and knowing” (zhi, 知) and believed that people varied in their levels of intelligence by how knowledge was acquired and utilized. For example, Confucius (2014) said in the book “Doctrine of the Mean”:

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Some are born with the knowledge of those duties; some know them by study, and some acquire the knowledge after a painful feeling of ignorance. But the knowledge being possessed, it comes to the same thing. Some practice them naturally, some from a desire for their advantages, and some from strenuous effort. But the achievement being made, it comes to the same thing. To be fond of learning is to be near to knowledge. (p. 9)

Moreover, Confucius greatly emphasized the importance of both deliberate learning and active thinking. An inherent strength of the theory is the emphasis that learning without thinking (i.e., rote learning) reduces learning to regurgitation, whereas thinking without learning is not well grounded in experience and fundamental understandings; it can easily hit a dead end or get nowhere. A famous quote of Confucius in Analects of Confucius (Confucius, 1975), well known even to today’s Chinese elementary school students, is this: “Learning without thought is labor lost; thought without learning is perilous” (學而不思則罔, 思而 不學則殆). In essence, both learning and thinking are two fundamental skills for intellectuals, and they are two major means to obtain knowledge and possess a high level of mental power. Confucius further elaborated on the relationship between learning and thinking when he had a conversation with one of his disciples, Zigong (子貢). When Zigong wonders how his teacher (Confucian) became so good at so many things, Confucian says to him: “So you think I am erudite and highly knowledgeable?” (“多學而識之”). Zigong replied: “True, is it not?” Confucian responded: “No, I just follow a coherent line [of thinking]” (“予一以貫之”); this, by the way, is reminiscent of Einstein’s remarks that “It is not that I am so smart, it is that I stay with the questions much longer.” Confucius thought about human intelligence not merely as having a good memory and knowing a lot or learning faster than others. Instead, human intelligence is more penetrating, to be sure, with persistent probing and prodding; it allows people to develop insights into the inherent logic of things. Our interpretation of Confucius’s remarks is that intelligent thinking involves seeking profound coherence that holds seemingly discrete pieces of knowledge together as a whole or system, akin to what Bruner (1960) called “deep structure.”

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A critical feature of the Confucian interpretation of intelligence is its beliefs about intelligence not as merely instrumental (i.e., enable us to get things done and get us ahead), but as a means to a more virtuous life by reaching out to the ultimate human spirit, dao. Mencius (372–289 BC), a prominent Confucian follower, was probably the first one in China to use the term “intelligence” (zhi, 智). He was the first to articulate the four cardinal values of kindness, justice, courteousness, and intelligence, and further traced them to their respective roots: “Kindness is originated from empathy, justice from shame and disgust, courteousness from modesty, and intelligence from a sense of right and wrong” (“惻隱之心, 仁之 端也; 羞惡之心, 義之端也; 辭讓之心, 禮之端也; 是非之心, 智之端 也;” later a fifth value, credibility “信” was added). He saw 智 (intelligence) as the cognitive basis of morality, consistent with Piaget’s conception of morality as having a distinct cognitive component. Due to the emotional and cognitive origins, like all Confucians, Mencius believed that this cognitive quality can be cultivated. Wang Yaming (王陽明, 1472–1529) was a neo-Confucian scholar and contemporary of Da Vinci, who revamped and to some extent modernized Confucianism. While Da Vinci was doing groundbreaking work with analytic technique in mathematics, mechanics, chemistry, engineering, anatomy, among others, Wang advocated reaching truth through heart rather than through mind. But the only way it can be done is by taking action and knowing will come along. Wang coined a phrase “the union of knowing and action” (知行合一). Importantly, according to Wang, truth is not to be cognized and coded but intimately experienced. As can be expected, unlike Western philosophy, which separates epistemology and ethics, the notion of the union of knowing and action proposed by Wang also has a moral overtone, understandable in the ancient times of the Central Kingdom. However, Wang meant more than “do what you preach;” he pitted his conviction on the primacy of action for knowing as against a detached, speculative, and metaphysical way of thinking and knowing prevalent in a more puritan version of Confucianism by another neo-Confucianist, Zhu Xi (朱熹, 1130–1200). Wang’s view finds echoes in contemporary arguments that human intelligence is situated (Lave & Wenger, 1991), and even embodied in social context (Clark, 2001), and that knowing something or becoming more intelligent at

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something is to be able to feel, think, and act in a certain way through participation in social practice (Gee, 2007). For Wang, the “feeling” part always mediates cognition and action, and is essential for intimate connections the person makes with the objects, people, and symbolic meanings while in action. Wang was the first person in China who named his philosophy “a discipline of mind” (心學). Taken as a whole, the Confucian interpretation of intelligence emphasizes the importance of learning and thinking that is concerned with how one lives a virtuous life and makes connections with the world. For that reason, intelligence is seen as more moral than merely instrumental. Both experience and reflection are essential in this conception. Confucius also articulated wisdom (hui, 慧), especially in the book, “Doctrine of the Mean” (Zhongyoung, 中庸). The Mean is the central concept of this book, referring to a state of knowing how to seek an appropriate path to behavior and interacting with others harmoniously. Therefore, a wise man knows the course of the Mean and maintains harmony with others. In contrast, an unwise man goes the opposite way, often acting recklessly without paying attention to the situation so that he may easily be taken in a net, a trap, or a pitfall, and not knowing how to escape. To elaborate on the meaning of wisdom, Confucius described two wise men, Shun and Hui. When describing Shun, Confucius said, He indeed was greatly wise! Shun loved to question others, and to study their words, though they might be shallow. He concealed what was bad in them and displayed what was good. He took hold of their two extremes, determined the Mean, and employed it in his government of the people.

When describing Hui, Confucius once again emphasized his ability to choose the Mean and further praised Hui’s virtue of preserving wisdom, “whenever he got hold of what was good, he clasped it firmly, as if wearing it on his breast, and did not lose it.” In sum, a Confucian approach to wisdom emphasizes moderation and proportion based on the “Doctrine of the mean” and a constant admonition of exercising the two extremes: insufficient and overstretching. Therefore, to Confucius, “excess is just like falling short” (過猶不及), none considers wisdom.

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Since Confucian ideology emphasizes more on the Mean (Zhongyong, 中庸), to many contemporary theorists, especially those from the West, the Confucian ideology is not amenable and even detrimental to the development of creativity. There is a misunderstanding regarding the Confucian notion of creativity and the meaning of the “doctrine of the mean.” It is true that Confucius honored tradition and paid great attention to the social context; he also emphasized the importance of openness to experience to find a proper creative response to situational changes. From the Confucian point of view, creativity is meant to be incremental rather than a sharp break-away from tradition; rather, it can be seen as the extension of tradition, a continuous process of seeking new solutions to respond to the everlasting changing environment. The phrase, “doctrine of the mean,” refers to “knowing when to do what and act according to the situation (Niu, 2012). Many Confucian scholars, including Confucius himself, spent their lives learning new things, pursuing excellence, and achieving a state of greater enlightenment (Kim, 2007; Niu, 2012; Tan, 2020). Tan interpreted Confucian creativity as centering on righteousness (yi, 義), motivated by sympathy (shu, 恕) to broaden the Way (dao, 道). To further explain the dual properties of creativity, novelty, and appropriateness, from the Confucian point of view, originality is achieved through a transformation of the objective world into original interpretation, and appropriateness is accomplished through flexible response to concrete circumstances synchronically and diachronically. Therefore, the creative process is not only at the personal level but also at the interpersonal or social contextual level. The sociocultural perspective of creativity has been embraced by many contemporary scholars in creativity (e.g., Glăveanu, 2015, 2020; Sawyer, 2012; Simonton, 2019). Understanding the Confucian interpretation of creativity broadens our understanding of the concept of creativity. In sum, Confucianism directly illustrates intelligence (zhi, 智) and wisdom (hui, 慧), and both involve experience and reflection. Confucius did not directly talk about creativity himself but implied it in Confucian doctrine. Creativity is equated to excellence—the highest state of knowing the Way. In essence, all three concepts—intelligence, creativity, and wisdom—are closely related, and all emphasize the importance of social context and self-reflection to act appropriately and virtuously to the situation.

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Taoism Different from the Confucian tradition, which tried very hard to prescribe a normative way people can follow to live a virtuous and appropriate life, the Taoist philosophers tried everything they could to help people “un-prescribe” the conventional ways people do things and see the world; The two most important figures of Taoists are Laozi and Zhuangzi. Laozi (sixth century to late fourth century BC) is a mysterious and legendary figure living in the same period of Confucius. He is also considered as the founder of Taoism. The mystery lies not only in lack of clear record of his birth and death and life in between, but also the indiscernible intend of his original teaching. In his one and only book, The Book of the Way (Dao De Jing/Tao Te Ching, 道德经), Laozi (2015) did not clearly explain what the Way (dao) is. According to Laozi, human rationality could not comprehend the Way (dao), nor could the Way (dao) be explained by human language, and worse, language can distort our understanding of the Way (dao). His famous quote, which appeared in the first sentence of The Book of the Way, is “The Way that can be spoken is not a constant Way; a name that can be named is a not a continuous name“(道可道, 非常道; 名可名; 非常名, Chapter 1, verse 1). Here, Laozi alerts people to the danger of reifying something dynamic and changeable as if it is static and has an unchangeable essence. Applying in the context of this chapter, mind power is constantly changing and, therefore, cannot be obtained and measured. Laozi viewed wisdom as espousing a dialectical view of the world full of contradictions and paradoxes and fighting a one-track mind or either­or dichotomous thinking (Dai et al., 2019). A dialectic position helps individuals engage in polysemic engagement and crisis-crossing issues from different perspectives to achieve cognitive flexibility (Spiro et al., 1988). Laozi also viewed high intelligence as a mixed blessing, as high intelligence creates an illusion of power, sometimes leading to stupid mistakes. Taoists would use the metaphor of fire versus water to illustrate their wisdom. Fire seemingly carries an overwhelming power, burning down whatever is in its way, and the water seems so weak and shapeless, bordering on insignificance. Yet water is more fundamental to life, and

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the fact of water taming and even extinguishing the fire is used by Taoists to highlight soft control (e.g., co-existence) and soft power (e.g., cultural influence) against rigid control (e.g., conquering), and demanding power (e.g., military prowess). Similar to Confucian ideology of mind power, virtue is considered as an inseparable element of intelligence and wisdom. Therefore, “giving birth and nourishing, having without possessing, acting with no expectations, leading and not trying to control: this is the supreme virtue” (Chapter 10, verse 7). However, unlike Confucius, Laozi’s idea of intelligence and wisdom lies in weakness, simple, natural, authentic, gentleness, caution, inaction, and most importantly, denying oneself to follow the Way (dao) and the will of Heaven. Laozi even provided a list of characters associated with ancient followers of the Way (dao)—the wise men, as the following: Watchful as if crossing a winter river, Cautious as if in fear of their neighbors, Polite and respectful like guests, Natural and authentic, like melting ice, Simple like uncarved wood, All-embracing like a valley, Earthy like muddy water. Who can settle the mud to make water clear? Who can revive a stiff corpse? Those who follow this Way (dao) will not be conceited. Only through lack of conceit can one be renewed When worn out and dying. 豫兮若冬涉川, 猶兮若畏四鄰, 儼兮其若客, 渙兮若冰之釋, 敦兮 其若樸, 曠兮其若谷, 溷兮其若濁. 孰能濁以靜之徐清? 孰能安以動 之徐生? 保此道不欲盈. 夫唯不盈, 故能敝而新成. —Chapter 15, verses 2–4).

Compared to Laozi, Zhuangzi (476–221 BC), another prominent Taoist thinker, encouraged people to think outside the box and gain ultimate inner freedom to connect with Nature’s Way. This is the only Way (dao), according to Zhuangzi, in which one can become creative (道法自

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然). In this way, Zhuangzi’s Taoism has the most elaboration on the concept of creativity, even though the word of creativity was never mentioned in Taoist classics. Creativity here does not mean that one is trying to read God’s mind, as Einstein once said what he was trying to do. Instead, Taoists’ creativity means following Nature’s guidance and being at one with Nature (i.e., not knowing it but living it). For Zhuangzi, living an authentic, creative life, free from the shackles of social conventions and various mental traps (mental sets), is a central issue for every human being. Seeking inner freedom so that one can perceptually and intellectually penetrate into the Way (dao) and rhythm of life and universe (dao), is best illustrated by Zhuangzi’s story of a master dissecting an ox (庖丁解牛) with a knife that goes through the cow’s bones and joints smoothly without a glitch. The feat is achieved through one’s “mind’s eye” that penetrates into the anatomy of a cow, not by analytical means but by a perceptual grip, with the right touch and feel. Zhuangzi was de facto describing adaptive expertise (Hatano & Inagaki, 1986) that is achieved not only by years of deliberate practice (Ericsson, 2006), but also through mental concentration and embodied mastery of dissecting a cow. What is worth noticing is the recurrent theme of creativity, not as free association and divergent thinking as Westerners tend to see, but as following Nature’s Way, that is, there is more convergence and objectivity in creative thinking than what is reckoned with by these cognitive processes (see Mumford & McIntosh, 2017).

Zen Buddhism Zen Buddhism (Chan, 禪) can trace its origin to India but was formulated in China around the Tang dynasty (seventh to tenth century). It is a mixture of Indian Mahayana Buddhism and Taoism. Its Chinese pronunciation of the word, Chan, is an abbreviation of Channa (禅那), a Chinese translation of the Indian word, dhyana, which means meditation. When Zen Buddhism was introduced in Japan, the word of Chan is pronounced as Zen. Zen Buddhism emphasizes self-restraint, a practice of meditation and gaining insight into the true nature (jianxing, 见性) of the universe outwardly and the mind inwardly. Although Zen Buddhism

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did not use the same word of the Way (dao), the word “true nature” is equivalent to the Way (dao) in Confucianism and Daoism. Zen Buddhism is a wisdom-based philosophy. Its main advice is openness to one’s experience, even merging one’s consciousness into the universe to reach the point of selflessness. Zen Buddhism is anti-essentialism, arguing that things do not have their inherent essence (Zixing,自性). Yet, humans are inherently seeking certainty and cognitive closure, and as a result, hurting the integrity of life and even cause many miseries. Zen Buddhist wisdom is meant to help individuals overcome their illusions and sometimes delusions. The notions of substance (Se, 色) and emptiness (Kong, 空) are used as a cognitive vehicle to achieve the tranquility of inner life and mental freedom.

 he Troika Model: An Integration T of Intelligence, Creativity, and Wisdom As we demonstrated earlier, intelligence, creativity, and wisdom are not mutually exclusive and completely separate in functioning in the Chinese conceptions; instead, they are interconnected and came from the same source: the Way (Dao, 道). However, these three concepts are by no means identical. To avoid blurring the distinction between these three, we use the analogy of a troika to illustrate the relationship among intelligence, creativity, and wisdom from the Chinese perspective. A troika is a traditional Russian vehicle, a sleigh or carriage pulled by three horses harnessed abreast. It is often claimed to be the only harness combination with different gaits of the horses, indicating their independent agencies. Yet, these three horses coordinate and are controlled by the same reins. Like the three horses being the driving forces of a troika, intelligence, creativity, and wisdom are the three forms of mind power: they may have different characteristics and sometimes run in paces; yet, they walk alongside, governed by the same resource, the Way (dao). The role of the Way (dao) is like the reins in control of the troika, providing constraints and the direction of the troika. In other words, the Way (dao) is the source and ultimate control of the mind power in three different

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forms, intelligence, creativity, and wisdom (see Sternberg et al., 2021 for the notion of meta-intelligence). To reach the highest level of intelligence, creativity, and wisdom, people need to follow the Way (dao).

