Developing Creativity in Psychological Science and Beyond

Abstract

This article considers the problem of developing creativity, with a focus on psychological science. What makes a psychological or other scientist creative, and what are the attitudes as well as skills that one must develop to become creative? What can educators do to enhance their creativity for the benefit of science and the world? The essay focuses on transformational creativity—creativity that makes the world a better place. Transformational creativity requires individuals to defy popular beliefs (the crowd) and assumptions (the Zeitgeist) and often, their own past beliefs (the self). The essay also provides tips for improving creativity that draw on the experience of 100 highly eminent psychologists who were identified in a survey by Edward Diener and his associates. These creators were transformational in their own field of psychology. Mentors and teachers, in general, should put more focus on developing transformationally creative attitudes in their work with young people, because those are the attitudes that will make the field better and make the world a better place.

1. Introduction

When I started as an assistant professor of psychology, one of my earliest projects was a series of studies on the development of a particular kind of logical reasoning. I submitted them to a prestigious journal as a single article. After submitting them, I thought, with some embarrassment, that it had been a mistake to submit them for publication. They just were not very creative but rather were routine parametric variations on a paradigm from my earlier work. I thought about withdrawing the submission from the journal. Then I decided to just let the article be rejected.

The article not only did not get rejected, but it was accepted with glowing reviews. I hardly had to do any revisions at all. I thereby learned, early in my career, that journals, even prestigious ones, were, at least some of the time, more than happy to accept articles that were not very creative but that moved a paradigm forward just a bit—and offended no one. A problem in any field is that creative work often defies norms and steps on toes. When it defies those norms and steps on those toes, people react in a way that is self-protective.

That same year, at the end of the year, I submitted an article based on what I still consider to be some of the most creative work I have ever accomplished. The work scared some people off, and because it was critical of someone else’s paradigm, probably offended some important people. It was rejected. Unlike the previously described work, today, it has been very widely cited. I eventually got the work accepted, but only after repeated rejections and resubmissions. Scare people and expect to get rejected.

The oddity in that first year of my career was that the relatively pedestrian work was easily accepted, but the groundbreaking, transformational work was accepted only after what seemed like an unending revision. At one point, I had wondered whether this strange phenomenon was happening just to me. It was not.

This article seeks to explain what happened that first year. The main goal of the article is to discuss how we can understand different kinds of creativity, especially in, but not limited to, the discipline of psychology, and how we can educate students better for it. In this essay, creativity, whether in psychology or elsewhere, is defined as the production of work that is novel and useful or effective (Runco & Jaeger, 2012; Sawyer & Henriksen, 2024).

The thesis of the article is that creativity is developed mostly through a set of attitudes, not merely through abilities. These attitudes are the willingness to relinquish or defy one’s past but no longer valid or relevant beliefs, defy the crowd, and defy the going Zeitgeist (worldview) of the field (Sternberg, 2018). The most successful psychologists—and scientists in general—are not only creative but also transformationally creative—they deploy their creativity to make the world a better place.

In the essay, I will first discuss the triangular theory (Sternberg, 2018), by which creative people defy themselves, the crowd, and the Zeitgeist, upon which the essay is based. Then, I will discuss how this theory can help us understand world-changing, transformational creativity. Next, I will discuss how one can develop creativity, and possibly transformational creativity, in young psychologists. Finally, I will draw some conclusions.

2. Theoretical Framework: The Triangular Theory of Creativity

The theoretical framework of this article is a triangular theory of creativity (Sternberg, 2018). Anyone who can be creative—which is essentially everybody—will be creative, to some degree, if they adopt a creative attitude (O’Hara & Sternberg, 2001). Thus, the triangular theory views creativity as largely attitudinal. Undoubtedly, creativity also has an ability component, but it is much clearer how to modify attitudes than abilities (Sternberg & Spear-Swerling, 1999). There are three attitudes emphasized by the theory.

The first attitude is a willingness to defy one’s own present and previous beliefs. This attitude signifies that one is open to new ideas, new ideologies, and, sometimes, new facts that seem to be inconsistent with what one believes one already knows. The willingness to defy oneself is not easy to come by. People readily come by self-serving biases and often show a strong myside bias in their decision making (Stanovich, 2021). People often think of their views as representing not merely their own views but also reality. As a result, to the extent they are intelligent, they use their intelligence, as conventionally defined (Carroll, 1993; McGrew, 2009), to seek confirmation of what they already believe (Stanovich, 2021; Sternberg, 2005). For example, if they believe in a particular political or religious ideology, they typically use their intelligence to support rather than to question it.

