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Psychology Psychologists and the CreativityMovement: The Lives of Method Inside and

Outside the Cold ar

Michael ycroft

The neglect of this subject by psychologists is appalling. ' So saidpsychologist Joy Paul Guilford in his 1950 presidential address tothe Ame rican Psychological Association APA). The subject was creativity, and the neglect did not last for long. Before the decade wasout, another onetime APA President, Henry Murray, called thepost-Guilford burst of research into creativity an evolution of the humanspirit. Participants of a 1959 conference on creativity suggested thatthe Creativity Quotien t had dislodged the Intelligence Quotientas the parameter of choice for psychologists in the field of mentaltesting. 3 And a 1975 collection on creativity research looked back

to Guilford's 1950 address as markin g a parad igm shift in psychology.4 Pronouncements such as these hint at the importance of theself-styled creativity movement whos structure, motivations, andmethods are the subject of this chapter.

Aside from its undoubted popularity inside and outside psychology, the creativity movement is historically significant for the light itcasts on the natnre and origins of the high-profile theme of creativityin Cold War social science. As argued in this chapter, the movementwas only partly a Cold War movement: many of the methods andtechniques that underlay the work of creativity researchers had beenused during or prior to World War II in contexts where creativity wasnot a major consideration. Creativity researchers and their sponsors

were strongly motivated by cultural and political concerns distinctive


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of the Cold War. Yet those concerns did not drive the conclusions ofcreativity research in any st raightforw ard way.

More broadly, creativity research was one way in which Cold Warsocial scientists asked and answered questions about hum n nature.Like the human engineers who standar dized machine maintenanceduring the Cold War as Edward Jones-Imhotep describes in this volume), the psychologists of creativity tried to regulate the irregular. 5

But, unlike the treatment of intuitive technicians by hum n engineers,creativity researchers sought to harness rather than suppress the creative powers of the mind; for them, teaching machines, for example,were a way of amplifying the intuitive aspects of human behav10ur,rather than replacing them with more systematic and rule-boundkinds of behaviour 6 Like the decision theorists studied by HunterHeyck and the biologists and child psychologists in Marga Vicedo'sstudy, post-war creativity researchers were skeptical about t ~powerof individual human intelligence to solve the problems of nat10n andpsyche. But rather than looking for alternatives to individual intel

ligence in a noncognitive domain of individual psychology as did thescientists of motherhood in their work on emotions), or focusmg onentities other than individuals as did decision theorists in their workon system-level rationality), the scientists considered i n this chapteremphasised a new trait in the dom ain of cognition: creativity?

Few historians have focused on the creativity movement, but thosewho have studied it obliquely have supplied good reasons to do sodirectly. At the most general level, a number of historians of sciencehave shown the importance of psychology in post-war America.Boosted by their prolific contributions to World War II, encouragedby continued state and private funding, and supported by a culturaland intellectual climate that favoured psychological over class- oreconomics-based accounts of human phenomena, Cold War psychologists worked closely with the U.S. government and appealed stronglyto the U.S. citizenry. By the early 1960s, almost all of the Deparnnentof Defense's 15 million dollar social science budget was earmarkedfor psychological research, 8 and more or dinary Americans were seek-ing psychotherapy than ever before. 9 .

Of more dire ct relevance to this paper was the role that social psychologists played in various forms of Cold War resistance to the tripleills of social conformity, intellectual fragmentat10n, and authon-tarian rule. In a rich and convincing paper Jamie Cohen-Cole hasshown how creativity became a catchword for social psychologists

and their readers, expressing as it did the value of social tolerance and

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intelle ctual independ ence over the rigidity, ethnocentrism, ndirrationality of the authoritarian personality. 1o

. While Cold War psychology in general, and the theme of creativitym particular, have been amply illuminated by historians, the creativitymovement has largely been hidden from view. Part I of this chapter posi

tions the movement in relation to other strandsof

Cold War psychology, and summarises the people, events, and institutions that definedthe movement. Part II distinguishes two strands of the movement, thehumanist and instrumentalist. Creativity researchers in these differentstrands, like their respective sponsors, had different reasons for investingin creativity research. Yet the motivations of both strands were linkedto deep Cold War concerns about the health of self, state and society.Nevertheless, as argued in Part III, some key methods and techniquesof the movement ha d lives outside those concerns: factor analysis andlive-in assessment had their origins outside the Cold War, in contextswhere those methods had not led to the study of, or enthusiasm for,huma n creativity; and even within the Cold War context, those methods

sometimes overrode or ignored the cultural pressures of that context.