The Three Agencies of Mind Power Like the three horses in the troika, all three are unique agents, with their special characteristics, presenting each of the three aspects of mind power. The first aspect is intelligence (I), which is the instrumental agency, demonstrated in analytic reasoning and problem solving, and means-­ ends analysis, involving identification and satisfaction of goal-related constraints, capable of fashioning new models and explanations; often assessed in terms of effectiveness and efficiency vis-à-vis real-life tasks (technical rationality). The second is creativity (C), which is the creative agency, with its pathfinding power, often involving experimental and design efforts in creating new conceptual space and tangible ways and products; its mode of thinking can be hypothetical-deductive, abductive, serendipitous, or trial and error, and its modalities can be visceral and intuitive, with new insight into the nature of a problem or pathways to solutions; personal dispositions can be involved, such as adventurousness and risk-taking, Avant-guard spirit. The third and the final aspect is wisdom (W), which is the meta-­ control agency, with experiential-reflective in nature, serving as meta-­ functions (balancing and negotiating multiple goals, stop rules, etc.), based on past experiences and pattern-recognitions, providing heuristics of various perspectives, balancing acts, and comparative analysis, and limits of human action itself.

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 Mental Self-Government Framework A of the Three Agency In addition to the preliminary delineation of the three agencies and their distinct functions, we further specify their interrelations using the analogy of the Sternberg’s (1988) theory of mental self-government.

Functions of the Three Agencies Functional mutual dependence. Instrumental agency is needed for implementing a new vision or way of doing things. Wisdom is required to balance priorities, find an optimal mix, and sometimes impose the “stop rule.” Shared underlying components. Each agency appears to be executed by a distinct set of cognitive processes, but this is not necessarily the case in real-life human functioning. Hypothetical-deductive thinking is instrumental and analytic but plays a crucial role in generating novel ideas and experimentation in physical science. The instrumental agency is meant to be based on technical rationality (rule-based) yet imbued with experiential-reflective wisdom in actual human functioning (Schon, 1983). As is often the case, instrumental and imaginative human agencies, unlike AI, are subject to experience-based meta-control. To highlight the relationship among the three agencies, the instrumental agency provides the basic cognitive apparatus for instrumental problem solving, such as understanding nuclear fusion; the creative agency offers a vision of producing a nuclear bomb that can massively kill the enemy, and it is a meta-control agency that calls for the elimination of such dangerous weaponry that can potentially destroy the human kind itself. Together, they function as a troika of executive, legislative, and judicial functions governing human action per Sternberg’s (1998) theory of thinking style.

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Interaction and Reciprocation of the Three Agencies Instrumental and imaginative agency. executive power (analytic thinking, follow-through) and legislative power (creating new rules and new structures) are often inseparable, and jointly produce creative products (Mumford & McIntosh, 2017); discovery of missing chemical elements in the Periodic Table, or the use of first principles for inventions by Elon Musk are examples. Instrumental and meta-control agency. Executive power and judicial power often work together. Judicial power (wisdom) serves as reflective checks and balances, sometimes as an exercise of rationality against extremism, and sometimes as an exercise of strategic flexibility against the rigidity of technical rationality. Creative agency and meta-control agency. The legislative branch might pass a law to allow gene editing in some areas, and the judicial branch might see it as a violation of the constitution. Here, the creative agency tends to be liberal, and the meta-control agency tends to be conservative. Limits and boundaries of creativity, as well as the balance of innovation and conservation, are always encountered at the social and individual levels.

 pplications of The Troika Model: The Game A of Go and Doing Science Here we use two practical examples to illustrate how the troika model can help understand the indigenous Chinese view of intelligence, creativity, and wisdom. The first example is how the Chinese view a board game created in Ancient China, the game of Go. The second example illustrates how Yukawa, a Japanese physicist, was inspired by Zhuangzi while working on sub-atomic research.

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Go as the Situated Practice of the Troika The reason why the game of Go is an important venue or window for looking into the Chinese way of thinking is that the board game was considered an epitome of the universe in ancient China. The game is played on an 19 × 19-grid, empty board by two opponents taking turns to put black and while stones in the hopes of building one’s own territory and containing (sometimes invading) the opponent’s territory. The search space of this strategic game is estimated at 10170, compared to 1050 for chess. The players constantly face two challenges, the complexity of searching for the best move when there are so many choices, and difficulties and uncertainties in weighing the relative values of move options. Shi Dingan (施定庵, 1710–1771), a Go player in Qing Dynasty, equated the game with the universe: “The infinite variations and different plays from the past to the present, make the perfection of the mastery of the game impossible without following the flow of the game like the universe and developing the divine insight into the process” (是以變化無窮, 古 今各異, 非心與天遊, 神與物會者, 未易臻其至也). A Confucian approach to the game is exercising prudence in move selection, and making reasonable moves, not greedy or timid ones. Therefore, the game involves rational decision making based on experiences and careful look-ahead. It means doing a lot of off-line research on game situations and comparing the results. In the language of intellectual troika, instrumental agency is more important than others. In contrast, Taoist way of approaching the game is more intuitive, trusting their imaginative agency based on the dynamic flow and rhythm of the game (not getting bogged to detailed calculation of gains and losses). Taoist practice in the game of Go means the exercise of imaginative agency. Many Zen Buddhists, like Taoists, truly played Go, because the game resonates with their wisdom of life. For example, the emptiness of the board in the beginning indicates nothingness, everything played out is something we conjure up, and human players can easily get trapped by what they see on the board as already played out and fail to see what is yet to unfold. They try hard to define the game, when as a matter of fact the fluidity of the game defies their definition. A Japanese Go master liked to

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carry a fan when playing a game on which a motto of Zen Buddhism featured prominently: “无心” (no fixation or adherence), meaning that the game is constantly changing, and therefore one should not have a fixed goal or idea at any moment. This is also how Zen Buddhists live their life: they live the moment, rather than on a goal or fixed idea. As a result, they gain inner freedom from mentally imposed constraints. One can argue that the game of Go involves all three functions of intelligence, creativity, and wisdom—Tao; analytic intelligence, imaginative (creative) thinking, and reflective wisdom, reflected in Confucian, Taoist, and Zen Buddhist teachings, all play a role in the game. Being imaginative does not mean insensible risk-taking or forcing a move; the imaginative freedom one gains to explore new possibilities is a measured one. Zen Buddhism’s doctrine of no fixation and adherence does not deny the fact to play the game one still has to conjure up ideas or goals.

 ystems Logic Versus Reductive Logic S in Scientific Inquiry This example is drawn from a book “Intuition and Creativity,” written by Hideki Yukawa (湯川秀樹), a Japanese physicist, who won Nobel Prize in physics for his sub-atomic research in 1949. In this book, Yukawa (1973) criticized the western analytic-reductive tradition and advocated for the role of intuition in scientific inquiry. He used Zhuangzi’s fable “Chaos” to illustrate how excessively analytic technique in particle research can hamper our scientific understanding. This is an example of wisdom Yukawa drew from ancient Chinese tradition of epistemology, calling for exercising restraints and understanding the workings of the universe as a dynamic whole. The original fable Yukawa quoted in its entirety is as follows: The Emperor of the South was called Swift and the Emperor of the North, Fast. The Emperor of the Center was known as Chaos (混沌). One time, the emperors of the North and South visited Chaos’s territories, where they met with him. Chaos heartily welcomed them. Swift and Fast conferred together as to how they could show their gratitude. They said, “All men

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have seven apertures-the eyes, the ears, the mouth, and the nose-whereby they see, hear, eat, and breathe. Yet this Chaos, unlike other men, is quite smooth with no apertures at all. He must find it very awkward. As a sign of our gratitude, therefore, let us try making some holes for him.” So each day, they made one fresh hole; and on the seventh day, Chaos died. (Zhaungzi: 庄子《应帝王》“混沌”)

The logic of the Swift and Fast is a mechanical one: once we get a handle on all parts of a machine, we can get it running. However, it violates the logic of Chaos that the dynamic whole runs by its own logic and cannot be reduced to functions of its parts. Yukawa, on his mulling over this story, commented that scientists often try to find more particles, more basic forms, beyond what have been already found, a natural reductionist temptation. However, as Yukawa surmised, it is more likely that the most basic thing of all has no fixed form and corresponds to none of the elementary particles we know at present. It may be something that has the possibility of differentiation into all kinds of particles but has not yet done so in fact. Expressed in the familiar terminology, it is probably a kind of “chaos.” It was while I was thinking on these lines that I recalled the fable of Zhuangzi. (Yukawa, 1973, pp. 65–66)

Yukawa clearly thought that, like the game of Go, the dynamic flow of the universe generates particles rather than the other way around. In this sense, chopping out the organs of Chaos only kills Chaos. When Yukawa wrote his book, chaos theory was not articulated (see Gleick, 1987). Although we may not be able to link his early memory of studying Taoism and Confucianism directly to his deep insight into the dynamic interaction of atomic particles, which brought him the honor of the Nobel Prize in 1949, his remarks clearly indicate such a possibility. Furthermore, his 1973 book provided his personal theory of creativity, which was influenced by Zhuangzi’s Taoist’s teachings. Zhuangzi, in effect, was illustrating the pitfalls of the mechanistic, reductionistic worldview, as if once all nuts and bolts of the universe are located or fixated. We will get the whole picture of how the universe works, just like taking apart a mechanical watch to find out how the watch functions as a whole. Alas, accordingly

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to Zhuangzi, one would miss the essential of what makes the dynamic whole works. Zhuangzi’s humor shows through when he named the two guests Fast and Swift, who rushed to have a quick fix, only to find things backfired. In hindsight, Yukawa’s comments predict the birth of string theory in physics, which sees all manifestations of particles, not as materials, but as notes, as it were, (i.e., effects) of a piece of music played out on a proverbial string of a musical instrument such as violin. How string theory follows the logic of dynamic whole is beyond the scope of this paper (and the authors’ expertise), but that the ancient Chinese philosophy still resonates with modern scientists such as Bohr or Yukawa suggests its potential to inspire creative thoughts that transcend mechanical reductionism. It is a triumph of wisdom and imagination over the western mechanistic-­ reductive view of the world, albeit the fact reductionism has own shining moments, for example, the invention of genes editing that leads to breakthroughs in treatment of many diseases and malfunctions of organs.

Discussion Culture can profoundly influence our ways of thinking, not only certain opinions, cognitive processes, and thinking styles but also an understanding of the world and ourselves. In general, East Asians tend to use a holistic approach, attending more to the context and social interaction and making relatively little use of analysis. An example of using the holistic approach is Chinese medicine. According to the theory of Chinese medicine, all illnesses can be attributable to the imbalance of two opposing forces of energy, Yin and Yang, and the primary objective of Chinese medicine is to restore the harmony of Yin and Yang. When someone is sick, Chinese medicine aims to treat the person as a whole rather than pinpointing the location of the illness. In contrast, Westerners are more analytical, paying attention more to the objects and categories and using more formal logic (Nisbett, 2003). Therefore, it is unsurprising that Chinese culture promotes different understanding and ways of nurturing critical cognitive processes such as intelligence, creativity, and wisdom.

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This chapter explored the Chinese Way of interpreting mind power concerning intelligence, creativity, and wisdom. It revealed that the three originated in one source but manifested in different aspects, with the same goal of seeking the Way (dao). We proposed a Taiko model to illustrate the indigenous Chinese model of mind power. How does this model contribute to our understanding of intelligence, creativity, and wisdom? Most importantly, how would gaining these new understandings help us maximize our potential, have a better life, and understand each other from different cultures? Here we present three benefits. First, a review of the Chinese epistemology for the core of the three concepts of intelligence, creativity, and wisdom revealed the importance of the Way (dao). There are no human intelligence, creativity, and wisdom without knowing the Way (dao). In other words, mind power is not from within; it comes from Nature, a by-product of seeking the Way (dao). To reach the highest level of mind power, one needs to connect between self and the Way (dao). One may see a similarity between the Way (dao) in the Chinese cosmic system and God in Western Hebrew-­ Christian worldview. The difference lies in that the Way (dao) in Chinese is not a humanized character with a pre-determined schedule and plan. There is a constant interaction between human action and the Way so much as a detached epistemic stance toward the Way (dao) will not work. In other words, the separation of the subject and object is not only impossible but also undesirable, a point highlighted by Wang Yangming. Why would such a way of thinking about intelligence, creativity, and wisdom be beneficial? This way of thinking can help us avoid the correspondence bias and open new ways to look at them and uncover the discrepancies between the conceptual and the empirical, discerning the functional properties and underlying components and mechanisms. It has been a long tradition in psychology that the three have been studied separately, and only recently have theories started to focus on the shared value of the three (e.g., Sternberg et al., 2021). The Chinese approach to mind power can enrich our knowledge of the Nature of the three. Second, reviewing the three schools of thought further helps us understand the difference between intelligence, creativity, and wisdom. Fundamentally, the three concepts are not different in terms of their goal but the ways to approach the goal. Confucianism has the most

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elaboration of the idea of intelligence and advocates that two fundamental approaches to intelligence are through active learning and reflection. Taoism has the most discussion on the concept of creativity and encourages people to think outside the box and gain ultimate inner freedom to connect with the Nature’s way. All three schools of thought provide their approaches to wisdom via making the right choices in life: Confucianism chooses the Mean (e.g., most appropriate), Taoism chooses seemingly the weakness and soft (e.g., water), and Zen Buddhism selflessness and emptiness. Third, Chinese culture prefers holism over atomism when understanding the world, which reflects an epistemic stance. The indigenous Chinese way of thinking gravitated toward an organismic worldview, just as Western thinking represents a mechanistic-analytic one. The more holistic and synthetic nature of the Chinese conceptions may help us better integrate these aspects of mind power and see how they form a unified functional system. Conversely, we can also identify the shortfalls and weaknesses of traditional Chinese thinking, for example, its lack of analytic power, lack of empiricism, its tendency to adhere to introspection and speculation. One can further extrapolate that such a way of thinking easily lends to the anthropomorphic thinking, thus lacking in transcending power of hypothetical-deductive thinking and the spirit of empirical experimentation that led to modern science. A specific lesson brought up in this chapter by comparison with the Chinese culture is that Chinese emphasis on dynamism can help us avoid the error of reification of the concepts of intelligence, creativity, and wisdom as entities or entity-like. Ultimately, we should be aware that intelligence, creativity, and wisdom are abstract concepts and are always subject to different interpretations. Therefore, precise language is necessary to make them close to empirical observation and scientific investigation.