The second attitude is a willingness to defy the crowd—or the beliefs of others within one’s extended social networks. Defying the crowd is much easier in principle than it is in practice. It is difficult to defy the crowd because there is so much external pressure to conform, which often results in internal pressure to conform (Sternberg & Lubart, 1995). Most people want to be liked, even admired, and defying the crowd often leads to the opposite result. The late Wendell Garner (1980), a psychology professor at Yale University, once commented that “The hardest papers to get accepted are the ones that are not very good, because they are not very good, and the ones that are really great because they are really great”. His point was that work that is great defies the crowd, makes people uneasy, and often leads to people rejecting the work, not despite its high quality, but because of it.

Defying the Zeitgeist means questioning one’s presuppositions, including presuppositions that one just “knows” to be true. There are examples of such questioning in all fields of endeavor. A particularly famous one is René Magritte’s artwork, “This is not a pipe”, showing a picture of a pipe. In physics, Albert Einstein threw in the wastebasket much of what physicists and others had believed about the physical world with his theory of special relativity. Who, for example, would have believed that merely flying quickly into space would cause one to age more slowly than would someone who stayed on the Earth? In psychology, memory psychologists assumed the validity of frequency theory—that rehearsing words by repeating them would strengthen their memory trace and make them easier to recall—until Endel Tulving (1966) showed that repeating words did not necessarily make them more recallable (and might even have the opposite effect). Tulving found that repeating words enhances memory only when it strengthens the organization of the words in memory.

The greatest difficulty of defying the Zeitgeist is even becoming aware of what it is that you assume to be true that should be open to question. Precisely because we are hardly aware of our world views, such views are difficult to question.

3. The Theory of Transactional and Transformational Creativity

Sternberg (2024b) presented a theory of two types of creativity in everyday use—transactional and transformational. Consider each in turn. The kind of creativity one shows will depend partly on one’s personality and motivation and partly on the constraints in the environment (Sternberg & Kaufman, 2010).

3.1. Transactional Creativity

Ordinary transactional creativity (Sternberg, 2024b) is represented by work that is novel and effective in fulfilling a creative bargain. The creator produces work that is novel and useful to someone for some purpose, and in return, the work is recognized as fulfilling whatever bargain the creator made—work for hire, work for praise, work for the record, or whatever. If it is scholarly work, it may be read by some scholars and cited by fewer, but the work will be recorded on a CV or in a departmental record as having been completed and as having yielded a publication. If it is artistic work, the work may be sold as “creative”, but no one has any illusion that it is more than an object hanging on someone’s living room or other wall or in an office at one’s place of work. If it is a piece of creative writing, it may sell and even sell well, but again, no one has any illusion that it is more than writing to pass the time for those who read it, and perhaps for them to learn something in the process. Without some degree of directed motivation (Dweck et al., 2004) and even passion for what one is doing, it is difficult to do truly impactful creative work (Ivcevic-Pringle, 2019).

Most creative work is of this kind. It is intended for a limited purpose and accomplishes its purpose simply by being novel and accepted by someone as useful for some purpose. Most scholarly papers, including in psychology, are cited less than 10 times, and many are never cited (Weingart, 2012). They fulfill their transactional purpose by being published, perhaps with the hope that they may break out from the mass of papers that have little or no impact. Some of them do, but not many.

Sternberg and his collaborators (Sternberg, 1999; Sternberg et al., 2002) have referred to these kinds of creativity as replication and forward incrementation. In the case of replication, one does what has been accomplished before. In the case of forward incrementation, one does something more and moves the field beyond, although perhaps not much beyond where it was before. Any field needs replicators and forward incrementers. However, they are not likely to fundamentally change anything in a field. Most of psychology, for example, is forward incrementation. It is the next step beyond the last study—the kind of thing that authors say at the end of the discussion of their last paper that needs to be carried out and then that the next paper, by them or someone else, does carry out.

An example of this forward incrementation in psychology research is Sternberg (1980b). The study has been cited 111 times, according to Google Scholar (15 January 2025). It takes models that Sternberg already proposed for linear-syllogistic reasoning in adults and applies them to children in grades 3, 6, and 9. The variation in the study, therefore, is the age of the subjects. The model and the research paradigm remain pretty much the same as in Sternberg’s previous studies on linear syllogistic reasoning (e.g., Sternberg, 1980a), for which the research was conducted earlier than that for 1980a, even though the two papers were published in the same year. The research is basically the next step for an existing paradigm of research.

Creativity need not be transactional. It can be an end that is based on more than tit-for-tat exchange. Transformational creativity provides a way to accomplish that more important end.