Part : The Growth readth nd oundariesof the Creativity Movement

By the end of the 1950s, the creativity movement was home to a thriving bibliographic industry that helped to measure the growth of thefieldP In the 23 years prior to 1950, Guilford claimed, fewer than 0.2percent of the articles indexed in Psychological Abstracts had beendirectly relevant to creativity.I 2 By contrast, the number of creativityrelated topics in the Psychological Abstracts doubled between 1950and 1956_13 And according to the Journal o Creative Behaviour thetotal volume of research literature on creativity was roughly equal inthe periods 1850 to 1950, 1950 to 1960, and January 1965 to June1966.I 4At the heart of the movement was a series of seven conferenceshosted by the University of Utah between 1955 and 1971. The firstthree conferences were dedicated to the identification of scientifictalent ; later, the focus of the participants (and the sponsors) broadened to include the nature of the creative process, the personality andbackground of creative people, environments conducive to creativity, and creativity in specific fields such as visual art, architecture,and public relations. In the 1950s and 1960s a large number of con

ferences, especially those on the psychology of education, took up


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creativity as a theme or subtheme. 15 However, the Utah Conferenceswere the longest-running and most widely recognised of these. As areviewer noted, participants in the first three conferences amountedto a who's who of creativity research. 16

Three Utah conference regulars were arguably the core researchers

in the movement. Guilford himself led the Aptitudes Research Projectat the University of Southern California. Frank B arron was a key member of the Inst itute of Personality Assessment and Research ( PAR) atthe University of Califor nia at Berkeley. And Calvin W. Taylor led histeam at the University of Utah on a variety of creativity projects. Allthree were regularly cited in contemporary summaries of the movementP Other key researchers were Anne Roe, who conducted earlybiographical studies of scientists and artists and "communicated herresults widely and effectively"; 18 E. Paul Torrance, whose work oncreativity in education was widely cited from the late 1950s onwards;and Sidney Parnes, who led teaching and research on creative proble msolving at the University of Buffalo. The movement also enjoyed thesupport and involvement of L L Thurstone and Carl Rogers, bothformer APA presidents and leaders in their respective fields of psychometry and humanistic psychology.'9 Given the institutional andintellectual weight behind creativity research in the 1950s and 1960s,it is no surprise that by 1962 Calvin W. Taylor could without qualification refer to the creativity movement in his preface to a collection

of papers on the topic. 20Despite its size, the creativity movement was of course not the only

self-consciously creative enterprise in Cold War psychology, and 1tshould be distinguished from two other such enterprises: cognitivepsychology and creative liberalism. On the standard narrative, therise of computers and psycholinguistics after World War II pushedaside the behaviourist approach to psychology and replaced it withthe study of human thought processes led by the infant discipline ofcognitive psychology. 2 Whereas behaviorists like B. F. Skinner soughtlaws to describe how the physical movements outside an organismeffected the physical movements of the organism, cognitive psychologists such as Jerome Bruner, Allen Newell and Herbert Simon soughtmodels to describe how the human mind solved problems such aschess and the acquisition of language. Jamie Cohen-Cole has shownthat cognitive psychologists were engaged in creativity researchin two related senses. They studied creativity in the human mind,trying to understand mental actions that occurred independently of

the mind's observable environment. And they studied human minds

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creatively, building models that aimed to get behind the observablebehaviour of thinking humans.

Although the creativity movement was opposed to the extremesof behaviourism, it was not part of cognitive psychology as usuallyconstrued. 22 The models that Guilford, Taylor, Barron , and their colleagues created for the mind were far removed from the computermsplred models of cognitive psychologists. Rather, they were basede1ther on psychoanalytic theories of the mind, or on reports by creativepeople about the states of feeling or attitudes (such as "mud dled "

s c a ~ n i n g ,enriched, or pressured ) that they experien ced whiiecreatmg; or they were, like Guilford's "Structure of the Intellect"models of how mental traits might be distinguished and classified.;,The1r concep non of creativity was also different from that of cognitlve psycholog Sls. As Hunter Heyck argues in this volume, duringth1s era the decisiOn parad1gm loomed large in the human sciencesIncluding cognitive science, and in this paradigm cognitive p r o c e s s e ~were construed as a series of choices between sets of known alterna

tives.24

B _contrast, the most enduring conception of creativity fromthe creat v t_y movement, and a popular conception at the time, presented creat1ve thought processes as precisely those processes that did

ot ~ v o l v e_ c ~ o o s i n gone option from a set of preexisting options. Toa s:nct dec1s1on theorist, this definition of creativity, articulated byGmlford under the title of "convergent thinking," wo uld probably faileven to qualify as a cognitive process.. The creativity movement and creative liberalism are less easily dis

tmgmshed than the creativity movement and cognitive psychology:between the former pair there are clear overlaps of concepts and personnel. By "creative liberalism" I mean attempts by social psychologlS s and some psychologists-beginning in the 1930s, peaking in the1950 book The Authoritarian Personality and continuing throughthe 1950s to demonstrate links betwee n personality types and politIcal persuasiOns. A frequent outcome of these studies was the claimthat creativity and related traits (such as "independence of mind" and"tolerance for ambiguity") were linked to democracy while traits like''ngidity and intolerance of ambiguity were l i n k ~ dto authoritar-. 1 2 s T h1an ru e. ere s no doubt that members of the creativity move-ment, especially those in the huma nist stra nd discussed below heldthat, in Frank Barron's word s, to be creative in one's everyday c t i v -

ity is a p ~ s i t i v egood. 26 Tolerance of ambiguity, a favourite amongcreative hberals, was frequently included in the summaries of creative

traits compiled by participa nts of the Utah Conferences.27

And Barron

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was closely involved with proponents of creative liberalism, includingauthors of The Authoritarian Personality, at Berkeley's IPAR. 28

Nevertheless, the creativity movement was primarily a movementin psychology rather than social psychology, and its interests did notextend to linking intellectual or personality traits to political regimes.