References Bruner, J. (1960). The process of education. Harvard University Press. Chung, J. (2020, September 1). To be creative, Chinese philosophy teaches us to abandon “originality.” https://psyche.co/ideas/to-­be-­creative-­chinese-­ philosophy-teaches-­us-­to-­abandon-­originality

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Niu, W. (2012). Confucian ideology and creativity. Journal of Creative Behaviour, 46, 274–284. https://doi.org/10.1002/jocb.18 Sawyer, K. (2012). Extending sociocultural theory to group creativity. Vocations and Learning, 5(1), 59–75. Schon, D. A. (1983). The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action. Basic Books, New York. Simonton, D. K. (2019). The sociocultural context of exceptional creativity: Historiometric studies. In I. Lebuda & V. P. Glăveanu (Eds.), Palgrave handbook of social creativity research (pp. 177–189). Palgrave Macmillan. Spearman, C. (1904). “General intelligence,” objectively determined and measured. American Journal of Psychology, 15, 201–292. Spiro, R. J., Coulson, R. L., Feltovich, P. J., & Anderson, D. K. (1988). Cognitive flexibility theory: Advanced knowledge acquisition in ill-­structured domains. In T. Annual (Ed.), Conference of the cognitive science society (pp. 375–383). Lawrence Erlbaum. Sternberg, R. J. (1988). Mental self-government: A theory of intellectual styles and their development. Human Development, 31(4), 197–221. https://doi. org/10.1159/000116587 Sternberg, R. J. (1998). A balance theory of wisdom. Review of General Psychology, 2, 347–365. Sternberg, R. J., Glaveanu, V., Karami, S., Kaufman, J. C., Phillipson, S. N., & Preiss, D. D. (2021). Meta-intelligence: Understanding, control, and interactivity between creative, analytical, practical, and wisdom-based approaches in problem solving. Journal of Intelligence, 9(2), 19. https://doi.org/10.3390/ jintelligence9020019 Tan, C. (2020). A Confucian interpretation of creativity. Journal of Creative Behaviour, 54, 636–645. https://doi.org/10.1002/jocb.398 Yukawa, H. (1973). Creativity and intuition. Kodansha International.

5 Is Being a Smart, Creative, and Intellectually Humble Scientist Possible? Gregory J. Feist

For my dissertation in the early 1990s, I conducted a study on creative and eminent scientists. I interviewed about 100 full professors of physics, chemistry, and biology at major research universities throughout California. I audio-recorded these interviews and afterwards, had research assistants listen to the audiotapes and then, blind to the professors’ identities, they rated the scientists’ personalities using a Q-sort technique. One of the key findings was that the more eminent and creative scientists were rated as being not only confident but even arrogant and somewhat hostile (Feist, 1993). A journalist picked up on this finding and, after interviewing me, opened her article entitled “Nice Scientists Finish Last” with this line: “Greg Feist is a nice guy. Too bad for him!” (Sparkman,

Chapter in Sternberg, Kaufman, & Karami Intelligence, Creativity, and Wisdom: Are They Really Distinct?

G. J. Feist (*) San Jose State University, San Jose, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. J. Sternberg et al. (eds.), Intelligence, Creativity, and Wisdom, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26772-7_5

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1994). I was just starting my academic career and my “niceness” would be my downfall! This was clearly meant as a journalistic hook and somewhat tongue-in-­ cheek and not to be taken too literally. Ignoring for a moment that the statement makes the classic mistake of inferring causality from correlation, it does raise an interesting and important point about creative science and personality: In an enterprise as competitive and cut-throat as science can be—only a very small number get published in the top journals, get jobs as the top research universities, and get grant support—is arrogance a cause, effect, or mere correlate of being a creative scientist? Of course, my study was correlational and could not address this question. It is quite possible and even likely that the causality is somewhat bidirectional. Having confidence and even arrogance is probably an adaptive quality in the early stages of one’s scientific career. Being meek and unsure of yourself generally does not get you very far in science. But then, if you are one of the few who keeps “winning the prize” by getting top-tier publications, jobs, as well as regular grant support, then your confidence and sense of being better than most will probably only increase. Even if the correlation between arrogance and scientific creativity exists, and my study was not the only to find it, arrogance is clearly not a causal and necessary condition for scientific eminence. There are in fact, many examples of top scientists not being arrogant and even being very humble. Albert Einstein is an obvious high-profile example. In this chapter I review the literature on the three domains of this book—intelligence, creativity, and wisdom—as they relate to scientific interest, ability, and achievement and end the chapter discussing whether one can, and how likely it is one will, combine all three qualities in a single scientist. Intelligence, creativity, and wisdom can be thought of as three different processes, at least as applied to science. Intelligence is the process of acquiring knowledge; creativity is the process of creating knowledge; and wisdom is the process of applying knowledge.

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Intelligence in Science: Acquiring Knowledge It is almost banal to say that you have to be smart to be a scientist. It is a necessary condition for entering the gates of science. In fact, a recent Pew Research Survey reported that 89% Americans listed “intelligent” when asked to describe scientists, putting it at the top of the list (above “focused on solving real world problems,” “skilled at working in teams,” and “honest”) (Funk & Hefferon, 2019). The empirical literature backs up the common-sense notion association between intelligence and scientific interest and occupational choice. In general, research on intelligence and science has taken three distinct approaches. First, the researchers sample large representative segments of the population and examine the extent to which intelligence predicts occupational outcomes, including the sciences. Second, they simply measure or estimate the intelligence of people in scientific careers and compare those scores to the general population. And third, researchers assess intellectual ability early in life and select highly gifted students in math and science to study and then follow them over decades to see what kinds of careers they have as well as their levels of achievement and success. Intelligence Differences in Occupational Status (Including Science). The issue of intelligence and occupational success has been studied extensively since the early part of the twentieth century using both single-time and longitudinal methods. The general finding is fairly clear and robust: IQ is associated with and predicts the type of career one goes into. Some careers have mean IQs that are higher than others. On the surface, this is not controversial and it is seven obvious. But as Herrnstein and Murray’s well-known book on the topic, The Bell Curve (1994), made clear, the issue and especially its explanation is fraught with social, academic, and political controversy. One of the best studies on the topic was a meta-analysis that included 45 studies (N > 72,000) measuring intelligence and socioeconomic success, which included educational, occupational status, and income outcomes (Strenze, 2007). Occupational status was operationalized in the studies using either the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) prestige scale, International SES Index of Occupational Status, or the

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Duncan Socioeconomic Index. For example, the NORC prestige scale ranges from high to low status occupations: professional (which includes scientists, engineers, doctors, and teachers), technical-sales-­administrative support, production-craft-repair, farming-fishing-forest, service, and operators-fabricators-laborers. Strenze reported the average overall effect size was +0.43 between intelligence and career status outcome. Intelligence as a predictor outperformed father’s education and occupation, mother’s education and occupation, academic performance, and parental income. A number of studies have examined this question with longitudinal methods. McCall (1977) reported correlations between childhood and adolescent IQ and occupational status in adulthood from the Fels Longitudinal Study. He found small correlations when IQ was measured in childhood (ages 3 to 10) and then increases when IQ was measured between ages 11 and 18, averaging about 0.52 for men and about 0.55 for women. Cheng and Furnham (2012) followed a group of nearly 5000 adults who were assessed on IQ at age 11 and then were assessed on education, career outcomes, and personality at age 33 and again at age 50. The primary outcome variable was occupational prestige, scored on a 6-point scale from highest to lowest: professional (including STEM careers), managerial, skilled non-manual, skilled manual, semi-unskilled, and unskilled. The structural coefficient between childhood IQ and occupational prestige at ages 33 and 50 were positive and small (0.12 and 0.14) but statistically significant. Hasl et al. (2019) studied two U.S. birth cohorts from a representative sample who participated in the National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth (NLSY). The two birth cohorts were from the early 1960s (N = 3040) and 1980s (N = 3524). They were first assessed in their teens on IQ and GPA and then again 20 years later assessed on outcomes such as education (highest grade level), occupation (income and occupational prestige), and health (physical and mental). Occupational prestige was operationalized using the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) criteria as mentioned above They found, like Strenze, that higher adolescent IQ predicted obtaining higher prestige occupations 20 years later. Murray (1997) also analyzed different cohorts from the National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth (NLSY) and found that professional occupations (including engineers, scientists, doctors, and lawyers) had much higher percentages of people scoring 125 or higher on

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IQ tests than other occupations. In short, the empirical literature supports the common-sense view that people in the scientific professions are smart people. IQ of Scientists. The second approach is to directly examine intelligence in samples of scientists. Francis Galton was the first to do so in 1874 with his book English Men of Science (Galton, 2018). The measurement of intelligence did not yet exist, but he did describe his sample has having good memory and mechanical aptitude. Moreover, although not well operationalized, he argued that “no man is likely to achieve very high success in whom the automatic power of the mind, or genius in its special sense, and a sober will, are not well developed and fairly balanced.” (p. 234). There are very few published studies on IQ and the science professions and almost none since the 1980s. Catherine Cox, working with Lewis Terman at Stanford, analyzed 300 historical “geniuses” and estimated childhood and adult IQs from their behavior and achievement. A total of 37 of these were in the sciences. The mean IQ for mathematicians-­ astronomers was 179, physicists-chemists was 171, and biologists was 171 (see Table 5.1). These are extremely high scores (in the range of 4 to 5 standard deviations) above the mean (of 100 and SD of 15). But they were not just geniuses but historical geniuses, that is, ones who left a legacy and made historical important contributions to their fields. Next, Roe’s (1953) sample of 64 eminent physical, biological, and social scientists also reported very high estimated IQs, ranging from 147 to 158 (see Table 5.1). Harmon (1961) obtained academic and test records of almost 3000 PhDs from 1958 and reported mean IQs of 128 for PhD mathematicians, 130 for PhD physicists, and 124 for PhD social scientists (see Table 5.1). Gibson and Light (1967) reported the IQs of 148 academic scientists in the 1960s working at Cambridge University in the U.K. who were administered the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS). As can be seen in Table  5.1, mathematicians and physical scientists averaged around 130, engineers and biological scientists around 126, and social scientists around 122. Finally, a more recent estimate of IQ from SAT scores of US undergraduates ranged from 130 for math majors to 118 for social science majors (see Table 5.1). The ETS conversion from SAT to

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Table 5.1  Mean IQ scores of different groups of scientists Study

Sample

Discipline

Mean IQ

Cox (1926)

37 genius scientists

Roe (1953)

64 eminent scientists

Harmon (1961)

2853 PhD scientists

Gibson and Light (1967)

148 Cambridge university staff

Math-astronomy Physics-chemistry Biologists-­naturalists Psychology Anthropology Biology Experimental physics Theoretical physics Math Physics Social science Agricultural science

179 171 171 155 147 154 147 158 128 130 124 122

Biochemistry-­chemistry Biological sciences Engineering sciences Mathematics Physics Social sciences Math Engineering Physical sciences Computer sciences Social sciences

130 126 125 130 128 122 130 126 124 124 118

Educational Testing Services (2014)

U.S. undergraduates

Note: Roe (1953) and Harmon (1961) IQ scores reported in Dutton and Lynn (2014). Cox (1926) reported in Roe (1953). ETS (2014) converted SAT scores to IQ estimates. https://www.statisticbrain.com/iq-­estimates-­by-­intended-­college-­ major/

IQ is based on the convergent validity score between the two being quite high (0.82) (Frey & Detterman, 2004). There are strengths and weaknesses to these findings. Among the weakness are: they are old, from relatively small samples (except the SAT-IQ sample), IQ is often estimated from other indices, samples were typically all-male, and intelligence was limited to analytic-academic (verbal, quantitative, and spatial) intelligence (Gardner, 2011; Sternberg, 1984). One strength of these findings is their face validity, that is, as education and eminence levels rise, so too do IQs. In addition, because the cognitive complexity of the science professions is clearly greater compared to many

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other professions, these findings also support the common-sense notion and the empirical literature that scientists are smart people. Longitudinal Studies of Gifted Science and Math Students. The third approach to investigating intelligence and scientific interest and ability is to follow the career outcomes of intellectually gifted math and science students. In 1921 Terman famously assessed and selected all children in California who tested at 135 or above on the Stanford-Binet test (N = 1528) and then followed them up into adulthood (Terman et al., 1925). Fifty years later, at the ages of 60 and 70, 95% of the men on whom they had data were in the highest Census level careers, namely, professional and higher business occupations (Holahan, 2021). Not surprisingly given the generation, 50 years later the gifted women did not follow the same career paths as the gifted men: only 44% of the women were in professional, semi-professional, or managerial professions (Holahan, 2021). The next major longitudinal investigation that focused even more closely on scientific talent development was begun by Julian Stanley at Johns Hopkins in the early 1970s and has continued under the leadership of Stanley’s students, Camilla Benbow and David Lubinski. The project is known as the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth (SMPY) and it targets children under the age of 13 who show precocious signs of mathematical talent  (Lubinski & Benbow, 2021). Results from these studies have reported that precocious ability does predict achievement in high school, college, and career. Benbow and colleagues reported that approximately 90% of the SMPY sample go on to earn bachelor’s degrees, slightly less than 40% get master’s degrees, and about 25% receive doctorates. These figures are well above the base-rates for such degrees in the general population (with 23%, 7%, and 1% the national figures respectively). Lubinski and colleagues (2014) reported that, in general, talent-­ search SMPY participants who scored 700 or above on either one of the SAT subscales (quantitative or verbal) before age 13 went on to have very successful careers 20 years later, especially in math, science, or engineering. For example, nearly half of them were post-secondary teachers, scientists, or engineers. More specifically, about 15% of the talent-search females and about 9% of the talent-search males were in tenure track or tenured positions by age 33—rates much higher than the general

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population. Moreover, the pattern of cognitive talent predicted the type of career one took. Those with relatively high scores in quantitative and relatively average scores in verbal were most likely to major in STEM subjects and go into careers in math and science and engineering. Standardized test scores, at least at the highest percentiles, do in fact predict academic and occupational outcomes (Lubinski et al., 2014). Rena Subotnik and her colleagues (1993) were the first psychologists to systematically examine the longitudinal paths of scientifically (not just mathematically) talented young people. She focused on finalists and semi-finalists for the country’s most prestigious and elite science talent-­ search competition, the so-called Westinghouse competition (then the Intel and now the Regeneron Science-Talent-Search). It involves more than 1500 high school juniors and seniors every year, of which the top 300 are semi-finalists and the top 40 are finalists. Subotnik and colleagues followed up one cohort of semi-finalists from 1983 and were able to collect data on approximately 100 of the 300 finalists/semi-finalists. Eight years after being semi-finalists and finalists, 49 of the 60 males (82%) but only 25 of the 38 females (66%) were still in science or science related fields (including graduate school). Moreover, as Berger (1994) has reported on the entire sample of Westinghouse finalists, they do garner awards and recognition for their continued excellence for scholastic and career achievements. For instance, in the entire population of finalists up through 1994 five have gone on to earn Nobel prizes, 28 have become members of the National Academy of Sciences, and at least eight MacArthur Fellowships have been awarded. Feist (2006b) also examined the educational and career outcomes of 120 Westinghouse Science Talent finalists across four cohorts (1965, 1975, 1985, and 1995). For those who earned bachelor’s degrees, 60% were in the physical sciences, 21% were in the biological-life sciences, 4% were in the social sciences, 11.5% were in the humanities, and 4% were unknown. Doctoral degrees were earned by 91% of the male and 74% of the female finalists. Thirty-five percent of the doctoral degrees were in physical science, 56% in biological science or medicine, 4% in the social sciences, and 2% in the humanities. There were no disciplinary differences between men and women in the undergraduate and graduate degrees. There was, however, a significant gender difference in the

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percentage who left the science/research career path: 11% of the men compared to 43% of the women. To be sure, most of those who left science, both male and female, went into the non-research medical field. In addition, Feist (2006b) looked backward in a sample of undisputable high scientific achievement—members of the National Academy of Sciences—and found that the age at which they first wanted to be scientist predicted age of first scientific publication and lifetime publication total. The younger they were when they wanted to be a scientific, the more productive they eventually were.