3.2. Transformational Creativity

In transformational creativity, one seeks to use one’s creativity to see things in a new way that at the same time achieves some kind of common good—that somehow makes the world a better place. People who are transformationally creative may also be transactionally creative—they need to make a living, after all, and they may wish to be rewarded for their work, just as are others. However, they have a deeper purpose in their work, which is to create some kind of transformation in the world.

Transformational creativity can occur in any field. Painters such as Claude Monet and Pablo Picasso, composers such as Johannes Sebastian Bach and Ludwig von Beethoven, authors such as Feodor Dostoyevsky and Toni Morrison, and physicists such as Albert Einstein and Marie Curie have been transformationally creative in their fields.

Transformationally creative thinking can occur and has occurred in psychology as well, although some of the developments may be less well known among the general public. Wilhelm Wundt is often viewed as a father, if not, the father of experimental psychology as it is known today. William James set the stage for American psychology and is still widely cited today. Nobel Prize winner Herbert Simon and his colleague Allen Newell showed many of the future possibilities for cognitive psychology. Kenneth Clark showed that negative stereotypes about African Americans negatively affect not only White people’s perceptions of Black people but also those of Black people as well. In psychotherapy, transformational figures have been ones like Carl Rogers (humanistic therapy), Aaron Beck (cognitive therapy), and, of course, Sigmund Freud (psychodynamic therapy). Jean Piaget changed our understanding of cognitive development as maturational, and so did Lev Vygotsky, who recognized the role of the environment in a way that eluded Piaget. Social psychologists Shelley Taylor and Susan Fiske helped to invent the field of health psychology.

One could argue, of course, whether all these developments have been “positive”. No contribution, at least in science, is made to last forever, and one could argue about just how positive any particular contribution has been. By its nature, science progresses and theories are meant to be replaced by better theories. However, the newer theories rarely could have been proposed if they did not have the earlier theories to push against. New ideas, even if they are opposed to old ideas, need the old ideas to serve as an opposition, or in a Hegelian sense, as the thesis to their antithesis or synthesis (Hegel, 1931). The dialectic of thesis–antithesis–synthesis can be a useful tool for teaching psychology (Sternberg, 1998).

Transformational creativity involves more than the instigation of a new paradigm, in the sense that the term “paradigm” has been used in the history of science (e.g., Kuhn, 2012). A new paradigm does not necessarily catch on, and it does not necessarily ultimately help the field progress toward better ideas. It may be “pseudo-transformational”, or transformational in appearance only. Lysenkoism in the Soviet Union was built upon Communist ideals, but Trofim Lysenko, its originator, scarcely stands among the transformationally creative biologists in history. William Sheldon, in psychology, tried to infer people’s personalities and character from their physical body type—a paradigmatic idea that fortunately has gone nowhere in the science of psychology (Sheldon, 1942). Sheldon also was a thief (Marotta, 2013), which should give anyone pause. The ideas of Leo Kanner, who blamed emotionally distant mothers for their children’s autism (Kanner, 1943), have also been relegated to the garbage pail of truly bad ideas in psychology. Some of the worst applications of psychology, which also have received the reproach they deserve, almost defy the imagination. For example, two psychologists who were contractors working for the CIA, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, promoted waterboarding (near-drowning) of prisoners to coerce them into confessions (Chappell, 2017).

Thus, new and even revolutionary ideas are not necessarily good, as anyone can realize when they worry about whether the future of humanity is to destroy itself with weapons of mass destruction—physical, biological, or otherwise. We want to develop creativity in young psychologists in a way that will steer them toward transformationality rather than merely transactional work, and toward good rather than the appearance of good, which, as noted above, can be referred to as pseudo-transformationality of ideas (Sternberg, 2024b)—the appearance of good behind which lies selfish and egocentric intentions?

Transformational creativity does not come out of nowhere. To be transformational, an individual must be willing to defy the crowd, themselves, and the Zeitgeist. Transformationally creative individuals do not accept things as they are and as other people, in general, accept them. The transformationally creative want change, but unlike many people, have a vision of what this change should be. To achieve change, they need to understand the current Zeitgeist and what it is about that Zeitgeist that has led to its entrenchment. They then must convince their audience to question what basic assumptions for them may be, and hopefully, to change some of those assumptions.

The transformationally creative are sometimes people who at one time accepted, or at least, acquiesced to those assumptions. When they were children, they may have had little choice. However, at some time in their lives, they defied themselves and were willing to envision a new, transformed future that let go of whatever it was in their current context that they came to see as inadequate and perhaps counterproductive to a positive future.