Insofar as they studied the environmental factors conducive to creativ-ity, Barron, Guilford, Taylor, and their colleagues studied classroomsand laboratories rather than political environments, and in doing sothey did not draw extensively on creative liberalism: indeed, as lateas 963 their collective view on environmental conditio ns for creativ-ity was that we are aware of no area in the social sciences whereresearch is simultaneously so vitally needed and so sadly neglected." 29

It is not surprising , then, that references to the terms authoritarianand authoritarian personali ty are rare in the publi shed papers ofthe Utah conferences. 30 Thus, although there were conceptual andinstitutional overlaps between the creativity movement and creativeliberalism, their scientific aims were sufficiently different that theycan be trea ted separately.r Creativity research did not comprise a methodological move-

11 .IL ment in the style of Skinnerian behaviorism, cognitive psychology,J ~ a n dhumanist psychology. Indeed, the methods used by creativity

' '-......:.;researchers, from the hardheaded statistical approach of Gmlford to// the humanism of Barron, are notable more for their disparateness

~ than their unity. The movement was held together not by a common. method but by a shared topic (creativity), collaborattve projects (such

'71 ': as the Utah Conferences), and a shared feeling among its members' that they were participating in a cohesive enterpnse devoted to ere

~ ~ativity research. Perhaps most im portantly, it :as united by a shared~ 'conviction that creativity research-and creat Vlty ttself-could make

l; : 1 important contributions beyond professional psychology to a worldI '? fraught with Cold War-related problems.

.I,6 ~ ~ Part II Humanists and Instrumentalists Cold War; ~ Solutions to Cold War Problems\1 Accounts of the movement in the 1950s and 1960s gave consider

able professional and symbolic weight to Guilford's 1950 address.Nevertheless, the address itself cannot explain the deep and longlasting interest in the topic that Guilford so publicly promoted. As

members of the movement made plain, it was driven partly by soctal

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and technological concerns distinctive of the Cold War setting. Inprefaces, introductions, informal discussions, and presentations oftheir research, creativity researchers proclaimed creativity as oneimportant solution to the problems of the age. However, membersof the movement took two broadly different stances towards thoseproblems and their solution. I call the two strands of the movement

instrumentalist and humanist, and take Barron and Guilford asrepresentatives of each strand. Whereas Barron treated creativity asan end in itself and a solution to social and psychological problems ,Gmlford treated 1t as a means to an end and a solution to problems ineducation and industry. The sponsors of creativity research that mostclearly reflected these contrasting aims were the Carnegie Co rporat ionand the Nat ional Science Foundation (NSF).'2

As mention ed earlier, Barron conducted most of his research in the1950s and 1960s at the PAR at Berkeley. The Carnegie Corporationcovered the considerable expense of bringing groups of highly "creative" professionals to the Berkeley assessment centre for studies by

Barron, Donald MacKinnon, and their team; 33 and John Gardner,Carnegie president from 1955 to 1965, gave Barron personal encouragement to study creativity. 34 Gardner's interests in the topic areamply displayed in his 1963 book Self Renewal: The Individual ndthe Innovative Society. The overall aim of the book was to equipAmericans for the "great tasks of renewal" they faced in the areasof government, education, race relations, urban redevelopment,and international affairs. 35 To Gardner, the cultivation of creativityamong individuals, enabling them to adapt to rapid change and generate insightful solutions to prac tical problems, was the first and largeststep towards success in those tasks. Yet Gardner placed such valueon individual creativity that in Self Renewal the goals of achievingeconomic, military, and social success became indistinguishable fromthe goal of achieving individual creativity: "Unless we cope with theways in which moder n society oppresses the individual, we sha ll losethe creative spark that renews bot h societies and men. To Gardner,the "creative spark" was an end in itself, whatever other ends it mighthave served. 36

Barron's psychological career shows the same ready integrationof national interests and personal mental health. Like the sociologistEdward Shils, Barron's wartime research gave him firsthand expenence of the stability of small-scale units during times of conflictand hardship. 37 Unlike Shils, Barron's small-scale unit was not the

small group but the single creative mind. His experience as a hospital


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psychologist during the war piqued his interest in both the humanand instrumental value of creativity and its related virtues: there[in a World War II field hospital in Europe] began my special interest in courage, resourcefulness, flexibility, strength in meeting crises, the ability to rally from setbacks-in brief, the manifestationsof personal vitality and spirit. 38 The titles of his major works in the1950s and 1960s Creativity and Psychological Health Creativityand Personal Freedom and Creative Person and Creative Process-attest to his fascination with the power of the creative imagination,the main instrument of freedom. 39 Looking outwards, Barron saw

a not very united United States, a country of enormous vitality thatis nevertheless deeply troubled by its own potential for violence. 40