Creativity in Science: Creating Knowledge In addition to the manner and speed in which one acquires knowledge, there is also creating new knowledge or being creative in science. There are many predictors of scientific creativity and intelligence is one, as we just reviewed. Personality is another predictor of scientific creativity. Creative Personality in Science. The development of scientific talent, achievement, and productivity over the life course is one focus of psychologists of science who are interested in scientific creativity. Another focus is the unique personality characteristics of highly creative scientists. One model of personality that explains the connection between personality traits and creative behavior, including scientific creativity, is the so-called functional model. The basic idea of this model is that traits function to lower behavioral thresholds. If a person has a particular trait, then corresponding behaviors are more likely (have lower thresholds) in given situations. A person with a friendly personality, for instance, is more likely to behave in a friendly and warm way than a person without such a trait. Applied to creative behavior, certain personality traits make creative thought and behavior more likely. What then are these personality traits, in particular, as they relate to scientific creativity? A meta-analysis published in 1998 by Feist addressed the question of which traits make creativity and eminence in science more likely and what their magnitude of effect was (see Batey and Furnham (2006) for a qualitative review of the general creativity and

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personality literature). The traits can be arranged into three psychologically meaningful categories: cognitive, motivational, and social. Cognitive Traits. A consistent finding in the personality and creativity in science literature has been that creative and eminent scientists tend to be more open to experience and more flexible in thought than less creative and eminent scientists (Cassandro & Simonton, 2010; Feist, 1998; Perrine & Brodersen, 2005). In addition to the Openness scale from Big Five measures, many of these findings stem from data on the flexibility (Fe) and tolerance (To) scales of the California Psychological Inventory. The Fe scale, for instance, taps into flexibility and adaptability of thought and behavior as well as the preference for change and novelty. The few studies that have reported either no effect or a negative effect of flexibility in scientific creativity have been with student samples. Feist and Barron (2003) examined personality and creative achievement in a 44-year longitudinal study. More specifically, they found that personality variables (such as Tolerance and Psychological Mindedness) explained up to 20% of the variance over and above Potential and Intellect. Specifically, two measures of personality–California Psychological Inventory scales of Tolerance (To) and Psychological Mindedness (Py)–resulted in the 20% increase in variance explained (20%) over and above potential and intellect. The more tolerant and psychologically minded the student was, the more likely they were to make creative achievements over their lifetime. Motivational Traits. The most eminent and creative scientists also tend to be more driven, ambitious, intrinsically motivated, and achievement-­oriented than their less eminent peers (Feist, 1998, 2006a; Helmreich et al., 1980; Terman, 1954). Busse and Mansfield (1984), for example, studied the personality characteristics of 196 biologists, 201 chemists, and 171 physicists. Commitment to work (i.e., “need to concentrate intensively over long periods of time on one’s work”) was the strongest predictor of productivity (i.e., publication quantity), even when holding age and professional age constant. Similarly, Helmreich et  al. (1980) studied a group of 196 academic psychologists and found that different components of achievement and drive had different relationships with objective measures of attainment (i.e., publications and citations). With a self-report measure, they assessed three different aspects of achievement: “mastery;” preferring challenging and difficult tasks; and

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enjoying working hard; Helmreich and colleagues found that mastery and enjoying working hard were positively related to both publication and citation totals, whereas competitiveness was positively related to publications but negatively related to citations. Being intrinsically motivated (mastery and work) appears to increase one’s productivity and positive evaluation by peers (citations), whereas wanting to be superior to peers leads to an increased productivity, and yet a lower positive evaluation by peers. The inference here is that being driven by the need for superiority may backfire in terms of having an impact on the field. Social Traits. In the highly competitive world of science, especially big science, where the most productive and influential continue to be rewarded with more and more of the resources, success is more likely for those who thrive in competitive environments, that is, for the dominant, arrogant, competitive, hostile, and self-confident (Bachtold & Werner, 1972; Feist, 1993, 2006b; Helmreich et  al., 1980; Van Zelst & Kerr, 1954). In a classic study in the 1950s, Van Zelst and Kerr (1954) collected personality self-descriptions on 514 technical and scientific personnel from a research foundation and a university. Holding age constant, they reported significant partial correlations between productivity and describing oneself as “argumentative,” “assertive,” and “self-confident.” Chambers (1964) reported that creative psychologists and chemists were markedly more dominant, ambitious, self-sufficient, and had more initiative compared to less creative peers. Similarly, Feist (1993) reported a structural equation model of scientific eminence in which the path between observer-rated hostility and eminence was direct and the path between arrogant working style and eminence was indirect but significant. Moreover, in one of the few studies to examine female scientists, Bachtold and Werner (1972) administered Cattell’s 16 Personality Factor to 146 women scientists and found that they were significantly different from women in general on nine of the sixteen scales, including dominance (Factor E) and self-confidence (Factor O). The scientific elite also tend to be more aloof, asocial, and introverted than their less creative peers. In a classic study from the 1950s concerning the creative person in science, Roe (1953) found that creative scientists were more achievement oriented and less affiliative than less creative

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scientists. In another seminal study of the scientific personality, Eiduson (1962) found that scientists were independent, curious, sensitive, intelligent, emotionally invested in intellectual work, and relatively happy. To summarize the distinguishing personality traits of creative scientists: they are generally more open and flexible, driven and ambitious, and although they tend to be relatively asocial, when they do interact with others, they tend to be somewhat prone to arrogance, self-­confidence, and hostility.

Wisdom in Science: Applying Knowledge Intelligence gets you in the door of science. Creativity may land you top jobs and some degree of fame. But what about humility? Indeed, I just reviewed a body of literature that found that the social traits of hostility, competitiveness, and arrogance are common among creative scientists. What is wisdom? Wisdom, as Erikson (1959) first postulated, is reaching maturity with grace and acceptance of a well-lived life. Sternberg argued that a meta-intelligence coordinates the interaction between intelligence, creativity and humility and that humility and, more generally, wisdom involves balancing and applying creation and analysis for the common good (Sternberg, 2003; Sternberg & Glück, 2022; Staudinger, 2008; Staudinger et  al., 1997;  Sternberg et  al., 2021). Baltes and Staudinger (2000) outlined a robust conceptual and empirical model of wisdom and its criteria: • Addressing important and difficult questions and behavior concerning a meaningful life • Knowing the limits of our knowledge • Possessing advanced knowledge, judgment, and advice • Having knowledge that is unusually broad, balance, deep, and wide. • A synergy of mind and character that makes use of knowledge and virtues • Using knowledge for the good of others as well as oneself Of the criteria listed here, the three that are most useful to understanding scientific thought and behavior are: the awareness of the limits of

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one’s knowledge; the synergy of mind and character to make use of one’s knowledge and virtues; and making use of one’s knowledge and for the good of others as well as oneself. Knowing one’s limits is expressed as intellectual humility, whereas the synergy between mind and character and using knowledge for the greater good is expressed as ethical behavior in science. Intellectual Humility in Science. Science, more than almost any other social enterprise, also forces—at least ideally—one to be aware of the limits of one’s knowledge and findings. In other words, it forces us to be humble in the face of what we do and do not know, and what our findings do and do not say. Over-confidence and arrogance, couple with fear and anxiety of not getting published or getting a job can, in the worst case, lead to unethical or even fraudulent scientific behavior. To be clear, however, humility takes at least two distinct forms in science: epistemic and interpersonal. Epistemic humility is a virtue in science because it involves knowing the limits of one’s knowledge. Interpersonal humility, by contrast, is not holding one’s knowledge over other people and treating them as inferior because one knows more than they do. Although difficult to achieve in practice, and, given the findings associating interpersonal arrogance and scientific eminence, I would argue that perhaps the ideal combination for a scientist would be to have a high degree of epistemic humility but to not necessarily be interpersonally humble. Confidence, especially if it is well deserved, and even the belief that one is better than others in their field of expertise, may even be adaptive. Take, for example, the “depressive realism” effect: depressed people are more accurate about their degree of control and memory for their feedback of their performance after than non-depressed people, and yet they are depressed and have a sense of worthlessness (Alloy & Abramson, 1988; Moore & Fresco, 2012). Non-depressed people tend to have a “illusion of control”. Having interpersonal humility might be a philosophical virtue, but one that is not required and may even interfere with high levels of scientific creativity. Because science is such a competitive and reward-based enterprise, being confident and even cocky and arrogant toward others may be adaptive and beneficial, at least in terms of

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professional recognition and advancement. Whether it is beneficial to the advancement of scientific progress is a different question. Ethical Behavior in Science. One of the most egregious and ruinous cases of fraud in psychology was perpetrated in the 2000s and early 2010s by social psychologist Diederick Stapel (Bhattacharjee, 2013). As he confessed to later, he was so convinced that the null results he had obtained were wrong, that he simply sat down at his kitchen table and made up a dataset that he was convinced was real had the study been done properly. But it was not only this study, but many others in which he fabricated data. He also confessed that pressure to publish in top journals and to obtain and maintain his job as Professor then Dean at a prestigious university in Holland drove him to scientific fraud. In his words: I failed as a scientist. I adapted research data and fabricated research. Not once, but several times, not for a short period, but over a longer period of time...I did not withstand the pressure to score, to publish, the pressure to get better in time. I wanted too much, too fast. In a system where there are few checks and balances, where people work alone, I took the wrong turn (Diederik Staple (n.d.))

Ethical behavior—doing the right thing—is a component of scientific humility and in turn scientific wisdom. Recall Baltes and Staudinger’s (2000) criteria for wisdom: knowing the limits of one’s knowledge, having a synergy of mind and character that makes use of knowledge and virtues, and using knowledge for the good of others as well as oneself. Clearly, scientific fraud is the exact absence and opposite of wisdom. It is very interesting and, I argue, important that the newest variation of the Big Five in personality adds “honesty-humility” to the traditional five traits: neuroticism, extraversion, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness (Ashton & Lee, 2005; Lee & Ashton, 2006). People who score high on the honesty-humility dimension tend to not manipulate other people or break rules and are not interested in economic luxuries or driven by social status. Honesty-humility has a complex relationship with creativity. As already discussed, highly creative people in science tend to be arrogant, which would be low humility. Moreover, the people who score low on H-H are

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high on so-called dark triad or narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy and meta-analyses reveal small but robust relationships between narcissism and Machiavellianism and creative potential and achievement, but not psychopathy (Lebuda et al., 2021). And yet, being honest and epistemically humble are the hallmarks of the successful, if not ideal, scientist. If this is true in science, then wanting scientists to be both creative and humble may be a tall order. Again, however, there is a difference between interpersonal and epistemic humility. Lack of interpersonal humility may be associated with creative achievement in science, but there is no reason that epistemic humility can’t be. In fact, I would argue that the most creative scientists would also be epistemically humble—a la Einstein. To date, there is no empirical literature on this question. The best we can say, therefore, at this point is that gaining knowledge and having a synergy of mind and character, and applying that knowledge for the good of others as well as oneself and wisdom is something everyone, not just scientists, should strive for.

Is the Smart, Creative, and Humble Scientist Possible? We now come to the point at which we can discuss the possibility of scientists possessing all three qualities at the same time. If wisdom is really about applying and integrating knowledge in way that benefits the individual and society (Sternberg, 2003), then the wise scientist would integrate their intelligence and creativity in a research program that is beneficial not only to them, but also to society as a whole and do so with honesty and integrity. Being very smart is somewhat rare—if one defines it in terms of g or the related construct of IQ.  Perhaps 10% of the population is in the range of the average scientists in terms of intelligence. As we have established, being a smart scientist is more the rule than the exception. Being creative is rare, even in science. The Lotka principle makes clear: a robust finding is that in science (and many walks of life), the number of

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scientists/authors producing n number of articles is a ratio to the number of authors producing one article (1/nc), where c is a constant (most often it is around 2.0) (Lotka, 1926). More concretely, for example, 25 times more scientists will publish 1 paper than 5 papers; or 9 times more scientists will publish 1 paper than 3 (Chung & Cox, 1990; Huang & Yang, 2012; Simonton, 1988). Impact as measured by bibliometrics such as the h-index and citations are even more skewed (Grosul & Feist, 2014). Finally, although hard to quantify and assess, I think it is safe to say that wisdom is also rare, with most of us reaching old age without the benefit of wisdom. If each is rare, then possessing all of them must be a true exception in scientific achievement. Grant me a bit of leeway to do some “back of the napkin” calculations. Let’s assume a probability in the population (of scientists) of 90% (0.90) for high IQ (>120), 10% (0.10) for creative, 10% (0.10) for the epistemically humble, and 95% (0.95) for completely ethical scientist, we get a cumulative probability (multiplying probabilities) of 0.009% for the percentage of scientists who are smart, creative, epistemically humble, and completely ethical. That is 9 scientists out of 1000! Obviously, these numbers are nothing but very rough estimates and not to be taken too seriously, but the point is that possessing all four qualities in an individual scientist is rare and not likely. Whether it is 9 out of 1000, 15 out of 1000 or 25 out of 1000, we can’t say for sure. But I think most of us would agree it is rare and not common. Rarity does not mean it is not or shouldn’t be an ideal toward which all of us should aspire. Sternberg (2003) developed a “Balance Theory of Wisdom” that makes clear that wisdom requires integrating successful intelligence and applying value-laden knowledge to greater good as well as to the betterment of oneself. Values, among other things, include honesty, compassion, courage, and sincerity. If a scientist is to become not only a successful scientist, but also a wise one, they must not only be smart and creative, but also incorporate pro-social values into their scientific behavior and perhaps even their research outcome. A great example of a wise and creative scientist is Jennifer Doudna, winner of the 2020 Noble Prize in Chemistry (along with Emmanuelle Charpentier) and one of the inventors of CRISPR technology that allows for relatively cheap and inexpensive gene-editing. She famously had a

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dream about the potential misuse and evil application of her invention. In her dream, a fellow researcher told her a man wanted to learn about her discovery. When she went in to meet the man, he was sitting at a desk with the face of a pig. She knew it was Adolf Hitler. He said, “I want to understand the uses and implications of this amazing technology you have developed” (Isaacson, 2021, p. 283). Needless to say, Doudna was deeply frightened by this, and she realized immediately the obvious import of the dream. CRISPR was such a powerful and important discovery that it could truly change the world for both good and evil, and she had to be very wise in making sure it was used for the greater good. She has spent the last few years doing what she can to make sure it is not used for evil, but rather for the greater good. Indeed, CRISPR technology has been a crucial linchpin in the quick discovery of tests and vaccinations for COVID-19 as well as for treating sickle-cell anemia. Being an intelligent, creative, and wise scientist is clearly extremely unusual. Yet it is an ideal that all scientists should aspire to. Not only are they not mutually exclusive, they may even be mutually reinforcing (Sternberg, 2003). Being humble and creative (and smart) is indeed possible. To return to the anecdote that I opened this chapter with: Now that I just turned 60 and have had a 30-year career, I don’t think my niceness and humility has doomed me to obscurity. I think I have had a creative, if only moderately successful scientific career, despite being “a nice guy.”