Transformational creativity often builds gradually within the individual. There often are two prior steps before transformational creativity (Sternberg, 2024b): pretransformational creativity and proto-transformational creativity.

3.3. Pretransformational Creativity

Pretransformational creativity sets the path toward transformationality but does not attain it or even, usually, represent an effort to come close to it. It can be seen in projects that point toward a common good that can be achieved, whether through psychology or otherwise, but that do not themselves directly lead to that common good. An example would be a student project on how psychology might be used to facilitate difficult international negotiations on issues such as global climate change or air pollution, or an empirical study of the effectiveness of a negotiating strategy that could be used in such negotiations. Future Problem Solving (https://fpspi.org/, accessed on 29 January 2025) provides a program that enables students to think about how, someday, they might play a role in solving the problems that are likely to bedevil their future.

Although pretransformational creativity might be associated primarily with students, it also can be associated with more advanced scholars who are just starting down a transformational path. It may be that their research up to a given point was more oriented toward problems removed from the world and that they have made a deliberate move toward addressing in a positive way problems with worldwide implications.

3.4. Proto-Transformational Creativity

Proto-transformational creativity goes beyond incrementalism and makes some kind of a real difference, just perhaps not at the level the creator would have wished for. It is an attempt, perhaps successful or perhaps not or only partially so, to do something more than a next step in some existing paradigm—to break away from an existing paradigm. It may be that there is a twist in a theory or a study, or that it tries to take a larger step than just the next theory or study within a given paradigm. Proto-transformational creativity is a near break-out, but not quite.

An example of proto-transformational creativity is perhaps Sternberg (1977). On the one hand, it was a breakthrough paper because it showed how one could do a detailed information-processing analysis of analogical reasoning. Thus, it partially succeeded, as the author hoped, in breaking away from the dominance of the psychometric paradigm. Modeling was accomplished on the basis of mathematical models of information processing, not individual differences. On the other hand, although the paper was presented as a break-away from the prevailing psychometric paradigm for studying intelligence, it was not quite that.

Sternberg’s (1977) work lacked several key aspects of a true breakout. First, the items it used were of a type used on conventional intelligence tests, which Spearman (1923), a consummate and very early psychometric analyst, believed was the epitome of the need for intelligence. The analogy problems studied, therefore, were straight out of the psychometric script. Performance on the items was measured in a different way, but it was still for the same kinds of items that the psychometricians used. Second, scores derived from information-processing analysis were validated for convergent and discriminant validation against psychometric test scores. So, the attempt to escape from the psychometric paradigm actually sought its external validation through that very paradigm.

Proto-transformational work can be influential and change people’s perspectives on problems. It just has not yet made the break with entrenched existing paradigms that will enable it to have a wholly new and world-changing impact.

3.5. Transformative Creativity

Transformative creativity, introduced here as a construct for the first time in the context of the transactional to transformational sequence, introduces a new paradigm to thinking (Kuhn, 2012) and thus may excite considerable interest at the time it is proposed. The work is very novel; it is useful; it is transformative; however, it is not clear, at least at the time it is proposed, that it is substituting something better and more useful in the long-term for what it replaced. It transforms a field but not necessarily for the long-term and not necessarily in a way that makes the world a better place. Time may tell whether transformative creativity becomes transformational. For example, Howard Gardner’s (1983, 2011a, 2011b) theory of multiple intelligences might fit into this category. The theory suggests that intelligence is not a single thing but rather is multiple in nature. According to the theory, there are eight multiple intelligences: linguistic, logical/mathematical, spatial, musical, bodily-kinesthetic, naturalist, interpersonal, and intrapersonal. The theory transformed the way many people think about intelligence, but the empirical evidence supporting the theory has been somewhat scant: The claim that the multiple intelligences are independent has been fraught (Visser et al., 2006) and it is not clear that they are all intelligences, in any case. The theory has been widely cited but, more than 40 years after it was first proposed, it lacks the demonstrated empirical validity that might have been hoped for when it was first proposed.

Transformative creativity is close to both what Sternberg et al. (2002) called redirection and reinitiation. Redirection occurs when a creative individual, instead of continuing down the path set by a paradigm, changes the path—essentially moving at a right angle to the path that the paradigm has set. Neo-Freudian theorists such as Erikson (1950, 1968) started with Freudian theory, but moved it in a direction away from emphasizing the id toward emphasizing the ego, resulting in it often being called “ego psychology”.