Looking inwards, Barron saw a solution: creativity is energy beingput to work in a constructive fashion. 4 Gardner and Barron recognised urgent national concerns to which creativity research couldbe yoked. Yet they both insisted that the best way to address thoseconcerns was through a better recognition of the intrinsic value of

being creative.Guilford and the NSF, by contrast, rarely expressed strong viewsabout the value of creativity for individuals. The NSF entered thecreativity movement as the principal supporter of the Utah conferences, and its motives were clear from the outset: to improve theselection process for its program of scientific fellowships and therebystrengthen America's defences against both teacher shortfalls at homeand the Soviet threa t abroad. As an NSF representative told the gathered scientists at the first Conference in 1955, many observers areconvinced that the USSR is even now approaching comparabilitywith the United States in both quantity and quality of scientists andengineers. 4 The same concerns, sharpened by the Russian success

in launching two sputnik satellites in 1957, lay behind the contribution of the U.S. Office of Education to the sixth Utah Conference oninstructional media in classrooms. 43 The close involvement of NASAand the U.S. Air Force in the Utah series, in the form of funding aswell as reports on their in-house research, added to the instrumentalflavour of the Conferences; as did speakers from i ndustry leaders suchas the Dow Jones Chemical Company, General Electric, Boeing, andAerojet-General Corporation. 44

Guilford shared this instrumental approach to creativity research.His research projects were support ed by the Office of Naval Research(ONR) and the U.S. Air Force, and his reasons for taking up thestudy of creativity reflected the practical concerns of these backers. 45

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In ills 1950 address, under the heading The Social Importance ofCreativity, he made no mention of personal freedom, mental health,or the psychic dangers of conformity. Instead he noted complaintsfrom industry and government about the need for, and absence of,originality in the typical college graduate, as well as complaints fromeducationalists that existing teaching methods were doing nothing toease the concerns of government and industry. 46 Insofar as Guilford'sresearch into the topic was stimulated by Cold War political andsocial concerns, the link between those concerns and creative individuals was, for Guilford, instrumental rather than humanistic.

Part Ill: Factor Analysis and Live-in Assessment-The Complex Life of Cold War Methods

Like the sponsors they attracted, Ba rron and Guilford differed in theirmotivations for taking up creativity research. Yet both were alive to

the social and political problems of Cold War America, and their forays into creativity were driven partly by their desire to solve thoseproblems. How did these problems shape the science of creativity theyproduced? One possible answer is that creativity researchers deliberately developed investigative tools-psychological tests, methods, andtechniques-that were biased in favour of the researcher's culturallyconditioned preferences about how to solve the real-world problemsthat their research addressed. I argue in this section that this answercanno t be the whole story, since two key investigative tools for ColdWar creativity researchers-live-in assessment and factor analysis-had a history of prior use that did not result in strong conclusionsabont the value of creativity.

In mid-century American psychology, live-in assessment was aform of psychological assessment in which subjects and assessors livedtogether in a house-like setting for 1-3 days, during which time assessors observed the performanc e of subjects in simple menta l tests, teamexercises of varying degrees of life-likeness, and everyday personaland social behaviour such as a wisecrack overheard in the hall . . . aheated conversation at dinner . . . the way a clique forms in the livingroom . . . 47 Prior to the Cold War period, the method was used mostextensively in America by a group of psychiatrists and psychologistsduring World War II to select personnel for the U.S. Office of StrategicServices OSS), the forerunner to the CIA. The OSS psychological

staff explained their reasons for adopting the method, which they


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called multiform organismic assessment, in their post-war reportAssessment o Men 8 Multiform referred to the use of a largenumber of procedures based on different principles" to measure anygiven individual or any given trait in an individual. Organismicindicated that the key to personal effectiveness was an individual'spower to organise its various capacities to respond to a real-worldsituation. 49 The OSS staff contrasted the organismic approach tohuman assessment with the "elementalistic" approach. The formergave inaccurate estimat ions of total integrated processes: w?Jle thelatter gave accurate quantitative measur ements of partial, Isolatedprocesses. 50

Live-in assessment, as used during the war, did not obviouslyfavour the trait of creativity. One task of the OSS psychologists wasto measure the "intelligence" of their subjects, and they had considerable difficulty settling on a scheme of qualities to measure underthat heading. It is clear that their final analysis of "intelligence"included a solid core of qualities associated with the traditional

notion of intelligence;5

and that it also included war-specific qualities that seem to disfavour creativity (such as "ability to analyse andevaluate data, ability to write concise reports").'2 It is also clearthat according to the authors of Assessment o Men their methoddid ~ o tmeasure imagination, defined as the ability to anticipatenumerous possible contingencies and to conceive of a host of alternative forms of effective action. " 53 One of the authors of Assessmento Men (Donald MacKinnon) went on to found Berkeley's PAR in1949 by setting up a facility designed to reproduce the wartimemethod in a civilian setting, 54 and it was at this facility that Barronconducted most of his studies on creative people. Before Barron'sstudies, live-in assessment did not lead inevitably to the conclusionthat creativity was the key to personal effectiveness; hence the useof this method by Barron and other PAR scientists cannot be putdown to a self-serving choice of live-in assessment as a method likelyto support that conclusion.

