In Franklin’s account, creativity, the concept, popped up after the Second World War in two contexts. One was the field of psychology. Since the nineteenth century, when experimental psychology (meaning studies done with research subjects and typically in laboratory settings, rather than from an armchair) had its start, psychologists have been much given to measuring mental attributes.
For example, intelligence. Can we assign amounts or degrees of intelligence to individuals in the same way that we assign them heights and weights? One way of doing this, some people thought, was by measuring skull sizes, cranial capacity. There were also scientists who speculated about the role of genetics and heredity. By the early nineteen-hundreds, though, the preferred method was testing.
The standard I.Q. test, the Stanford-Binet, dates from 1916. Its aim was to measure “general intelligence,” what psychologists called the g factor, on the presumption that a person’s g was independent of circumstances, like class or level of education or pretty much any other nonmental thing. Your g factor, the theory goes, was something you were born with.
The SAT, which was introduced in 1926 but was not widely used in college admissions until after the Second World War, is essentially an I.Q. test. It’s supposed to pick out the smartest high-school students, regardless of their backgrounds, and thus serve as an engine of meritocracy. Whoever you are, the higher you score the farther up the ladder you get to move. Franklin says that, around 1950, psychologists realized that no one had done the same thing for creativity. There was no creativity I.Q. or SAT, no science of creativity or means of measuring it. So they set out to, well, create one.
They ran into difficulties almost immediately, and Franklin thinks that those difficulties have never gone away, that they are, in a sense, intrinsic to the concept of creativity itself. First of all, how do you peel away “creativity” from other markers of distinction, such as genius or imagination or originality or, for that matter, persistence? Are those simply aspects of a single creative faculty? Or can one score high on an originality or a persistence measure but low on creativity?
Then, do you study creativity by analyzing people commonly acknowledged to be creative—the canonical artist or composer or physicist—and figure out what they all have in common? Or could someone who has never actually created anything be creative, in the way that innately intelligent people can end up in unskilled jobs—the “born to blush unseen” syndrome? If that were the case, you would need an I.Q. test for creativity—call it a C.Q. test—to find such latent aptitudes.