Is there a g factor in academic creative performance? : Evidence from bibliographical indices of Swedish academics

Abstract:

People's cognitive abilities are characterized by a general factor of intelligence, initially intuited by Charles Spearman's (1904) observation that school children tend to have overall high or overall low marks in many school subjects, rather than low in some and high in some. In the realm of real-world creative performance, it is similarly argued that people who produce more also produce with higher quality, in other words a positive quantity-quality manifold rather than a quantity-quality tradeoff. Likewise, such people are also assumed to do all this in a shorter period of time. The influential creativity scholar Dean Simonton calls these principles "more bang for the buck" and "faster, better". Here, I empirically test both these hypotheses for a group of highly creative professionals, matched in their formal level of achievement. The results support both the “faster better” and “more bang for the buck” hypotheses in academia. However, the strength of the correlations fluctuates between disciplines, which raises more questions of where the line is to be drawn between individual achievement and effects coming from differences in academic cultures.