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6 Wisdom, Intelligence and Creativity: An International Historical Perspective Michel Ferrari, Fengyan Wang, Rasool Kord Noghabi, Zhe Feng, and Pouria Saffaran

 isdom, Intelligence and Creativity: W An International Historical Perspective When we consider the discipline of psychology around the world today, wisdom, creativity, and intelligence are three separate areas of study: Why is that? And is there any advantage in bringing them together? We will address these questions by considering psychological research in North America, Iran, and China, three cultures with active modern scientific

M. Ferrari (*) Department of Applied Psychology and Human Development, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected] F. Wang School of Psychology, Nanjing Normal University, Nanjing, China R. Kord Noghabi Department of Psychology, Bu-Ali Sina University, Hamedan, Iran © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. J. Sternberg et al. (eds.), Intelligence, Creativity, and Wisdom, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26772-7_6

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traditions studying these topics that have different historical scholarly traditions. This approach leads to an obvious problem: wisdom, intelligence, and creativity are all English words with a unique history that has evolved over time. How can we avoid becoming imprisoned in English, imposing its meanings on Iranian and Chinese culture, whose words may have different, if related, meanings (Wierzbicka, 2013, 2016)? This problem is particularly acute if we ask about the relationship between these terms, since Farsi and Chinese terms may have a semantic range different from their English counterparts. One way to address this issue is by using historical exemplars that provide a direct reference to concepts (Zagzebski, 2017). This will allow us to compare exemplars of wisdom, creativity, and intelligence, while also considering other concepts important to understanding these exemplars. (Note that, for us, exemplars need not refer to particular people or characters considered in isolation; often, we are interested in exemplary narratives of wise characters acting in settings that show their wisdom, intelligence, or creativity.)

The Genius and the Sage in North America Iconic North American wisdom figures today include Socrates, Solomon, and Jesus—none of whom was North American (Weststrate et al., 2016). Instead, what is striking about this list is how ancient these iconic wisdom figures are: All of them lived around the Mediterranean over 2000 years ago. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the origins of the contemporary English concepts of intelligence, creativity, and wisdom also trace back to that context. So does the word genius, which turns out to be pivotal to our story, because genius—although always associated with intelligence and creativity—has sometimes been associated with wisdom, and sometimes not. Z. Feng • P. Saffaran Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada

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 isdom, Creativity, Intelligence, and Genius W in Ancient Mediterranean Culture “Wisdom” combines wis from Old English, meaning wit (Latin, Sanskrit Vis “seeing”) and dom (the state or fact of being, or having a specified interest, or character). According to Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary (n.d.-a), “wisdom” is the oldest of these words, a noun that entered the English language in the twelfth century and referred to, “(1) ability to discern inner qualities and relationships (insight); good sense (judgment); generally accepted belief; accumulated philosophical or scientific learning (knowledge); (2) a wise attitude, belief, or course of action; and (3) the teachings of the ancient” Because wisdom involves seeing things or actions that require inspiration or special discernment, it was originally associated with the divine. For example, the oldest extant written heroic story, the Epic of Gilgamesh, is about the king of Uruk in ancient Sumeria (now Iran) around 2500 BCE. Within the epic, Gilgamesh seeks the advice of two goddesses associated with wisdom: one is his mother, and the other appears as a tavern keeper who advises him to give up the search for immortality and to enjoy the experiences he is given in his lifetime. In the Odyssey (composed around 750 BCE), Athena (goddess of wisdom) appears in one instance to Odysseus disguised as shepherd boy then, pleased with his story, reveals herself to say “you and I both know sharp practice, since you are far the best of all mortal men for counsel and stories, and I among all the divinities am famous for wit and sharpness” (Odyssey 13. 296–991). In Plato’s dialogue Hippias Minor, Socrates identifies with Odysseus over Achilles to claim that crafty people (helped by Athena) are wiser. Athena was originally a palace goddess but was later thought to inspire all things involving cunning and strategy, especially war battles (Murrin, 2007); the close Roman analog, Minerva, was the protector of the Roman Emperor Domitian (Hayward, 2020). Intelligence, from the Latin intelligens (present participle of intelligere) meaning to understand: from inter [between]- + legere to “gather, choose,  Murrin (2007) translation, with original Greek.

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pick, read.” Intelligence as noun entered English in the late fourteenth century and shares some overlap with wisdom. According to Webster’s online dictionary (n.d.-b) it means, “(1) the ability to learn or understand or to deal with new or trying situations (reason)”—including “the skilled use of reason”—and “the ability to apply knowledge to manipulate one’s environment or to think abstractly as measured by objective criteria (such as tests).” And to “mental acuteness (shrewdness)” In addition, it refers to “(2) information concerning an enemy” and “(3) the act of understanding (comprehension)” (Merriam-Webster, n.d.-b). By extension, this can include “the basic quality of divine mind” or “cosmic intelligence” (Merriam-Webster, n.d.-b). Intelligence was an attribute of the Titan Coeus (Koios), whose name means “inquiry,” first mentioned by Hesiod writing about the time of Homer, but little is said of him. For Christians and Muslims, intelligence and wisdom are both basic eternal qualities of God. Create is from the Middle English createn, borrowed from Latin creātus (past participle of creāre) meaning, “make, bring forth, produce, cause.” Create entered the English language in the fourteenth century, meaning “(1) to bring into existence. […] (2) to produce or bring about by a course of action or behavior. (3) to cause, occasion. [And](4) to produce through imaginative skill.” The first known use of the term “creativity” was in 1875 in Adolphus William Ward’s History of Dramatic English Literature (Runco & Albert, 2010). Creativity is related to Ceres, the goddess of agriculture and fertility. Genius was also externalized as a spirit guide, with interesting relations to the other terms. As well explained by Eysenck (1995), the word genius first appears in Plautus around the third century BCE referring to a tutelary spirit. But the idea of such spirits is much more ancient. In the Ancient Near East, extending to ancient Iranian and Greek antiquity, every person and family had their own genius—what the Greeks called their personal Daimon. Depending on the person, such protector deities could be wise. Plato in his Apology has Socrates (still an iconic wisdom figure) tell his accusers that “something divine … a sort of voice” (31d) came to him for all important decisions. In the broader Ancient Near East, this concept later developed into the folkloric belief in

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“genies”—spiritual beings who were largely indifferent to humanity but who could be recruited to help them do great things, for good or evil (Naraghi, 2018). Making a full circle, in Islam and Christianity, because these forces were outside the faith, they were later called “demons” from the Greek word daimon. Throughout the European Middle Ages and Renaissance, wisdom, intelligence, and creativity remained divine attributes, now associated with the Abrahamic God worshiped by Jews, Christians, and Muslims. For example, Pierre Charon’s (1541–1603) book de la Sagesse (on Wisdom, 1601) distinguishes between mundane, humane, and divine wisdom: divine wisdom is unknowable and mundane wisdom is essentially expertise that can be put to selfish ends, so Charon focuses his effort on understanding humane wisdom—something very close to Sternberg’s (1998) conception of wisdom as encompassing the common good. Charon was a near contemporary of Francis Bacon (1561–1626). And, although Bacon (1609) wrote The Wisdom of the Ancients explaining the significance of Greek myths about the same time as Charon’s book, Bacon is most famous for his Novum Organum (New Method) of 1620, generally considered to herald the arrival of the “scientific method.” After this time, early modern science developed the idea of empirical investigation of a mechanical universe that anyone can understand, if they apply the right method (the scientific method) and carefully document their procedures and findings. The right method guarantees quality knowledge, so to advance knowledge one no longer needs to be wise. By the eighteenth century, David Hume’s (1739–1740) A Treatise of Human Nature and others extended the scientific method to the study of man (or philosophical anthropology), proposing that all spiritual forces worked through the human body (see Vidal, 2011). This led to the naturalization of previously external spiritual forces: in particular, to a reimagining of genius as an internal characteristic of particular people who were considered exceptionally intelligent, creative, and sometimes wise. For example, the Holy Trinity bust, commissioned after Shakespeare’s death in 1617 (sometime between 1618 and 1623) opens with this line: “Judicio Pylium, Genio Socratem [A Pylius (Nestor) in judgement, a Socrates in genius.]” The romantic philosophers, in particular, imagined the genius as a “great man” (always a man) who was so original and creative that he

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became an iconic/paradigmatic example for others to follow—exhibiting ground-breaking creativity that required great intelligence. Genius was sometimes also associated with wisdom when it inspired cultural norms, but it was also considered to be near to madness due to the personal and political consequences of such refusal to adhere to social norms or conventions. Addressing this issue in his Essay on Genius, the Englishman Alexander Gerard (1774) claimed that artistic and scientific genius have different relationships to law, “We ascribe so great merit to invention, [that] we allow the artist who excels in it, the privilege of transgressing established rules” (p. 14). By contrast, Francis Bacon was considered a genius because he “establish[ed] rules, formerly unknown, by which genuine and inductive philosophy might be cultivated and raised to perfection; and to make considerable progress applying these rules to the actual production of that stupendous edifice of knowledge, of which his comprehensive mind had formed the plan” (Gerard, 1774, pp. 16–17). A similar story unfolds in German-speaking lands. Herder, for example, claimed his student Goethe was a genius who exemplified German ideals (Jackson, 1995). Romantic philosophers also embraced the classical Greek idea—probably originating with Plato (Tigerstedt, 1970)—that the creative process is an inherently irrational aesthetic response, or furor poeticus, that was a form of rapture, delirium, or temporary madness (Stiles, 2009)—indeed, Latin made no distinction between madness and inspiration (Eysenck, 1995). And in the nineteenth century, mental illness was often used to explain the outstanding creative achievements of great artists, musicians, and writers—as seen, for example, in Lombroso (professor of psychiatry and forensic medicine at Turin) in his 1864 book Man of Genius. Around this time, we find the appearance of the “mad scientist” meme in literature and the arts, including plays by Alfred Binet (Stiles, 2009). While the romantics idealized poetic genius and saw genius as a mystical transcendence of the ordinary (hence also wise), Victorians brought scientific tools to bear on the study of exceptionality (Stiles, 2009), and celebrated the average healthy man as the ideal. This was in keeping with Adolphe Quételet’s (1835) influential statistical concept of the “average man,” according to which, all deviations from the ideal—including

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extreme deviations in ability—were inherently problematic. Thus, Victorians set out to study child prodigies, including prodigies in the arts (see Graus, 2021). Francis Galton, himself a child prodigy, built on Quételet’s (1835) work in his 1869 classic Heredity Genius—considered a precursor to later scientific studies of both creativity and intelligence.

History of Intelligence Research Early twentieth century psychologists used a variety of methods to study genius, but by definition, genius is rare; it was important to extend the study of intelligence and aesthetics to the entire population and, with Galton, to explore the whole range of abilities (from exceptionally accomplished to exceptionally disabled) as types of people—as Galton believed, and likewise Binet and those who followed them. Terman (1917) famously combined their ideas, using the Stanford-Binet in his longitudinal study of genius. Terman was a great admirer of Galton, assigning him an IQ of 200 (Terman, 1917). Terman famously embarked on his “Study of Genius” project—published in several volumes from 1925 to 1958, following the Galtonian assumption that IQ is fixed and that people can be categorized into different groups (e.g., by race, gender, ability) and studied as such. Terman set out to study gifted children poised to become geniuses later in life (i.e., superlative in intelligence, creativity, and morality/wisdom) to better understand and support them. However, to study this group, it was important to have a contrasting group of people representing the full range of intelligence, leading other researchers to focus on people considered intellectually inferior and morally degenerate (often, in practice, women, immigrants, or other socially disadvantaged groups, reflecting the prejudices of the time). The later history of research into intelligence develops from this point and is too vast for us to cover in a short chapter. Interested readers should see Sternberg’s (2020) Cambridge Handbook of Intelligence for a survey of this important work.

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History of Creativity Research Likewise, the history of creativity research cannot be summarized in a few paragraphs, except to say, with Ryhammar and Brolin (1999), that research on creativity, in the contemporary sense, began in the 1950s and developed into five lines of research: (1) personality aspects, (2) cognitive aspects, (3) efforts to stimulate or increase creativity, (4) integrative models, and (5) more comprehensive integrated models that use systems thinking to explain how new ideas and products arise in socio-historical contexts. These lines of research alternated in their point of focus between (1) the creative person (2) the creative process (3) environmental factors and (4) the creative product. For a more detailed look at this fascinating body of work, interested readers should see Kaufman and Sternberg’s (2019) Cambridge Handbook of Creativity.

History of Wisdom Research By the 1980s, the study of creativity was still found to be insufficient to account for exceptional human accomplishments said to involve wisdom. Psychological models and theories of wisdom pursued a variety of approaches, including wisdom as expertise (analogous to cognitive creativity, and the study of open problems in cognitive science); wisdom as personality (analogous to creative personality, and the study of person perception); wisdom as relational/situated performance (analogous to socio-historical studies of creativity, and the situation-specific responses of social psychology). Studies of wisdom extended beyond the nineteenth century understanding of genius, returning to the study of the sage, and therefore to a unified conception of intelligence, creativity, and wisdom. The sage is not always named as such; but the implied ideal unites these three concepts, as seen most prominently in the work of Robert J. Sternberg (2003, 2021). Indeed, a recent study by Dong and Fournier (2022) found that intelligence and creativity were necessary for wise performance (assessed by the Berlin paradigm) (Baltes & Smith, 1990; Baltes & Staudinger, 2000) and Grossmann’s Situated Wise Reasoning tasks (Brienza et al., 2018); creativity was also associated with Webster’s

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Self-Assessed Wisdom Scale (Webster, 2003, 2007). For a more detailed look at the wide range of research on wisdom, interested readers should consult Sternberg and Glück’s (2019) Cambridge Handbook of Wisdom. This whirlwind tour shows why wisdom, creativity, and intelligence came to be studied separately in Europe, and later, in North America. What about Iran and China?

The Models of Ayyari and Javanmardi in Iran The concept of wisdom plays a significant role in Iranian history, with persons embodying the quality of “wisdom” considered exemplary figures in ancient Iran, sought out concerning a wide range of problems. By contrast, those exhibiting what we might call “intelligence” or “creativity” today were sought out only for specific skills or for helping with specific problems. Therefore, it is not surprising that, of the three concepts, wisdom (Farsi: Xrad; ‫ )خرد‬has the longest history in the Iranian culture, dating back at least to the Zoroastrian period. Xrad derives from the closely associated Indo-European word kretus, composed of the root word kret (insight, intelligence, strength) and the suffix us. Its meaning remained largely unchanged from Zoroastrian times to contemporary usage and denotes the power of understanding, knowledge, and intelligence (Ahmadi, 2014; Delpazir et al., 2017). Similarly, according to the Abadis online dictionary (n.d.-a), the Farsi word for intelligence (Housh; ‫ )هوش‬is associated with cleverness, understanding, but also reason and wisdom. Although Housh is not as significant as Xrad in the Iranian tradition, it is referenced in major poems by Ferdowsi and Saadi, dating back to the eleventh century. The proto-Indo-­ European root for Housh is hṓws, which means to hear. The Farsi word for creativity (Khalaghiat, ‫)خالقیت‬, meaning to bring into existence, is not as old—although closely related words, such as Ebda (‫ ;ابداع‬meaning innovation), are much older and, in the poetry of Hafiz, are associated with the Xrad of God (Abadis, n.d.-b). Moreover, as we shall soon see, creativity is considered an essential characteristic for human excellence, as portrayed in the Iranian literature.