To be sure, the continuity between live-in assessment and its wartime and civilian manifestations was imperfect. After all, post-warpsychologists were free to build tests of their own into the generalstructure of multiform, organismic assessment. For example, asCohen-Cole has noted, the Barron-Welsh Art Scale a psychologicalscale that captured a subject's "openness to complexity and richness"by measuring their preference for complex and asymmetric line draw

ings over simple and symmetric line drawings was a novel Cold War

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instrument that absorbed and concentrated the ambient cultural preference for Citizens who could tolerate diversity.

Nevertheless, for PAR members (unlike Barron) whose careers in.the discipline be gan well before the war, tests and theories from outside the Cold War context were equally serviceable to the study of creativity as n ew devices such a s the Barron-Welsh Art Scale. An PARstudy of creativity in architects is a case in point. 56 In this widely readand much c1ted study, parameters of human personality drawn fromprewar psychotherapy played as large a role as those identified andmeasured by post-war psychologists. In some cases the IPAR teamused prewar. theories e n c ~ s e din post-war assessment technology:the Myers-Bnggs Type Ind1cator Tests, designed to reveal a person's"openness to experience," were based largely on work by Carl Jung inthe early 1920sY In other cases the influence of non Cold War ideaswas more direct, as when Mac innon interpreted the results of testsof the architect's "femininity" through Jung's theories about sexualidentification.

PAR members not only used notions from outside the Cold Warcontext to support their conclusions about the nature and value of creativity. They also stood by those theories on some occasions whereby doing so, they reached conclusions that seemed at odds with t h ~Cold War milieu. This is most clearly illustrated by MacKinnon ina d1scuss1on about teaching methods during the 1964 Utah conference. y drawing on J ng's notion of creativity as a reconcilia tion of~ p p o s i t e s ,~ a c K ~ n n o nconcluded that a rigorous and rigid education system may m fact be favourable to a stude nt's creative development, if their powers of complex thought are stimulated by thecontrast between a ng1d mtellectuallife and a free social life. 58 Thisendorsement of "rigid education" is hardly characteristic of Cold Warcreative liberalism. To be sure, there is little evidence that MacKinnonpursued this line of thought in his published work; indeed, in thepopular study of architects mentioned above he does not hesitate toconclude that creative talent is best nurtured by tolerant hands-offteaching and parenting. Yet the evidence of the Utah Conferencesshows that creativity researchers considered such cnlturally favourable concluswns to be open to challenge; and in some cases the challenge came from the application of research tools drawn from out ofthe Cold War context.

Similar points hold for factor analysis, Guilford's investigativetool of cho Ce. The psychometrician L L Thurstone presented factor

analys1s as early as 1931 as a way of carving up the mental capacities


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of individuals into independent traits or "factors." 59 As Guilforddescribed the method in his 1936 textbook Psychometric Methodsfactor analysis was a principled way of reducing the vast array oflayperson's terms for mental traits to a small but comprehensive setof fundamental traits. 60 Having identified a set of factors and associated tests, prewar factor analysts calibrated their tests by performingthem on people thought to possess the factors in question. Post-warfactor analysts, including Guilford, took the same steps. Guilford'sCold War descriptions of factor analysis in his 1950 address, 1954textbook, and 1967 magnum opus on human intelligence, are identical in substance to those in his prewar work. 61

Furthermore, in its pre Cold War applications, factor analysisshowed no tendency to favour creative traits. As Guilford pointedout in his 1950 address, creativity had not been systematically studied since Alfred Binet, by factor analysis or any other means. 62 It isworth adding that there were broader continuities between Guilford'sCold War studies of creativity and prewar psychometrics. To his

contemporaries, historians, present-day psychologists, and Guilfordhimself, the content, methods and prominence of Guilford's rese archon the structure of intelligence made him a natural successor toCharles Spearman, Edward L. Thorndike, and L. L Thurstone, thepre-eminent psychometricians of the first half of the century. Forthe purposes of this chapter, however, the m p o ~ t a n tcontmmty Smethodological: given the past use of factor analysis m creatlV ty-freecontexts, Guilford's application of the method to creativity seems tobe a case of a Cold War scientist broadening his subject matter inresponse to the widely advertised failure of educators to produce theoriginal thinkers demanded by government and industry. It does notseem to be a case of Guilford choosing a method (factor analysis) soas to guarantee his preferred conclusion (that creativity is a highlydesirable psychological trait).