Reinitiation occurs when a creative individual or group essentially starts over. The information-processing approach to psychology (Miller et al., 1960; Newell & Simon, 1972), mentioned earlier, was a reinitiation vis à vis the behaviorist approach that was previously dominant in experimental psychology. Miller, Simon, and others did not just change directions from behaviorism. They started over. Although their sense of what is problematic was more similar to that of the Gestaltists, such as Köhler (1970) and Duncker (1972), the information-processing psychologists went beyond viewing the mind as a big black box. Both the Gestaltists and the behaviorists saw the mind as a black box. The difference was that the Gestalt psychologists wanted to peer inside the box but did not really know how, whereas the behaviorists rejected the concept of mind as even worthy of study since they believed it was unknowable and largely irrelevant to behavior change.

Transformative creativity can be highly influential in terms of changing the ways in which people think about psychological or other phenomena. What transformative creativity has not quite achieved is the level of positive effect on the world that characterizes transformational creativity.

Transformational creativity (Sternberg, 2021, 2024b), as discussed above, is creativity that is deployed to make the world a better place—to make a positive, meaningful, and potentially enduring difference to the world. It differs from transformative creativity in that it not only transforms a field but also has a significant and meaningful positive impact on the world. It is a process, not an end state. That is, no one reaches an end in the quest for transformational creativity. There is always more to be achieved. People who believed in transformational creativity as an end state would stop being transformationally creative because they would think that they have, somehow, arrived. However, no one arrives—they just get closer and closer without knowing exactly where they are going or what the end state will look like.

What distinguishes the transformationally creative from the transformatively creative is that the former not only accomplish something novel and out of paradigm, but they achieve something that further makes a positive and meaningful difference to the world. They do not only change the world; they change it in a way that makes it better, often through their intentional efforts to effect positive change.

Examples of truly transformational creativity are rare among instances of creative output, but because history is so long, they are legion in the intellectual history of humankind. Transformationally creative creators are ones who changed the way people think and made the world better in the process—Nelson Mandela and Mohandas Gandhi in the field of statesmanship, Louis Pasteur, Jonas Salk, and Jennifer Doudna in the field of medicine; William Shakespeare, Toni Morrison, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez in the literary world; Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, and more recently, Georgia O’Keeffe in the world of art—to name just a few. In psychology, examples might be Herbert Simon, Daniel Kahneman, and Roger Sperry, among many others. They go beyond transformative creativity in how they change not only science, but also the world.

4. What’s to Be Done to Enhance Creativity, in Psychology and Other Disciplines?

What can teachers and mentors do to help students become either transformatively creative or, ideally, transformationally creative? One can always make up techniques for being more creative, which has been what much of the field has done over the years. However, a better way is to examine what highly creative psychologists and others have achieved in their research and other endeavors that have rendered them so extraordinarily creative. Sternberg et al. (2016) invited the most highly distinguished psychologists of recent times to write essays about themselves and their creative work. The list was attained from the work of Diener et al.’s (2014) “incomplete list” of the most eminent psychologists of modern times. The list was based on citation counts, prizes and awards, and other indications of distinguished scientific contributions.

The Sternberg et al. (2016) book consisted of 100 essays by distinguished scientists, with each scientist writing not only about their work but also about the road traveled to complete the work. Sternberg (2016), the senior editor, then wrote an essay distilling what he had learned from reading and editing the 100 essays. What were the attributes underlying the creativity that led the “top 100” scientists to where they were? What kinds of thoughts, feelings, and actions led them to get to where they were? This part of the essay reviews Sternberg’s (2016) essay as a way of providing a roadmap to any aspiring psychologist as to how they can become more creative, in general, but also, more transformationally creative—making a positive, meaningful, and potentially enduring difference to the world.

Sternberg’s (2016) analysis of the essays revealed 18 common characteristics of the 100 psychologists identified by Diener et al. (2014) as distinguished. Sixteen of the 18 are readily modifiable—they are under the conscious control of the individual. The other two are not as readily modifiable but nevertheless are subject to some modification. The characteristics are summarized in

Table 1. Summary of characteristics of eminent psychological scientists.

Highly Controllable Characteristics

1.  Hard work; 2.  Niche-picking; 3.  Taste in scientific problems; 4.  Willingness to formulate an extended program of research; 5.  Willingness to set their own, often idiosyncratic paths; 6.  Willingness to surmount obstacles; 7.  Intellectual curiosity; 8.  Openness to new experiences; 9.  Intellectual honesty; 10.  Willingness to take intellectual risks; 11.  Intellectual courage; 12.  Collaborative skills; 13.  Communication and persuasion skills; 14.  Tolerance of ambiguity; 15.  Self-efficacy; 16.  Knowing your strengths and weaknesses.