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To better understand the relationship between these concepts in Iranian history, we begin by considering pre-Islamic, and specifically Zoroastrian, texts. Several Zoroastrian texts (e.g., the Avesta) discuss wisdom, creativity, and intelligence, broadly understood, and their connections to each other. In seeking to explain ideal types of human development, these texts discuss wisdom as an ability to reason and understand, but also the intellect as distinguishable from wisdom, described as the confluence of willingness to learn, ability to learn, and memory (Riazi-Heravi et al., 2020). Indeed, these texts outline two distinct forms of wisdom: (1) wisdom learned through experience (Goushsoroud Xrad; literally wisdom acquired by hearing) and (2) innate wisdom, not learned but acquired through an unmediated relationship with the world and by creative insight (Asn Xrad, based on inner sight or insight) (Riazi-Heravi et al., 2020). This latter form of wisdom was personified in Anahita (a Zoroastrian water deity; Saadi-Nejad, 2021), described as the ultimate source of knowledge and morality—Anahita also plays a symbolic role as the virgin mother of Mitra, the Zoroastrian God of Covenant and worldly wisdom (Murdock, 2013). Note that these concepts point to two aspects of wisdom—one based on intelligence (Goushsoroud Xrad) and the other based on creativity (Asn Xrad)—considered synergistic, with the ultimate model of human excellence requiring the development of both. In the post-Islamic period, we can examine the “Ayyar,” an exemplary ideal figure in Persian literature. Interestingly, several previous authors have pointed to the connection between the concept of “Ayyari” and the Zoroastrian deity Mitra (later known as Mehr), goddess of morality and wisdom worshiped as the most supreme deity of the brotherhood of the Ayyars, due to its role in oath keeping (Pourshariati, 2013; Saremi & Nouri, 2013; Madani, 2021). As an ideal type, the concept of “Ayyari” shows the relationship between wisdom, intelligence, and creativity. For instance, the book of “Samak e Ayyar” follows the story of Samak, an exceptional Ayyar (Rassouli & Mechner, 2021), and clearly shows the connection between creativity and wisdom. For example, to uphold the two fundamental principles of the Ayyari—“keeping oaths/promises” and “helping those in need”—Samak relies on his general resourcefulness and his creativity. In one story, Samak is forced to choose between

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keeping an oath to a fellow Ayyar (to kill that Ayyar’s nephew) and helping someone in need (the nephew, who Samak sees is innocent). To resolve this conflict, Samak uses creativity and deception to come up with an option that lets him to keep his oath, execute his plans, and still help someone in need. Samak delegates the task of killing the Ayyar’s nephew to one of his incompetent servants, who then fails at the task, allowing Samak to simultaneously fulfill his oath and save an innocent life. Furthermore, Samak never fights his opponents face-to-face—considering this manner of fighting ineffective, even though it was then considered part of a common code of honor. In other words, Samak understands the limitations of conventional morality and goes beyond it (a behavior consistent with the modern concept of “openness”). He is willing to violate these codes so long as it helps him achieve the ultimate aim of keeping his oaths and helping others (reminiscent of the wisdom-related concept of value relativity). Lastly, Samak embodies the archetypal figure of the “trickster.” Previous analyses of the “trickster” motif have associated it with creativity (Schultz, 2007), which is also conducive to wisdom-­ related moral behavior, as seen in the story of Samak. Another important concept illustrated by the story of Samak is Javanmardi (literally: youngmanliness), another medieval Persian ideal for human behavior. Javanmards also formed alliances similar to that of Ayyars and, in certain periods, Ayyars practiced a specific kind of Javanmardi, making the concepts of Ayyari and Javanmardi somewhat interchangeable (Arjomand, 2020; Gevorgyan, 2013; Keikavus, ca. 1080/1951; Saremi & Nouri, 2013). Conceptualizations of Javanmardi have evolved over time, offering an opportunity to investigate how understandings of the relationship between wisdom, intelligence, and creativity have changed in the Iranian imagination throughout different historical periods. According to Loewen (2001), the earliest accounts describe Javanmardi as Heroic Warriors, as seen in early accounts of the Ayyars, like Samak. For these warriors, their foremost aim was to be victorious in battle and to successfully complete their missions, despite external forces. During the Abbasid Caliphate, Javanmardi became intertwined with the Sufi notion of futuwwat, with the, now internalized, enemy becoming one’s carnal soul (nafs). Humility became the ultimate virtue, as it promoted

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ego-detachment, leading to self-transcendent wisdom (Loewen, 2001). The eleventh century text Qabus Nama, by the Ziyarid ruler Keikavus, supports this understanding of Javanmardi by Sufi mystics. Furthermore, they elaborate its gradations and manifestations in various aspects of Ziyarid society (Keikavus, ca. 1080/1951). Keikavus outlines four types of Javanmardi embodied by: (1) soldiers (Ayyar) or Merchants, (2) Islamic jurists, (3) Sufis and saints, and finally, (4) prophets—who embody its most complete and rarest form. The Javanmardi of the common soldier (Ayyar) is instantiated in the body (i.e., acted out), while that the Javanmardi of the prophets is instantiated in the body, the soul, and the senses. Note that account of Javanmardi overlaps the contemporary Iranian Hierarchical Wisdom Model put forth by Karami and Ghahremani (2016, 2017), itself derived from Iranian literature: Both models propose practical intelligence at their most basic level, and increasingly rare and complete forms of wisdom at higher levels. In the final stages of its development, Javanmardi was embodied in the wrestler (Pahlewan), in whom Javanmardi is both a physical and spiritual quality. As a physical champion, the wrestler is courageous, strong, and willing to confront challengers, within the bounds of the Islamic notion of adab (i.e., proper/ethical behavior) (Loewen, 2001). Famous Pahlewan also wrote poetry, recited to teach other wrestlers the humility and bravery needed to be a Javanmard (Luijendijk, 2016); sometimes lines from the Shahnameh were recited to identify the wrestler with the heroic warrior archetype and his courage (Loewen, 2001). Thus, aesthetic sensitivity—an important aspect of creativity—inspired the Pahlewan wrestler toward virtue (wisdom). They were also expected to be well-versed in the sciences of his day, to defend Javanmardi as the ultimate ideal: In other words, in this model of Javanmardi, wisdom must use creativity and intelligence (or knowledge) to battle “unwise intelligence.” Since the nineteenth century, the concept of Javanmardi has lost its richness, although a more narrow practice of “Pahlewani” continues in the Zoorkhane (the traditional Persian Gymnasium). But, despite the gradual disappearance of Javanmardi as something uniting morality, intelligence, and creativity, these concepts remain essential to wisdom in the Iranian imagination. Indeed, Imam Ali, still an iconic Iranian wisdom figure is associated with Javanmardi (Dortaj et al., 2022). A story is

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attributed to Imam Ali still widely referenced today that demonstrates his virtues: Once, when the Prophet Mohammad was being pursued by the Quraysh, Imam Ali was confronted by several members of the Quraysh seeking to discover the whereabouts of the prophet. In order for Imam Ali to remain truthful, while still upholding his pledge to serve the Prophet, he slightly adjusted his seating position and said, “Since I have been sitting here, I haven’t seen anyone pass by.” In this story, creative problem-solving strategies is recruited to support both wisdom and virtue not unlike the story of Samak-e-Ayyar—which shows that wisdom, creativity, and intelligence are still interrelated and synergistic concepts, even in contemporary Iran.

 isdom, Creativity, and Intelligence in Iranian W Psychological Research Looking at the history of psychological research in Iran, studies of Intelligence—measured by IQ or more recently EQ and practical intelligence—clearly dominate, with schools for the gifted recruiting students based on IQ or similar tests. Given its potential to foster innovation in various contexts, creativity has also been measured, albeit to a lesser extent. But empirical studies of wisdom have been confined to a handful of university researchers. Indeed, wisdom research is so unfamiliar in Iran, that many researchers find it difficult to publish research in this field. Not surprisingly, there is little research examining wisdom, creativity, and intelligence together. However, Ghorbani and Khormaee (2016) found that successful intelligence is associated with wisdom, while self-efficacy mediated the relationship between wisdom and intelligence. And Ghorbani and Yousefi (2018) surveyed 268 undergraduate students in Iran and found a significant relationship between various facets of Webster’s (2003) SAWS (openness, emotional regulation, humor, critical life experience, reminiscence, and reflectiveness) and various facets of creativity—fluency, flexibility, and originality, but not elaboration—as assessed by the Torrance test of creativity (Torrance, 1990), with creativity explaining 26% of the variance in wisdom. Likewise, Kordnoghabi and Delfan Beiranvand

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(2017) found that, unlike fluid intelligence, crystallized intelligence—as assessed by the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS) (Orangi & Baraheni, 2006)—was related to wisdom as assessed by the 3DWS (Ardelt, 2003, 2004). And wisdom and creativity were positively correlated, with intelligence explaining 29% of the variability in wisdom and creativity 16%.

Education and Real-World Problem Solving In modern societies, which reward high IQ and creativity, wisdom development is not a priority for most citizens. This observation, while applicable to all Western societies, may be even more pronounced in Iran, where educational attainment is not only important for future employment, but often a prerequisite for immigration to the West. In other words, the promise of a better life requires exceptional academic achievements in school and on standardized tests. Wisdom development is at best a secondary concern, and at worst completely irrelevant. To counter these tendencies, some researchers and educators have proposed top-down approaches for wisdom education in the classroom, using unconventional testing methods that assess more than just intelligence and creativity (e.g., the CASPer test for medical school admission) (Dore et al., 2017), in the hopes of changing incentive structures to promote the development of wise ethical behavior. Although it may prove successful, such approaches risk missing the point of wisdom education—that wisdom should be an end in itself, rather than a way to access institutions of higher education. It is easy to imagine students studying to excel on wisdom assessments, without behaving wisely in their day-to-­ day lives. As the late Iranian sociologist, Ali Reza-Gholi (1998), pointed out: top-down attempts at large scale societal restructuring often fail to alter people’s implicit value structures. Building on the Iranian literature just mentioned, we suggest that an alternative path to wisdom education is through its “beautification” (i.e., by attending to the emotional and aesthetic aspects of wisdom). Then wisdom education will be considered inherently valuable and pursued for the right reasons, irrespective of its secondary benefits.

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If educational reinforcements target intelligence, creativity, and wisdom combined, rather than just intelligence or creativity in isolation, then perhaps over time, these systems may be corrected and improved. And given the central aim of this book, we need exemplars who themselves unite wisdom, intelligence, and creativity to inspire student behavior—such an educational goal could generate new educational content, teaching methods, and assessments of great personal and social value.

 isdom, Creativity, Intelligence and the Sage W in China Contemporary Chinese translations of the English words “intelligence,” “creativity,” and “wisdom” have a long history in ancient Chinese texts. The Chinese phrase “创造 [to create, by producing things that never before existed]” first appeared in Book of the Later Han (后汉书, composed in the fifth century AD) and Book of Song (宋书, written between 492–493AD). The common Chinese translations of intelligence (智力) and wisdom (智慧) both share the first character智, originally a Chinese oracle character that means to aim an arrow (有的放矢) coming out of one’s mouth, associated with purposeful, fast and keen perception. (See 知 in the Editorial Committee of Han Yu Da Zi Dian, 2010, p. 2763; Xu & Duan, 1988, p. 227). Intelligence (智力), first recorded in Han Feizi 2 (mid third century BC), refers to precisely this ability (力/能力). Wisdom (智慧) adds慧 to it—composed of an upper part 彗 (to sweep) and a lower part 心 (heart) (Editorial Committee of Han Yu Da Zi Dian, 2010, p. 1031). If one can sweep away the dust (e.g., greed, infatuation, biases, and fallacy), the heart (innate purity) can emerge. This character first appeared in Mozi,3 about the fifth to third century BCE. Chinese culture also has a range of ideal types, or exemplars, with an analysis of what makes them exemplary. For example, as an iconic  智力不用则君穷乎臣。——《韩非子⋅八经⋅因情》  若 使 之 治 国 家 ， 则 此 使 不 智 慧 者 治 国 家 也 ， 国 家 之 乱 既 可 得 而 知 己 。 —— 《墨子⋅尚贤中》 2 3

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exemplar of wisdom, Confucius is benevolent and intelligent. In the Confucian Analects and the tradition that followed from it—in particular, the Confucianism of Xunzi (also Xun Kuang, third century BCE)— iconic wisdom figures are praised for both their ability and their intelligence. Likewise, the leaders Mozi (also Mo Di, 470–391 BCE) referred to as wise clearly show virtue and intelligence (competence). But if we compare the lives of Cao Cao (曹操, an exemplar of intelligence), Cai Lun (蔡伦, an exemplar of creativity), and Confucius (an exemplar of wisdom), we find that Chinese culture has always distinguished between intelligence, creativity, and wisdom, rather than seeing them as three manifestations of how to live a good life. Examining the differences between these individuals will allow us to distinguish popular conceptualizations of intelligence, creativity, and wisdom. Lu Ban (鲁班) (inventor and structural engineer who is revered as the Chinese Deity of builders and contractors), Cai Lun (inventor of paper), and Bi Sheng (毕昇) (inventor of movable type technology), are all exemplars of creativity as well as highly intelligent. The warlord Cao Cao is an iconic exemplar of wisdom and intelligence in China today. In stories of his son, Cao Chong (曹冲), we see an organic synthesis of all three concepts. According to Records of the Three Kingdoms (三国志), Cao Chong was highly intelligent and discerning from a very young age; by the age of five or six, he had already achieved an adult level of competence. The well-known story of how Cao Chong weighed an elephant demonstrates his genius. As the story goes, Cao Cao received an elephant from his opponent Sun Quan (孙权) and wanted to know how much it weighed. None of his court advisers could figure out a good way to do this. When his son Cao Chong heard of the problem, the young child quickly proposed putting the elephant onto a boat in water and marking the level of water displacement, then replacing the elephant with something easy to weigh until the boat reached the exact same level. While this story deftly shows Cao Chong’s intelligence, the story of how he saved the life of a storage officer (曹冲智救库吏, Chen, ca. 300 C.E./2007, p. 587) shows his wisdom. At the end of the Han Dynasty, laws were cruel and harsh. When Cao Cao’s saddle was chewed by rats, the officers who were responsible for storing it faced certain death. Learning of their predicament, Cao Chong asked them to wait for three