Like live-in assessment factor analysis was of course a genericmethod that could in principle house any number or kind of particularpsychological tests. Did the tests Guilford devised to assess individualcreativity, and the concepts he attached to them, share the kmd ofcultural presuppositions implicit in the Barron-Welsh Art Scale andthe efforts by creative liberalists to attach the term "intolerance ofambiguity" to a ny kind of mental "rigidity"? Not in any obvious ways.Guilford's tests of creativity were sometimes criticised for their foreignness to real-life intellectual activity; for the same reason, it is dif

ficult to read Cold War cultural narratives mto them. ItS

difficult,

Psychology. Psychologists and Creativity 209

for example, to find Cold War-specific political assmnptions behind atest in which subjects are asked to name as many uses as possible for ab r H ~ kor to hst as many words as possible starting with e. MoreoverGmlford appears to have recognised some negative intellectual traitsclosely linked to creativity. To Guilford, "intolerance of ambiguity"called to mmd "decisiveness" and "preference for goal-directed thinking"; while its opposite, much praised in the work of creative liberalists, called to mind "fanciful thinking," "dilettantism (superficial,shifty thmkmg)," and "whimsical thinking (thinking with surprising twists and turns)." 64 At least in Guilford's hands, factor analysisand the particular tests he linked to it did not obviously prejudice theresearcher n favour of creative traits. As for live-in assessment sofor factor analysis: Cold War concerns may have directly m o t i v ~ t e dcreatlV ty researchers to apply these methods to creative traits b ut theconclusions those researchers reached were n ot foreordained 'by theirchosen methods.

onclusion

Creativity was a far-reaching theme in Cold War social science.Research into human creativity during this time can be roughlydlVlded mt o cogmt1ve psychology, creative liberalism and the creativ- Ity movement in psychology. Th e la tter can itself be divided accordingto the aims of Its scientists and their sponsors: the humanistic aimof investigating the power of creativity to enrich enliven and liberate individuals; and the instrumental aim of i m ~ r o v i n g~ d u c a t i o nand consolidating America's stock of gifted scientists so as to betterrespond to practical needs at home and abroad.

This distinction between two different motivations for doingcreativity research maps on to a distinction between two differentstyles of inquiry into creativity. Factor analysts, led by Guilford,were elementahst1c and proud of it, analysing human mental capacIty mto Its factors and formulating simple, objective measuresof those factors. Organismists like Barron and his colleagues atBerkeley's PAR rejected this attempt to partition the mind, insteadUSing a method live in assessment or multiform organismicassessment that gave free play to the subject's unified capacitiesand to the assessor's human capacity to observe them as people. Inpractice these two strands of creativity research were frequentlyentangled. Barron the humanist was as important a member of the

Utah Conferences as Guilford, though not important enough to


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dislodge the instrum ental aims of those conferences. And like otherpsychologists of his generation who mixed positivist science andpsychotherapy, Barron was himself divided over the correct way tostudy creativity. 65 As this chapter aims to show, however, the different aims, methods and funding sources in the movement can be

usefully analysed into two.While their work incorporated common concerns of the Cold Warera, both the humanists and instrumentalists of the movement usedmethods and techniques that flourished prior to the Cold War. InGuilford's work on creativity, the aims and methods of prewar psychometrics continued uninterrupted, albeit applied to a broad er rangeof mental capacities than before. Live-in assessment was younger thanfactor analysis when MacKinnon and his PAR team applied it tothe study of creativity. Yet, like factor analysis, it had been appliedintensely outside the Cold War in contexts where it did not yield strongconclusions about the im portanc e of creativity to the health of societyand its selves. Within each of these two broad methods lay a numberof specific tests, theories, and techniques that Cold War researchersdeveloped specifically to investigate creativity. Some of these smallscale methods, like the Barron-Welsh Art Scale, were clearly products of their time and place. Others however, such as those basedon Jung's theories, were drawn from outside the Cold War context;and some, like Guilford's analysis of "tolerance of ambiguity" andMacKinnon's application of the "reconciliation of opposites" viewof creativity, appeared to run against the cultural currents that carried those researchers to the study of creativity in the first place. Themethods of creativity research entered Cold War life and were shapedby it, but they also had lives of their own.

Notes1. Joy Paul Guilford, "Creativity,"' American Psychologist 5 (1950): 444-454,

on445.2. Henry Murray, "Vicissitudes of creativity," in Creativity and its Cultivation:

Addresses Presented at the Interdisciplinary Symposia on Creativity, ed.Harold H. Anderson (Harper: New York, 1959}, 40-67, on 43.

3. Calvin W Taylor ed., Proceedings of the Third 1959) University of UtahResearch Conference on the Identification of Scientific Talent (Wiley: NewYork, 1959), 282-286.

4. Irving A Taylor andJ. W Getzels eds., Perspectives in Creativ ity (Chicago:Aldine Pub. Co., 1975), 1.

5. Edward Jones-Imhotep, Maintaining humans," this volume.

Psychology, Psychologists, and Creativity 211

6. On the creativity movement and teaching machines see especially Sidney J.Parnes, Programming Creative Behavior: Final Report, Office o f Education,U.S. Department o f Health, Education, and Welfare, Title VII, Project No.5-0716 (State University o f New York at Buffalo, 1966).

7 On decision theorists see Hunter Heyck, "Producing reason," and on biologists and child psychologists studying emotions, see Marga Vicedo, ColdWar emotions." Chapters 6 and 13, respectively, in this volume.

