Creativity and Genius

Amid the pageantry of the recent turn-of-the-millennium celebrations were numerous newspaper articles and television reports ranking the most influential people of the century, if not the past 2000 years. Each of these lists, whether specific to science, leadership, or athletics, comprised individuals known for their remarkable impact on society, human behavior, and thought. The creative geniuses that top such lists exemplify the heights of human achievement, possibility, adaptability, and even destructive capacity—individuals as diverse as Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, Martin Luther King, Jr., Napoleon Bonaparte, Pablo Picasso, and Eleanor Roosevelt. It is apparent from our fascination with such lists that our society holds the creative individual and the creative genius as a measure of its own value and well-being. In this chapter we describe the nature of both creativity and the creative genius, their relationship to the positive psychology movement, as well as the strategies that have been developed to measure these phenomena at the individual and sociocultural levels.