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days before turning themselves in; then he tore his own clothes so that it looked as if they were chewed by rats, and pretended to be upset. When Cao Cao asked what was the matter, Chao Chong said, “People believe it is bad luck for your clothes to be chewed by rats, so I am worried.” Cao Cao answered, “Nonsense. Don’t worry about it.” Later, when the storage officers reported the damage to his saddle, Cao Cao laughed and said, “If even the clothes my son is wearing can be chewed by rats, so can a saddle on a pillar.” And he did not punish the officers for negligence. In this story, Cao Chong was kind-hearted and empathetic toward the officers. Although young, he understood how events would unfold and acted to assure a more beneficial outcome (因势利导). He accurately appraised Cao Cao’s temperament. And his solution very deftly solved the officer’s problem while remaining within acceptable moral and ethical bounds. According to Records of the Three Kingdoms (三国志), Cao Chong saved many other lives with his wisdom before dying from an unrecorded illness4 at the age of 13. If not for his early death, Cao Cao would surely have made him heir to the throne. In ancient time, the wise are also understood by their attitudes toward the good life. In China, there are at least two kinds of good life: material and spiritual. Will the wise person necessarily live a life that is rich both materially and spiritually? The Tai Bo chapter of The Analects (Book 8 chapter 13.3) states: “邦有道，贫且贱焉，耻也；邦无道，富且贵 焉，耻也[When a country is well governed, poverty and a mean condition are things to be ashamed of; when a country is ill governed, riches and honor are things to be ashamed of ] (Confucius & Mencius, 480–250 B.C.E./1861).” A wise person living when the state is orderly and fair is exemplified by Fan Zhongyan (范仲淹) who, through his own honest effort, led a life that both materially and spiritually rich. But if the state is cruel and unjust, wise people pursue spiritual contentment and refuse to join the injustice through the lure of material riches; for example, Zhuang Zi (庄子) refused to serve under King Wei of Chu (楚威王) who was waging war against the state of Qi (齐), famously saying: “I would rather play happily in a dirty ditch than become chained to a ruler of state. I will  年十三，建安十三年疾病，太祖亲为请命。及亡，哀甚。——《三国志⋅魏书⋅武文世 王公传第二十⋅邓哀王冲传》 4

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never serve as a civil officer to satisfy my spiritual intent5 (authors’ translation).”

 odern Research on Wisdom, Creativity, M and Intelligence in China There is no historical equivalent to psychological science in ancient China, and traditional Chinese scholarship is unfamiliar with the practice of concept definition and comparison. Reviews of historical scholarly work thus find no record of any synthesis of the Chinese equivalents of intelligence, creativity, and wisdom in ancient texts. Indeed, modern psychological research in China today evolved not from ancient Chinese psychological scholarship but rather from transplanted Western psychological traditions. In the decades before the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, psychological research in China was primarily an introduction of Western psychological science. After 1950, it abandoned the West for the psychological research tradition of the Soviet Union, and during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), normal scientific research activities came to a halt due to political upheaval. Since the Chinese Economic Reform in the late 1970s, Chinese psychologists turned again to the West and to psychological studies from the United States in particular, including the study of intelligence (Wang, 2008, pp. 573–729). For the last 20 years, most scholarly efforts have focused on the study of the brain and cognition. Some voices have advocated for the indigenization of psychological studies in China, but they have not gained much traction. More recently, some studies of Chinese indigenous understanding of creativity and wisdom have been made by the research teams of Luo Jin (e.g. Luo, 2004) and Wang Fengyan (e.g. Chen et al., 2021; Chen & Wang, 2014, 2016; Fu & Wang, 2020; Wang & Zheng, 2009, 2014, 2015; Wang et al., 2022; Zhang et al., 2022).  楚威王闻庄周贤，使使厚币迎之，许以为相。庄周笑谓楚使者曰:“千金，重利；卿 相，尊位也。子独不见郊祭之牺牛乎?养食之数岁，衣以文绣，以入大庙。当是之时， 虽欲为孤豚，岂可得乎?子亟去，无污我。我宁游戏污渎之中自快，无为有国者所羁， 终身不仕，以快吾志焉。”——《史记⋅列传⋅老子韩非列传》 5

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In particular, Wang and colleagues (2014, 2022) discussed the conceptual relationship between intelligence, creativity, and wisdom, and there are efforts to introduce and translate the research by Sternberg (e.g., Dai, 2022), But, to date, there have been no empirical studies on this topic, for two reasons: (1) conceptually, intelligence and creativity are viewed as components of wisdom, making it difficult to study the relationship between them using mediation or moderation models; and (2) using the nomination method or multidimensional scaling to study their synthesis lacks novelty.

Implications for Educating and Assessing Wisdom, Creativity, and Intelligence in China Sages of the past have long recognized the importance of knowing others. The Counsels of Gao-yao chapter in the Book of Documents (“尚书”)—one of the oldest Chinese classics—gives perhaps the most iconic descriptions of this tradition: “When (the sovereign) knows men, he is wise, and can put everyone into the office for which he is fit (Confucius, 772–476 B.C.E./1879).” Yao (尧)—one of the Primeval Emperors and the Five Premier Emperors, who exemplifies exceptional rulership—used a multi-­ scenario assessment to examine the qualities of his successor Shun (舜). Three common methods are documented: (1) question and answer examination (问答鉴别法), (2) behavioral observation (察言观行法), and (3) directed scenario (准情境测验法). Historically, Chinese intellectuals used these three methods concomitantly or individually. Ancient records on their use not only have a very long history, but are also rich and plentiful, suggesting they were standard practice (Wang, 2008, pp. 352–387). We can trace an ancient assessment tradition as far back as Zhuang Zi (庄子, see the “Nine Tests 九征” in Zhuang Zi, Laozi & Zhuangzi, 475–221 B.C.E./1962) and Lü Shang (吕尚, the eight tests, Lü, 475–221 B.C.E./1997, p. 98; Wang, 2008, p. 378). Zhuge Liang (诸葛亮)— another iconic wisdom figure in China today—used seven ways to truly know someone, saying:

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There are seven ways to know someone. First, ask them about their attitudes toward right and wrong and see their aspirations. Second, verbally confound and perplex them and observe how they change. Third, ask them their tactics to tell their knowledge and intelligence. Fourth, confront them with disasters and difficulties to observe their courage. Fifth, get them drunk to observe their character. Sixth, present them with wealth to test their honesty. Seventh, make a promise with them and see how true they are to their word. (authors’ translation)

Besides question and answer examinations, behavioral observation, and directed scenarios, we find three other documented methods by which to test people’s abilities: (1) action tests (typically, archery), (2) ring puzzles (九连环), and (3) the tangram test (七巧板). The ring test is a traditional puzzle game that requires one to disentangle a loop from a set of interlinked metals rings or pillars (typically 9) as quickly as possible. It was used in modern western psychological tests by Henry Alford Ruger at Columbia University in the 1910s, who wrote about Chinese Ring Puzzles. The tangram is also a puzzle game, but requires manipulating flat geometric shapes to form various designs, and measures intelligence based on how long it takes someone to reach a solution. The tangram is first mentioned in the Yan Ji Tu (燕几图) of the Song dynasty (960–1279 AD), where a set of drawers could be freely arranged and organized as needed (Chen, 2019, p. 5101). The tangram later developed into the Yi Zhi Tu (益智图), by Tong Yegeng of the Qing dynasty (1636–1912 AD) (Wang, 2008, pp. 363–365).

Implications for Solving Real-World Problems National problems and assuring the Earth’s survival place additional demands on wisdom beyond the toy problems typically studied in psychological research. A high level of wisdom is required of leaders and citizens of powerful nation states who play a critical role in international affairs. How can we improve their wisdom? There are two key areas to consider.

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The first is to distinguish between two types of problems: (1) when a relative truth or best practice is conceptually possible but temporarily unclear, or needs to be adapted to unique local circumstances; for example, finding effective and responsible measures to limit the spread of COVID-19 as a global health crisis, and (2) when disagreements largely depend on differences in local preferences, traditions, or common practices; for example, cultural differences in etiquette, where acceptable behavior in one culture may be appalling in another. Solving these two types of problems requires different strategies. To solve the first kind of problem, individuals and groups—especially those in leadership positions—should use the “wisdom of the sciences” (物慧); that is, the investigative spirit of the scientific method, rationally distinguishing truth from untruth, bravely supporting what is morally right, taking responsibility for the greater good, and recognizing as “the primary principle … the harmonious co-existence between human beings and the earth” when assessing benefits and costs, gain and loss (Zhao, 2018). To solve the second kind of problem, individuals and groups in leadership positions should practice the “wisdom of the humanities” (人慧) or moral wisdom (德慧), respecting differences in traditions, aesthetics, and preferences, and seeking harmony when assessing costs and benefits, or gain and loss. Exemplary wisdom figures like Abraham Lincoln and Nelson Mandela effectively led people toward a free, equal, fair, and transparent society that abides by the rule of law, where accurate and evidence-based information is widely accessible, and opinions are freely expressed without fear of oppression and discrimination. The effectiveness of this wise leadership could be further enhanced by teaching the general public key characteristics associated with wisdom, helping them transcend egocentric attitudes and become alert to coercion from individuals with partisan motives. Another other key skill is the ability to take advice, which is important for the average citizen, but especially for people in positions of power, whose decisions often have major long-lasting consequences on a global scale.

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Conclusion and Future Directions We need morally informed genius (the sage) to solve real and present existential threats to humanity, like climate change. But instead of waiting for a white knight to guide us all—a hallmark of Fascism (Naraghi, 2018) all too clearly on the horizon these days, we need to see genius as the product of all of us working together. Wikipedia and other “wisdom of crowds” phenomena such as “citizen science” or wise AI leverage our collective genius, supported by technology. For example, Lee and Chang (2010) used an evolutionary system and collective intelligence to augment creativity in product design: More specifically, over the internet, they used a wisdom of crowds approach to identify and respond to consumer’s reaction to new products during their design phase, promoting group creativity and intelligence through an iterative evolutionary process. Looking to the recent past and, unfortunately, the present, it is not uncommon to find individuals in many nations who lack wisdom and use their intelligence and creativity to wreak havoc in the world. However, at each historical moment—including our own—, we also find wise individuals who achieve great things using their intelligence, creativity and physical skill. A rapidly globalizing world, facing global challenges (e.g., COVID-19 and climate change) requires global solutions to these real-world problems: Various cultures around the world are repositories of wisdom that integrate intelligence and creativity in ways that have the potential to contribute to the solutions to these global existential threats that we so desperately need.

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7 Wisdom, Intelligence, and Creativity Are Not the Same: But the World Needs Them All Judith Glück

Are wisdom, intelligence, and creativity all the same thing, and is our distinction between them just an outcome of psychology’s tendency to sort things into too many separate boxes, even if they actually belong together? In this paper, I argue that 1 . complex real-life problems require intelligence, creativity, and wisdom; 2. but the three qualities still are not quite the same: they have different developmental dynamics and people who are particularly high in one of those qualities typically are not equally high in the others;

Chapter to appear in Sternberg, R. J., Kaufman, J. S., & Karami, S. (Eds.). Intelligence, creativity, and wisdom: Are they really distinct? Palgrave Macmillan. I am very grateful to Ursula M. Staudinger for the permission to reanalyze the data from the Interactive Minds Study for this chapter.

J. Glück (*) Department of Psychology, University of Klagenfurt, Klagenfurt, Austria e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. J. Sternberg et al. (eds.), Intelligence, Creativity, and Wisdom, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26772-7_7

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3. we need collaborative approaches to solve the big problems of our time. Science is, in many ways, such a collective/collaborative approach—but the knowledge accumulated by science does not seem to be sufficient to solve the great challenges our world is facing today. We need to use our intelligence, creativity, and wisdom to figure out how to change the world for the better.

 ifficult Real-Life Problems Need Wisdom, D Intelligence, and Creativity Here’s a life problem that my research group designed to measure wisdom. How would you respond to it? Anna is a teacher of a ninth-grade class, and she has a good relationship with her students. One day she sees one of them standing alone in the hallway, crying. She considers approaching him but feels that he does not want to talk right now. As she pays closer attention to what is happening in class and on the media pages of her students, she finds out that the boy is being anonymously harassed and attacked online. It seems that some students are bullying him because he is gay. Anna knows that the boy’s parents are rather strict and conservative, and she does not think they have a good relationship with their son. What could Anna consider and do in this ? There are no right or wrong answers. Everything you have to say is important to us.

This is a typical wisdom-requiring problem in that it is complex, important, interpersonal, and uncertain in outcome—there are many things Anna could do, with no obvious “best” solution (Glück & Weststrate, 2022). We rate our study participants’ responses to this problem for components of wisdom such as consideration of different perspectives, awareness of uncertainty and uncontrollability, and consideration and regulation of emotions. However, as I was thinking about the topic of this book, it seemed obvious to me that to optimally deal with problems like this, people also need intelligence and creativity. As an example, here is the response that was rated as wisest in our study.

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“Anna could approach the student and let him know that she’s noticed something is wrong. She could provide support and encouragement and suggest he meet with a school counselor. She should report the bullying to the appropriate department within the school. For example, in my state, there is a point person who handles and investigates all incidents of bullying within schools. I used to be that person in a previous job. Considering the high rate of suicide among bullied teens, something would need to be done immediately to provide mental and emotional support to the student. It’s so important to feel supported and cared for. Perhaps Anna could even spearhead the development of a LGBTQIA+ support group for students. If he is being bullied for being gay, surely there are other students in the same situation. A support group could provide the support that he and the other teens could use, and he could have a peer support system at school. If he wanted to address the problem with his parents, the school could hold a meeting with the student and his parents where he could “come out” to them in a controlled environment where guidance and support could be offered to the parents as well.” This response shows a high level of wisdom, but it also shows crystallized intelligence, fluid intelligence, and creativity. Wisdom has been defined in many ways (see, e.g., Aldwin et al., 2019; Ardelt, 2003; Baltes & Staudinger, 2000; Grossmann et al., 2020; Staudinger, 2019; Sternberg, 1998, 2019c). Recently, we proposed an integrative definition that combines most existing definitions to explain wise behavior in the face of difficult life problems (Glück & Weststrate, 2022). According to this model, wise behavior in difficult situations requires both non-cognitive and cognitive components of wisdom. The non-cognitive components include an exploratory orientation (wanting to understand the problem in depth; being open to different perspectives), concern for others (an ethical orientation toward maximizing a common good rather than one’s own benefit; empathic concern for others involved), and emotion regulation (remaining calm even in highly emotional situations). In challenging situations, they contribute to a mindset that helps wise individuals to remain open, caring, and calm, where others would run around with their hair on fire. This mindset enables wise individuals to draw on their cognitive components of wisdom: life experience and accumulated knowledge about themselves, other people, and life in general; their