Modestly or Moderately Controllable Characteristics

17.  Above-average analytical intelligence; 18.  Luck.

.

• Hard work. One realizes that one must work hard, and that ability can make hard work more effective or more efficient but cannot substitute for it;
• Niche-picking. Niche-picking refers to one’s finding an area of research as well as teaching that appeals to one and that one can become passionate about. It is finding the right fit for one’s abilities and attitudes;
• Taste in scientific problems. Perhaps the most important attribute of psychological and other scientists who are eminent is that they have exquisite taste in scientific problems. They leave the smaller and less important problems to others. They focus on the problems that may truly enable them to make a world-meaningful creative contribution;
• Willingness to formulate an extended program of research. They find one or more problems that captivate them and then they devise a program of research, executed over time, that enables them successively better to understand the phenomena of interest to them. They are doing what they love to do, and, for the most part, let the work and their presentation of it market themselves;
• Willingness to set their own, often idiosyncratic paths. These scientists show themselves to be willing to defy the crowd. They do not follow well-trodden paths but rather create their own paths. They are not scientists who follow the current fashions. They seek to create the fashions of the future. Moreover, most of them create multiple idiosyncratic paths during the course of their careers. That is, they are willing to defy themselves as well as to defy the crowd in pursuit of making science and the world better;
• Willingness to surmount obstacles. Virtually all scientists encounter obstacles in their career paths. All have significant setbacks. They all need either to navigate around the obstacles they encounter or else directly crash through those obstacles;
• Intellectual curiosity. Conducting serious psychological research with the goal of making a difference to the field or even the world requires great intellectual curiosity because there is no one there to structure your research. Generally, you are on your own;
• Openness to new experiences. To be a trailblazer, one must be open to new experiences because one is not following a pre-existing trail but rather forging one’s own trail;
• Intellectual honesty. One must be intellectually honest because science is based on honesty. Presenting false results not only destroys one’s own career and integrity but also defrauds others who may follow up on the false results;
• Willingness to take intellectual risks. Forging one’s own path is always a risk because, as noted above, it may lead nowhere, or at least, nowhere good, or simply derail one from studying problems one is able to solve;
• Intellectual courage. Forging one’s own scientific path requires courage. Others generally are uncomfortable with people who depart from the going paradigm (Kuhn, 2012). Distinguished scientists are courageous in following a transformational path that others do not see to follow or do not wish even to approach;
• Collaborative skills. Regardless of who receives credit, almost all of science involves collaboration at some level. Even if no collaborators are involved, one will have to negotiate the publication process, which inevitably involves working with others, often not in an entirely pleasant way, as it is the rare paper that receives only positive reviews;
• Communication and persuasion skills. With creativity, coming up with an idea is not always the hardest part of the creative process. Often, the hardest part is persuading other people to accept one’s ideas. Hence, one must be willing to figure out strategies to communicate what one has found to other people in a compelling and persuasive way. Without such communication, the idea may well die on the vine;
• Tolerance of ambiguity. The eminent psychologists identified by Diener et al. (2014) all had long, tortuous roads to get to the point at which they were eminent for their ground-breaking work. Not one of them had a smooth, straight path. Most were confronting feelings of failure at some point during their career and some at multiple points. One must confront many ambiguities in one’s research—results that do not quite make sense, or theories that do not quite hang together;
• Self-efficacy. Self-efficacy is a belief in one’s ability to succeed in the tasks one needs to do. To be creative in psychology, one must believe in oneself, even in the face of failures, such as experiments that do not work out and rejected articles and grant proposals. (The author of this article dismally failed his first psychology exam in his first year of college, receiving a score of 3 out of 10.). One needs to keep up the belief in oneself, lest one lose not only the support of others, but also one’s own support;
• Know your strengths and weaknesses. No one is good at everything. A career as a research and teaching psychologist demands a very wide variety of skills, but no one can expect to excel in all of them. It is a good idea, therefore, to analyze one’s strengths so as to capitalize on them and at the same time, analyze one’s weaknesses so as to compensate for them or correct them;
• Above-average analytical intelligence. Although none of the scholars took an IQ test for inclusion in the list, it is clear that they all possessed above-average intelligence, almost however defined (Mackintosh, 2011; Sternberg, 2020; Wagner & Sternberg, 1984). The traditional view is that intelligence is relatively stable, but many theorists of intelligence believe it is at least modestly to moderately modifiable (Jaeggi et al., 2011; Peng et al., 2017; Sternberg et al., 2008). One maintains and enhances one’s intelligence by using it and loses it by leaving it scarcely used (Kohn & Schooler, 1978);
• Luck. Finally, there is luck. For whatever reason, or none at all, some people end up luckier than others. One must figure out how to make the most of the luck one has and, where possible, “make one’s own good luck” by doing things in a way that brings one favorable resources and, hopefully, positive attention.