8. Henry W Reiken, National resources for th e social sciences," in SymposiumProceedings: The U.S. Army s Limited-War Mission and Social ScienceResearch: 26-28 March 1962, ed. William A. Lybrand (Washington, D.C.:Special Operations Research Office, 1962), cited in Ellen Herman, TheRomance of American Psychology: Political Culture in the Age of Experts,1940-1970 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 128-129.

9 See Herman, The Romance of American Psychology, esp. chaps. 5 and 10.10. Jamie Cohen-Cole, The creative American: Cold War salons, social sci

ence, and the cure for modern society," Isis 100 (2009): 219-262.11. See Sidney Parnes ed., Handbook on Creativity (New York: Charles

Scribner's Sons, 1962), 205, for a summary of the bibliographic projectsunderway by 1960.

12. Guilford, "Creativity," 445.13. Barron, Creative Person and Creative Process (Oxford: Holt, Rinehart, &

Winston, 1969), 3.14. "Introduction," Journal of Creative Behavior 1 (1967): 5-10, on 6.15. See E. Paul Torrance, "Creativit y and education," Creativity: Progress and

Potential, ed. Calvin W Taylor (McGraw-Hill: New York, 1964), 57-60, fora summary of creativity meetings relating to education.

16. ]. K. Feibleman, "Review of 'Scientific Creativity: Its Recognition andDevelopment,' eds. Calvin W Taylor and Frank Barron," Journal o f HigherEducation, 34 (1963): 413-414, on 413.

17 Summaries from wi thin the movement include Taylor and Williams, Historyand Acknowledgments," in Instructional Media and Creativity, in eds.Calvin W Taylor and Frank E. Williams (Wiley: New York, 1966), xi-xvii i;and Taylor and Barron, "Preface," in Scientific Creativity: Its Recognition

and Development, eds. Taylor and Barron (Wiley: New York, 1963), xiixix. Summaries from outside the movement include Murray, "Vicissitudesof creativity,"' 96; and John Gardner, Self-Renewal: The Individual and theInnovative Society (New York: Harper and Row, 1964), 132.

18. Taylor and Barron eds., Scientific Creativity: Its Recognition andDevelopment, xiv.

19. On the involvement of Thurstone and Rogers in the movement see Taylored., Scientific Creativity: Its Recognition and Development, ix, and Taylorand Williams eds., Instructional Media and Creativity, xiv-xv.

20. Calvin W Taylor, "'Preface," in Taylor, Widening Horizons in Creativity(New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1964), ix-xvi, on ix.

21. Some historian s have questioned whether the so-called cognitive revolutionwas as rapid or unprecedented as others have made it out to be. Examples

are T. H. Leahey, in The mythical revolutions of American psychology,"

iI

II

iIII .

II I

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American Psychologist, 47 (1992), 308-318; and G. Mandler, in Originsof the Cognitive Revolution, Journal of the History of the BehavioralSciences, 38 (2002): 339- 353. However, these authors do not doubt that the1950s and 1960s saw a growing interest among psychologists in the study ofthought processes in their own right.

22. Examples of anti-behaviorist sentiments within the creativity movement ncludeGuilford, Basic problems in teaching for creativity, in Instructional Mediaand Creativity, Taylor and Williams eds., 71-103, on 71; Donald MacKinnon,

The nature and nurture of creative talent, American s y c h o l o g i s t ~17(1962): 186; and Salvador Maddi, The strenuousness of the creative life, inCreativity and its Cultivation, ed. Anderson, 173-190 , on 174.

23. For examples of these three approaches see respectively Frank Barron,The Needs for Order and Disorder as Motives in Creative Activity, in

Scientific Creativity: Its Recognition and Development Taylor and Barroneds., 153-160; Brewster Ghiselin, Roger Rompel, and Calvin W. Taylor,A Creative process list: Its development and validation, in Creativity:

Progress and Potential, Taylor ed., 19-33; and Guilford, 'The Stru ctureof Intellect, Psychological Bulletin 53 (1956), 267-293.

24. Heyck, Producing Reason, this volume.25. For a detailed discussion of this genre in psychology, and its links to post-war

U.S. liberal thoug ht, see Cohen-Cole, The creative American, 225-236.26. Barron, Creative Person and Creative Process, 7.27. Tolerance of ambiguity or tolerance of complexity appear as traits

of the creative person in Taylor ed., Proceedings of the First (1955) UtahConference on the Identification of Creative Scientific Talent (Wiley: NewYork, 1956), 230, 238; and Taylor and Barron eds., Scientific Creativity: ItsRecognition and Development, 386.

28. Frank Barron, Preface, in Barron, Creativity and Personal Freedom(Princeton, NJ.: Van Nostrand), vi.

29. A look ahead: Reflections of the conference particip ants and the editors, inScientific Creativity: Its Recognition and Development, Taylor and Barroneds., 372-389, on 373.

30. The indices for the published proceedings of the Utah conferences one to six

cite a total of two occurrences of the terms authoritarian or authoritarian personality in the text of the papers they contain.31. Calvin W. Taylor, ed., Creativity: Progress and Potential, xiv; and Barron,

Creative Person and Creative Process, 3.32. These were of course not the only important sponsors of the creativity move

ment; as shown in this section, military and industrial patrons also contributed to the Utah conferences and to Guilford's Aptitudes Research Project.