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metacognitive awareness of the uncertainty and multiperspectivity of every complex problem; and their self-reflective capacities. Utilizing these cognitive resources, wise individuals are able to think and then, hopefully, act wisely with respect to the problem. The participant cited above clearly shows several of those components of wisdom. She shows empathy and an orientation towards a greater good in her concern for the student, but also for the parents and even for other LGBTQIA+ youth who might profit from a support group. She shows a lot of knowledge and experience with this type of problem as well as the metacognitive abilities to consider different perspectives and the uncertainty involved in every possible approach. The more self-related components of wisdom, such as openness or self-reflection, are less evident in her response, but that makes sense, because the problem does not concern her personally. According to our model, the relevance of the self-­ related wisdom components varies with personal involvement in a problem, which is obviously low for the fictitious problems that are typically used in wisdom research (Glück & Weststrate, 2022). With respect to intelligence, this chapter draws on the basic distinction between crystallized and fluid intelligence (Cattell, 1963; Horn & Cattell, 1967; for a recent review see Hertzog, 2020). Crystallized intelligence is closely related to the life-knowledge component of the integrative wisdom model. It is typically defined as the knowledge and experience a person has accumulated in the course of their life (Horn & Cattell, 1967). Crystallized intelligence is highly domain-specific: some people accumulate lots of knowledge about interpersonal problems while other people accumulate lots of knowledge about combustion engines, complex statistical modeling, or medieval music, to give just a few examples. Dealing with a real-life problem requires crystallized intelligence in the domain(s) that the problem refers to. Our wise participant had accumulated exactly the right type of crystallized intelligence for responding to this particular problem during her career as a school counselor for bullied students. The fact that crystallized intelligence is a highly individual concept makes it difficult to measure—how do you assess how much knowledge a person has accumulated when everyone accumulates knowledge in different domains? The classical empirical proxy for crystallized intelligence is

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vocabulary, which can be measured easily but may not represent everyone’s crystallized intelligence equally well. Fluid intelligence is generally defined as the ability to reason logically to find the best solution to a novel problem (Horn & Cattell, 1967). When we are faced with a problem far out of our domains of expertise, we need general capacities such as processing a lot of information quickly  and reasoning about it clearly and logically. Fluid intelligence is usually measured through relatively abstract tasks with which (most) people have little experience, such as identifying the rule underlying a series of numbers or an array of figures. Most real-life problems obviously require a combination of fluid and crystallized intelligence, but there tends to be a tradeoff between them: our wise participant did not need to use much fluid intelligence because she brought so much crystallized intelligence to the problem. I would argue that she still shows fluid intelligence in how she grasps the complexity of the problem, considers the perspective of everyone involved, and takes various constraints into account as she thinks about what might work best (such as the parents’ unknown attitude toward their child’s sexual orientation). There is an important lifespan dynamic in the tradeoff between fluid and crystallized intelligence. Fluid intelligence generally peaks in early adulthood and then declines—slowly at first and then faster as people age. Crystallized intelligence, on the other hand, obviously does not decline with age; as it accumulates with experience, it tends to increase or at least stay stable way into old age. (Declines in crystallized intelligence do occur in advanced old age or in the course of dementia-related processes; they also occur when individuals no longer need the knowledge they have accumulated in a specific domain—as most of us find out when they try to recall knowledge from school subjects they didn’t find interesting.) As people grow older, they compensate for losses in fluid intelligence by using their crystallized intelligence (Baltes et al., 1999; Hertzog, 2020): for example, in domains like chess, older experts show better performance than young novices in spite of their declines in fluid intelligence, because so much of their skill has been automatized (Vaci et al., 2015). This developmental dynamic also plays out in the relationships of fluid and crystallized intelligence with other variables. For example, Glück and Scherpf (2022) found that while adolescents and young adults

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need a certain level of fluid intelligence to be able to respond wisely to life problems, fluid intelligence and wisdom are unrelated in older adults. Crystallized intelligence, however, predicts wisdom at any age. Some models of intelligence are much more differentiated and comprehensive than the Cattell/Horn model. In particular, the Cattell-Horn-­ Carroll (CHC) model includes a number of components in addition to fluid and crystallized intelligence, such as numerical ability, visual and auditory processing, or short-term and long-term memory (e.g., Conway & Kovacs, 2015; Ortiz, 2015; Schneider & McGrew, 2012). However, for the purpose of solving real-life problems rather than acing intelligence tests, crystallized and fluid intelligence seem most relevant to me, and many of the more specific components of the CHC model can, to some extent, be subsumed under fluid (processing speed, short-term memory) or crystallized intelligence (numerical skill, long-term memory). Creativity is most broadly defined as the ability to generate ideas that are novel and original, but also useful in that they have some function or purpose (e.g., Amabile, 2013; Hennessey & Amabile, 2010). There is a certain tension between these two criteria—does art, for example, always have to have some meaning or fulfill a purpose? Is creating a new vaccine for COVID-19 creative in the same way as creating an abstract painting? For dealing with complex real-world problems, usefulness in addition to originality is certainly important. Our participant showed creativity in coming up with several different things Anna could do, including talking to a counselor, founding an LGBTQIA+ support group, and finding a good way to involve the parents. All three ideas are also relatively original if we assess originality the way it is typically assessed in creativity tests: the less often an idea comes up in a large sample of responses, the more original it is considered to be. The most frequent response to Anna’s problem in our study was that Anna should talk to the boy and offer him support. That is certainly not a bad idea, and our wise participant mentioned it, too, but it is probably not sufficient to solve the problem. I hope to have demonstrated that the best solutions to complex life problems like the one we used in our study are not only wise, but also intelligent, in both the crystallized and the fluid way, and creative. Just to illustrate that point a bit more, here are some of the responses from our study that were rated as low in wisdom:

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• “should calm the student by moral advice” • “I think Anna should talk to the parents about the situation, not doing so could take major consequences. Only parents have the last word and it is they who will decide what to do with their child.” • “In such Scenario the boy should be handed over to the authorities or guardians who will adopt him and make him feel accepted in order for him not to be depressed or commit suicide” • “Tell him that it’s okay to be who he is and once he gets out of high school, while he’ll still deal with bullying it will be on a lesser scale.” These responses are not only low in wisdom; they also lack some or all of the other characteristics I have discussed. They do not demonstrate much knowledge about the problem (“the authorities or guardians who will adopt him”), awareness of the complexity of the situation or ability to reason logically about it (“calm the student by moral advice”), and while some of them may be quite original (“tell him […] he’ll still deal with bullying but it will be on a lesser scale”), they do not seem particularly useful. In sum, wise solutions to complex life problems involve domain-­ specific crystallized intelligence, fluid intelligence, and creativity. The extent to which they require each of these capacities probably depends on the nature of the problem. For Anna’s problem, several approaches have already been found to be useful in schools around the world, and knowledge about such approaches may be more important than creativity. Other problems require a lot of original new ideas and out-of-the-box thinking. Climate change, perhaps the single largest problem that humanity is facing right now, seems to require a lot of new ideas. Some of these new ideas are about new technologies. Others, however, concern ways to increase the awareness and willingness of people around the world to do what we already know we need to do. I would argue that all complex life problems require, to some extent, wisdom, crystallized intelligence, fluid intelligence, and creativity.

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 ow Do Wisdom, Intelligence, and Creativity Work H Together in the Face of Life Problems? Dealing with a complex life problem, be it a small-scale one like Anna’s or a large-scale one like climate change, typically involves at least four steps, although they may need to be taken multiple times as we test and evaluate different approaches. These steps are (1) understanding the problem in its complexity, (2) generating possible approaches to (start to) solve the problem, (3) evaluating those possible approaches, and (4) actually acting—and then possibly finding out that one’s first approach did not work and looping back to (1), (2), or (3). Note that this is a rather rough account of the phases of problem-solving; Sternberg et al. (2021) present a more comprehensive account that includes more steps. Getting a correct representation of the problem is much harder in the real world than in typical psychological research. Real-world problems are not presented as written vignettes that include all relevant information like the one about Anna and her student. In fact, real-world problems tend to become more complicated, the more we dig into them. If Anna’s problem were to happen in real life, Anna might find out that there is a complex group dynamic in the boy’s class, that his parents love him but are highly religious and struggling with their religion’s views of LGBTQIA+ issues, that the boy’s partner is somewhat toxic, which has to do with his own family, and so on and so on. Even knowing what questions to ask and how to represent the problem at an adequate level of complexity can require all of the four qualities discussed in this chapter. Wisdom and crystallized intelligence may be particularly important when it comes to deciding which aspects are most relevant to understanding the problem. Crystallized and fluid intelligence may be needed to understand the interplay between the different aspects. Creativity seems less relevant, but it might help with identifying aspects of the problem that are not visible at first sight. As a large-scale real-world example, consider the early phases of the COVID-19 pandemic and the ways in which different nations tried to understand what was happening. Some political leaders chose to believe that the problem was going to go away by itself very soon; others were

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more aware of its likely scope and willing to take strict measures to prevent the virus from spreading. Almost no one was, at that time, willing and able to also consider the more indirect consequences of those preventive measures, such as reduced access to treatment for people with other health issues, effects of lockdowns on the education and mental health of children, economic effects on small businesses, and so on. As the pandemic went on, we became more and more aware of the ramifications of the COVID-19 measures in other domains, and in most countries, measures became more nuanced and evidence-driven. In retrospect, we are probably going to learn a lot about which countries got through the pandemic best. I would speculate that it will be nations whose governments were willing to listen to scientists from different disciplines from the beginning, trying to get a full picture not only of the medical but also the non-medical complexities of the situation. Generating possible approaches for dealing with a problem clearly requires creativity. As mentioned earlier, some possible approaches, such as talking to the boy in the case of Anna’s problem, are rather obvious. Others, however, such as initiating an LGBTQIA+ support group in the school, require more divergent thinking. Techniques such as group brainstorming or other approaches inviting the generation of new ideas can help boost creativity (e.g., Hender et al., 2002). While creativity is in the foreground when it comes to generating ideas, relevant background knowledge (crystallized intelligence) is required in order to even be able to produce useful ideas. In terms of the originality component of creativity, President Trump’s idea of using disinfectant to fight the COVID virus could certainly score high; however, due to his lack of basic medical knowledge, this idea was not only not useful but actually harmful to some people who tried it out. Fluid intelligence is clearly also needed for generating ideas that can actually work, especially when different aspects of a problem are related in complex ways. Wisdom may be less relevant at the stage of generating ideas, but it plays an important role in evaluating them. Evaluating possible approaches requires crystallized and fluid intelligence as well as wisdom. Crystallized intelligence again provides background knowledge that is important for evaluating the possible usefulness of any approach taken in a complex problem situation. Fluid intelligence

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is important for thinking through possible effects and unwanted side effects. Wisdom is needed especially when it comes to comparing the pros and cons of different approaches, that is, to decide which tradeoffs need to be made in order to achieve the best possible outcome for the largest number of people. This often also involves deciding how the best outcome can even be defined—is optimizing class climate better than maximizing the gay boy’s well-being? Should his family situation also be considered, or should the focus be on the school-related issues? With respect to the COVID-19 pandemic, this was certainly one of the major challenges that governments were confronting. How much loss of education, especially for children from disadvantaged backgrounds, is acceptable in order to reduce the spread of the virus? How did this dynamic change as variants of the virus became less deadly? To what extent can and should people be trusted to make reasonable decisions on their own, in a situation where populist politicians exploit people’s cravings for simple answers to complex problems (Glück, 2019b)? Finally, taking action requires much more than just the four qualities we are discussing here, but it certainly also includes them. Wisdom, in particular, is probably needed to approach the different parties involved in a situation, such as the boy’s parents in Anna’s problem. Once one or more approaches have been taken, it is important to evaluate their progress and, if necessary, to step back to an earlier stage to change course. Generally, the process will hardly be linear with respect to a complex problem. Taking one approach may bring up a whole new problem and send everyone back to Step 1 or any step in between. During the different stages of the pandemic, large-scale problems shifted from (1) providing a sufficient amount of hospital beds and ventilators to (2) providing access to testing for everyone who wanted to be tested, (3) providing access to vaccines for everybody who wanted to get vaccinated, (4) getting people to get vaccinated who did not want to get vaccinated, (5) dealing with the mental-health outcomes of the experience, especially in young people, ... and so on. The four qualities, and wisdom in particular, are also important for deciding when and how to adjust an approach or give up on it completely. As mentioned earlier, Sternberg et al. (2021) give a more comprehensive account of the steps that complex real-life problems involve and of

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how intelligence, creativity, and wisdom are required during the process. If wisdom, intelligence, and creativity are all necessary for dealing with difficult real-life problems, does it mean that they are all closely related, and essentially parts of one overarching human problem-solving capacity?

 wo Arguments Why Wisdom, Intelligence, T and Creativity Are Not Quite the Same Thing Does the fact that complex problems require all four capacities imply that the four capacities are all the same or are inseparable? Sternberg et  al. (2021) argued that the four capacities tend to draw on the same basic cognitive processes and are certainly hard to differentiate when a person is working on a complex problem: Is, for example, identifying a new aspect of a complex problem a use of creativity, fluid intelligence, crystallized intelligence, or wisdom? However, when we measure them using typical psychological measures, they are quite distinguishable both within and between individuals. While I do think that psychology tends to over-­ differentiate and put things into neat separate boxes that actually do not occur separately in the wild, a lot of evidence suggests that wisdom, crystallized intelligence, fluid intelligence, and creativity are separable capacities. The main two arguments that I see for this are that (1) the four capacities have different lifespan developmental trajectories, and (2) people who are high in one of the capacities tend not to be equally high in the others.

 he Different Developmental Dynamics T of the Four Capacities Figure 7.1 displays the age relationships of the four qualities in a lifespan sample. The data come from a study by Ursula Staudinger and Paul Baltes (Staudinger & Baltes, 1996; see also Staudinger et al., 1997), which is the only study, to our knowledge, that assessed all four variables together in a relatively comprehensive way. Another advantage of this study is that its sample was diverse in age (M = 41.5 years, SD = 17.0) and education

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Fig. 7.1  Relationships of crystallized intelligence, fluid intelligence, creativity, and wisdom with age (data from Staudinger & Baltes, 1996)

(43% had less than the 12 or 13  years of schooling required for the German “Abitur”, 34% had completed the Abitur, and 12% had a college or university degree; for details see Staudinger & Baltes, 1996; Staudinger et al., 1997). The sample included 113 men (40.6%) and 161 women. Wisdom was measured using three problems from the Berlin Wisdom Paradigm (BWP) (Baltes & Staudinger, 2000; Staudinger et al., 1994). As usual in research with the BWP, participants’ verbal responses were transcribed and rated for five wisdom criteria (factual knowledge, procedural knowledge, lifespan contextualism, value relativism, and recognition and management of uncertainty) on seven-point scales. As described in detail by Staudinger and Baltes (1996), two of the three wisdom problems were administered under various experimental conditions involving

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real or imaginary dyadic interactions. For the purpose of the current paper, I factor-analyzed all three wisdom problems and found that they formed a strong common factor that accounted for 74.8% of the variance, with factor loadings of the three problem scores ranging from 0.81 to 0.89. This factor score was used as the measure of wisdom here. Crystallized intelligence was measured using the vocabulary subtest of the HAWIE (Wechsler, 1982), the German version of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS). Participants were asked to give the definitions of a total of 16 words; correctness of responses was coded by two independent raters. Fluid intelligence was measured using an 18-item short version of the Advanced Progressive Matrices (APM; Raven, 1971). Creativity was measured using three different tasks: Impossible Figures (Guilford, 1967), Word Ends (Torrance, 1974), and Plot Titles (Torrance, 1974). Following Torrance’s model of creativity, responses to each task were rated for fluency, flexibility, and originality. I computed the factor score across the nine scores as an indicator of creativity for these analyses. As Fig. 7.1 shows, the relationships of the four capacities with age are quite different. Fluid intelligence has a strong negative correlation with age, r = 0.70, p