Gregory J. Feist

• PhD
• Professor (Associate) at San Jose State University

Critical thinking and creative thinking are two related and yet distinct constructs. The core connection is they both start by challenging assumptions. After all, assumptions are simply the implicit starting point of our reasoning process, and starting points can and often do lead us astray and prevent us from solving important and difficult proble...

The purpose of this study was twofold: first, to be among the first attempts to validate linguistic analysis as a method of creativity assessment and second, to differentiate between individuals in varying scientific and artistic creativity levels using personality language patterns. Creativity is most commonly assessed through methods such as ques...

Motivated reasoning occurs when we reason differently about evidence that supports our prior beliefs than when it contradicts those beliefs. Adult participants (N = 377) from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk) system completed written responses critically evaluating strengths and weaknesses in a vignette on the topic of anthropogenic climate change (...

The role of psychopathology in creative achievement has long been a debated topic in both popular culture and academic discourse. Yet the field is settling on various robust trends that show there is no one answer. Conclusions vary by level and kind of creativity and level and kind of psychopathology. The current study sought to replicate previous...

This textbook is a systematic and straightforward introduction to the interdisciplinary study of creativity. Each chapter is written by one or more of the world's experts and features the latest research developments, alongside foundational knowledge. Each chapter also includes an introduction, key terms, and critical thought questions to promote a...

A thorough understanding of the relationship between quality and quantity of creative productions is critically important for creativity researchers and practitioners. The current study examines the equal odds baseline as a simple model to describe the quality-quantity relationship. Among other predictions, the equal odds baseline posits the presen...

The general conclusion from recent research on the Big Two dimensions of human personality — Plasticity (extraversion and openness) and Stability (neuroticism, agreeableness, and conscientiousness) — show that Plasticity has a more robust and stronger association with creativity than Stability. More specifically, people who are high in plasticity a...

Applying science to the current art of producing engineering and research knowledge has proven difficult, in large part because of its seeming complexity. We posit that the microscopic processes underlying research are not so complex, but instead are iterative and interacting cycles of divergent (generation of ideas) and convergent (testing and sel...

It is not uncommon for people to gloss over the high degree of creativity involved in science. The physical sciences (physics, chemistry, geology, and astronomy) would not be where they are today without extremely creative insights and solutions to both experimental and theoretical pro blems. In this chapter I review the vast and growing psychologi...

As individual subjects, creativity and personality have been the focus of much research and many publications. This Cambridge Handbook is the first to bring together these two topics and explores how personality and behavior affects creativity. Contributors from around the globe present cutting-edge research about how personality traits and motives...

Understanding how impactful scientific articles were funded informs future funding decisions. The structural significance of articles is broken down into two submeasures: citation count and “generativity” (a novel measure defined as being highly cited and also leading to a comparatively large number of other highly cited work). Generativity is an a...

In this article, I argue that scientific fame and impact exists on a continuum from the mundane to the transformative/revolutionary. Ideally, one achieves fame and impact in science by synthesizing two extreme career prototypes: intrinsic and extrinsic research. The former is guided by interest, curiosity, passion, gut, and intuition for important...

Creativity is sexy, but are all creative behaviors equally sexy? We attempted to clarify the role of creativity in mate selection among an ethnically diverse sample of 815 undergraduates. First we assessed the sexual attractiveness of different forms of creativity: ornamental/aesthetic, applied/technological, and everyday/domestic creativity. Both...

Other studies of science - philosophy, history and sociology - are well-established investigations into the nature of science. Psychology of science, until recently, has been a missing perspective. This review summarises and highlights key empirical findings from the last decade or two that demonstrate that psychology has important contributions to...

The psychological qualities of the creative person in general are gradually becoming more and more clear, and yet the psychological qualities of the creative scientists remain less clear. The current investigation examined the personality characteristics of the creative scientist in a sample of 145 academic physical, biological, and social scientis...

Since 2006, the psychology of science has become an established discipline. The year 2006 saw the first international conference, from which the International Society for the Psychology of Science and Technology was launched. The following year, the first peerreviewed journal was started, the Journal of Psychology of Science and Technology. The soc...

One important task for psychologists of science is to examine the psychological factors (such as personality or cognition) that underlie who becomes interested in science and what kind of attitudes people develop toward science. Those were the primary questions addressed by the present study in a sample of 655 college undergraduates. We predicted t...

Scientific behavior, interest, talent, and achievement can be and have been investigated from each of the fundamental subdisciplines in psychology. Simply put, there is a psychology behind science. I review and summarize the major empirical findings from different subdisciplines—namely, cognitive, developmental, personality, social, and clinical. F...