The upshot of this analysis is that being a creative psychological scientist is at least as much a matter of attitude as it is of ability. Attitude is, arguably, far more important than ability. Creativity is largely a decision (Sternberg, 2000), not just an ability. Moreover, changing one’s abilities is hard. But changing one’s attitude is only as hard as one makes it for oneself.

How do teachers and mentors develop creative attitudes? There are five main techniques:

• Stress the importance of creative attitudes in the development of creativity. Students often think of creativity as something inborn and fixed. In contrast, however, creativity can be developed through a change in how one thinks about one’s life and one’s work (Sternberg, 2000, 2018; Sternberg & Lubart, 1995; see also R. De Bono, 1999; E. De Bono, 2015; Glăveanu et al., 2019; James & Taylor, 2010; Kaufman, 2023; Lubart & Thornhill-Miller, 2019);
• Stress the modifiability of creative attitudes. Creative attitudes are modifiable, not fixed (Sternberg, 2018; Schank & Childers, 1988). They represent a decision anyone can make in their work and in their life. Encourage students to adopt their own creative attitudes;
• Provide role models of creative attitudes. Provide role models of creative attitudes, as is done in the Sternberg et al. (2016) book, but as can be found in any history of science, in general, and psychology, in particular. Some psychological scientists, such as Roger Sperry, Herbert Simon, and Daniel Kahneman, mentioned earlier, developed their creative attitudes to the point that they won the Nobel Prize;
• As a teacher or mentor, be a role model yourself. Students observe how teachers think. Role-model the creative attitudes that students should adopt;
• Stress the importance of transformationality. Too much creativity today is being used for neutral or even negative purposes. Stress the importance of using creativity to do positive things and make the world a better place.

To teach for transformational creativity, first, one starts with significant real-world problems like these. Second, one works with students to define exactly what the problems are. Third, one works with the students to understand what kinds of solutions have been proposed and enacted, and how they have succeeded in some ways and failed in others. Fourth, one investigates what kinds of solutions might work that either have not been tried or have been tried but in ways that were inadequate. Fifth, one needs to think about which solutions possibly could be made to work. Sixth, one must think about how one actually could convince others of the value of the solution one prefers. Seventh, one must think about how the solution would be implemented. Finally, one needs a way of knowing whether the solution is actually working, and if not, what can be done about it. In other words, this instruction involves simulating real-world transformationally creative thinking, as well as giving examples of real-world transformationally creative thinkers and how they accomplished their goals. One learns to think in a transformationally creative way not by didactic learning, but rather by simulating processes of transformational creativity.

What would be examples of issues in which one can develop transformationality in the creativity of young people? Here are just a few examples of the level of societal challenges:

• Climate change. Climate change is a phenomenon whose reality is accepted by virtually all (97%) of responsible climatologists and meteorologists (Cook, 2025; NASA, n.d.). Yet, many people refuse to believe in it, preferring to follow politicians, celebrities, and ideologists who deny or belittle its existence (Uteuova, 2024). Many leaders around the world are minimizing the effects of climate change, even after the Los Angeles fires of January 2025. They and others should learn from the fires, but they likely will not (Prose, 2025). How could psychologists use their knowledge of persuasion techniques to help responsible leaders persuade people of the catastrophic risks of climate change and thereby help create a better world?
• AI. More and more experts in the field of artificial intelligence are recognizing that the development of AI, for all its good intentions, may turn us humans into servants of AI rather than its masters (Dreyfus & Dreyfus, 1988; Goodyear, 2023; Roose, 2023). Nobel Prize winner Geoffrey Hinton has noted that for AI to flip to master from servant would require little more than a subroutine telling the AI to put its own interests ahead of those of its programmers, or humans in general (see Metz, 2023). Meanwhile, the use of generative AI is threatening the development of reading and writing skills in young people, who are turning to AI to do work they previously would have had to do themselves. Psychologists are desperately needed to work with computer scientists to ensure that AI does not spiral out of control even more than it already has;
• Weapons of mass destruction. Weapons of mass destruction are becoming more and more deadly and, at the same time, difficult to stop. Those are the goals, for example, with hypersonic missiles, which travel so fast that they are extremely difficult to intercept. The new weaponry, which already is being developed and used now by imperialist regimes, only encourages more new weaponry to counteract the newly existing weaponry. A cycle of competition for more deadly weaponry is created that already has spun out of control. How does one stop the cycle? Osgood (1962) devised a method to reduce international tensions, Graduated Reciprocation in Tension Reduction (GRIT). Perhaps psychologists of the future could work to apply it in today’s world.