33. MacKinno n, This week's citation classic, Current Contents 52 (1981):181; Barron, Creative Person and Creative Process, vii-viii.

34. Barron, Creative Person and Creative Process, viii.35. Gardner, Self-Renewal, xvi.36. Ibid., vix.37. OnShils seeJeffersonPooley, Edward Shilsand the 'Theory of Mass Society':

Roots of a Cold War pejorative, manuscript , presented at conference on The

Psychology Psychologists and Creativity 213

Construc tion of Social Science in Cold War America, University of Toronto,May 21-22, 2010, Toronto, Canada.

38. Barron, Creativity and Personal Health, vi.39. I bid., 306.40. Ibid., 7.41. Barron, Creative Person and Creative Process, 8.42. Bowen C. Dees, NSF interests in the problem of identifying creative scien

tific talent, in Proceedings of he First (1955) Utah Conference, Taylor ed.,5-13, on 10.

43. Support for the 1966 Utah Conference from the Office of Education carneunder the newly drafted National Defense Education Act of 1958 (Taylorand Williams eds., Instructional Media and Creativity, inside fron t cover).The Act was passed in response to widespread anxiety about public schooling in the U.S., stirred up partly by the sputnik crisis.

44. For industry involvement in creativity research, see especially Lois-EllinDalla, Observations of a committee From industry on the CreativityConference, in Widening Horizons in Creativity, Taylor ed., 424-436.

45. Maury H. Chorness, An Interim Repo rt on Creativity Research, inProceedings o f the First (1955) Utah Conference, Taylor ed., 132-155, on132.

46. Guilford, Creativity, 446.47. The OSS Assessment Staff, Assessm ent of Men: Selection of Personnel for the

Office of Strategic Services (New York: Rinehar t and Company, 1948), 33.48. Ibid., 28.49. Ibid., 38.50. Ibid., 41.51. Ib id., 272.52. Ibid., 271.53. Ibid., 459.54. MacKinnon , This week's citation classic,'' 181.55. Cohen-Cole, The creative American, 241-242.56. The study was published in MacKinnon, The nature and nurture of creative

talent. The article appeared in Current Contents in 1981 as the week's fea

ture paper (MacKinnon, This week's citation classic ). Current Contentsreported that the paper had been cited 195 times between 1962 and 1981.

57. Ibid., 196.58. The discussion, and MacKinnon's contribution to it, appears in Taylor,

Instructional Media and Creativity, 8-9.59. Thursto ne, L. L., Multi factor analysis, Psychological Review 38 (1931):

406-427.

60. Guilford, Joy Paul, Psychometric Methods, 1st ed. (New York, McGrawHill, 1936).

61. Guilford, Creativity, 449-451; Psychometric Methods, 2nd edn., 470-471,522-529; and The Nature o f Human Intelligence, 40-56.

62. Guilford, Creativity, 445-447.63. For a contemporary view of Guilford's role in the psychometric tradition,

see David Krech and Richard S. Crutchfield, Elements o f Psychology


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Cold a r Social Science

Knowledge Production Liberal Democracyand Human Nature

dited y

Mark So oveyand Hamilton Cravens

p lgr vemacmillan


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COLD WAR SOCIAL SCIENCE

Copyright Mark Solovey and Hamilton Cravens, 2012.U rights reserved.

First published in 2012 byPALGRAVE MACMILLANin the United States -a division of St. Martin's Press LLC,

175 Fifth Avenue ew York NY 10010.Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world,this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited,registered in England compan y number 785998 of HoundmiUsBasingstoke Hampshire RG21 6XS

Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companiesand has companies and representatives throughout the world.

Palgrave and Macmillan are registered trademarks in the United States,the United Kingdom, Europeand other countries.

ISBN: 978-0-230-34050-3

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from theLibrary of Congress.

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.This book is printed on paper suitable for recyclingand made from fullymanaged and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping andmanufacturingprocesses are expected to conformto th e environmental regulations of thecountry of origin.Design by Newgen Imaging Systems P) Ltd., Chennai, India.

First edition: january 2012

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1J

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Contents

ist of Figures

Foreword: Positioning Social Science in Cold War AmericaTheodore M. Porter

Acknowledgments

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

Cold War Social Science: Specter, Real ity, or Useful Concept?Mark Solovey

Part I Knowledge Production

The Rise and Fall of Wartime Social Science:Harvard's Refugee Interview Project, 1950-1954David C. Engerman

Futures Studies: A New Social Science Rooted inCold War Strategic ThinkingKaya Talon

It Was All Connected": Computers and Linguistics inEarly Cold War AmericaJanet Martin Nielsen

Epistemic Design: Theory and Data in Harvard'sDepartment of Social RelationsJoel Isaac

Part II Liberal Democracy

Producing ReasonHunter Heyck

Column Right, March Nationalism, Scientific Positivism,and the Conservative Turn of the American Social Sciencesin the Cold War Era

Hamilton Cravens

vii

ix

xvii

1

25

45

63

79

99

117

Documents

Bycroft Psychology, Psychologists