5. Comparison to Another Theoretical Framework: 4 Cs

Kaufman and Beghetto (2009) have proposed a different but related theoretical framework, that of the 4 c’s. These four c’s are mini-c creativity, little-c creativity, Pro-c creativity, and Big-C creativity. Mini-c creativity is creativity in learning new things; little-c creativity is creativity in daily life; Pro-c creativity is creativity in one’s profession; and Big-C creativity is world-changing creativity. Most of the creativity shown in the profession of psychology is presumably Pro-c.

Pro-c creativity can vary in levels and types of defiance—of oneself, the crowd, and the Zeitgeist. Professional creativity can be seen as a singular category when ascribed to what Csikszentmihalyi (1988) called the “field” (a field of people, all of whom are “professionals”), but when used to describe creativity in a domain, the category is extremely broad. It includes replications and minor incrementations of knowledge that will have little or no effect on a field, but it also includes major paradigm-shifting articles that can change the way a discipline thinks. To take a simple example, George A. Miller’s (1956) paper on “the magic number 7” has been cited, according to Google Scholar, over 43,000 times as of the date that this article is being written. In contrast, Fred Sheffield’s (1949) paper on the “spread of effect” without reward or learning has been cited 22 times. The latter paper was published in a highly regarded journal, but more than 75 years after publication, it is scarcely in the same category as the Miller paper. One could call them both out as representatives of Pro-c creativity, or as professional contributions, but something may get lost in lumping both into the Pro-c category. Yet, neither would be in the Big-C category of changing the world and indeed, the number 7 did not prove to have quite the generality Miller hoped it would have. Indeed, if Miller did have any paradigm-changing influence, it was probably not for this article but rather for his book with Galanter and Pribram (Miller et al., 1960), Plans and the Structure of Behavior, which focused not on a single number, but rather, laid out a framework and agenda for the cognitive psychology of subsequent years.

There are perhaps three challenges to the concept of Pro-c creativity that encourage us to see it in a more differentiated way. Consider each in turn.

The first challenge is that there is such a wide range of behavior that passes for Pro-c creativity. In science, for example, there are papers that are never cited and there are papers that are cited tens of thousands of times. In terms of creative impact, they have virtually nothing in common but are all Pro-c if they were accomplished by professionals.

The second challenge is that much of the most creative work is carried out by non-professionals. Franz Kafka, one of the greatest writers in history, was not a professional writer—he was, at various times, a lawyer and an insurance broker. Almost all his known works were published posthumously, and he asked his friend, Max Brod, to burn them all after his death. Albert Einstein did much of his most important work while his profession was that of patent clerk.

The third challenge is that it is not always clear what constitutes a profession. How does one compare the creativity of a milkman (Scribner, 1985) to that of a molecular biologist (Watson & Berry, 2003)?

Pro-c is a useful concept, but it could use more elaboration to account for the different kinds of cases that might (or might not) qualify as “Pro-c”. Although Kaufman and Beghetto (2009) viewed Pro-c creativity as being of a single type, it is viewed here as being of multiple types (Sternberg, 2024a, 2024b). In other words, there are qualitative ways in which Pro-c creativity can be distinguished into subtypes, such as transformative and transformational creativity. Some of these types would apply to so-called little-c, or everyday creativity as well.

A good goal for future psychologists is to become Pro-c creative, but in a way that will make a transformative and perhaps even transformational difference to the field. Not everyone will reach these goals, but anyone can give it their best shot.

6. Conclusions

Teaching psychology students, or any other students, to become creative is largely a matter of developing creative attitudes, such as the ones that emerged from the analysis (Sternberg, 2016) of the 100 eminent psychologists (Diener et al., 2014). Some attributes of a person are hard (although not impossible) to change, such as their intelligence and their luck. One may be able to change these attributes, or not. However, so much of creative success is a matter not of ability but rather of attitude. Ellen Berscheid and Elaine Hatfield, founders of the scientific study of love, were certainly experts in generating novel and effective ideas, but they needed to take on not only psychology colleagues but also a U.S. Senator in achieving their ground-breaking, transformational contributions to psychology. Their attitude toward fighting for their ideas enabled their ideas to permeate psychology. In deciding for transformational creativity, one may or may not succeed in becoming transformationally creative, but almost certainly, one will do work that is more meaningful, personally, professionally, and globally.