One formative idea behind the workshop on expertise in Berkeley in August of 2010 was to develop a viable “trading zone” of ideas, which is defined as a location “in which communities with a deep problem of communication manage to communicate” (Collins et al. 2010, p. 8). In the current case, the goal is to have a trading zone between philosophers,...

Given its stature as a transformative influence on society, science is and ought to be an object of intense study. Philosophers, historians, and sociologists devote systematic attention to questions such as what distinguishes scientific from non-scientific knowledge; what is the historical context to great scientific discoveries, such as the theory...

The Cambridge Handbook of Creativity is a comprehensive scholarly handbook on creativity from the most respected psychologists, researchers and educators. This handbook serves both as a thorough introduction to the field of creativity and as an invaluable reference and current source of important information. It covers such diverse topics as the br...

One key assumption of the psychology of science is that psychological factors make certain interests, talents, and abilities more likely and others less likely (Feist, 2006). The line of argument that Simonton (2009, this issue) puts forth-integrating and uniting the meta-literatures on dispositional and developmental influences on scientific and a...

Reviews the book, The International Handbook of Creativity , edited by James C. Kaufman and Robert J. Sternberg (see record 2006-05841-000 ). The book is structured such that more than half of the chapters deal with European-American perspectives (British-American, Latin American, Spanish, French, German, Scandinavian, Polish, and Russian-Soviet);...

One of the wonders of the human brain is that it is capable of both appreciating and creating sensory experiences that inspire a sense of wonder, beauty, and awe; that is, create and appreciate art. That particular patterns of sound, markings, light waves, gustatory and tactile sensations, and verbal and linguistic forms are preferred and appreciat...

As the British statesman Edmund Burke once wrote, "Those who do not know history are destined to repeat it." (Not to be confused with George Santana's comment: "Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it."). The fact is that the history of the psychology of science has been a struggle for existence. If we wish to move away from str...

As I have argued elsewhere (Feist, 2006a; Feist & Gorman, 1998), the psychology of science is a discipline that incorporates all the major subdisciplines in psychology, in particular the neuroscientific, developmental, cognitive, personality, and social perspectives. The empirical investigations that psychologists have contributed to the study of s...

In the present article, I review and summarize two subdisciplines of the psychology of science, namely development and personality. In the first section concerning developmental psychology of science, I review three major developmental topics: 1) the literature on the developmental and familial influences behind scientific interest and scientific t...

As the British statesman Edmund Burke once wrote, "Those who do not know history are destined to repeat it." (Not to be confused with George Santana's comment: "Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it."). The fact is that the history of the psychology of science has been a struggle for existence. If we wish to move away from str...

This paper reports the results of two studies on the development of scientific talent among the scientific elite: finalists in the Westinghouse Science Competition and members of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). Sampling four cohorts of finalists, we examined whether these gifted teenagers actually do go on to be the best scientists of the n...

In this book, Gregory Feist reviews and consolidates the scattered literatures on the psychology of science, then calls for the establishment of the field as a unique discipline. He offers the most comprehensive perspective yet on how science came to be possible in our species and on the important role of psychological forces in an individual's dev...

It is a very appealing, and ultimately firmly American, notion that a creative person could be creative in any domain he or she chose. All the person would have to do would be to decide where to apply her or his talents and efforts, practice or train a lot, and voilà, you have creative achievement. On this view, talent trumps domain and it really i...

Recent evolutionary theory has argued that what people find “beautiful” is not arbitrary, but rather has evolved over millions of years of hominid sensory, perceptual, and cognitive evolution. Sensations that have adaptive value (i.e., that enhance safety, survival, and reproduction) often become aesthetically preferred. One purpose of the current...

In 1950 (at age 27) a sample of 80 male graduate students was assessed on potential, intelligence–intellect, personality and creativity, and then personality and career outcome data were collected again at age 72. Intelligence (primary mental abilities, spatial, and number), intellect, potential, and personality (e.g., self-confidence, tolerance, o...

Despite broad agreement that understanding a personality construct requires integrating trait and state levels of analysis, few studies have explicitly attempted such an integration. The present study did this by examining the relationships between trait and state measures of empathy. State measures were taken daily, with a focus on the day level (...

Disciplines that study science are relatively well established in philosophy, history, and sociology. Psychology of science, by comparison, is a late bloomer but has recently shown signs of codification. The authors further this codification by integrating and reviewing the growing literature in the developmental, cognitive, personality, and social...

Theory and research in both personality psychology and creativity share an essential commonality: emphasis on the uniqueness of the individual. Both disciplines also share an emphasis on temporal consistency and have a 50-year history, and yet no quantitative review of the literature on the creative personality has been conducted. The 3 major goals...

There can be little doubt that in decisions of academic hiring, tenure, and the awarding of grant support the evaluation of quantity and quality of publication plays a major role. However, the question remains as to which matters more, quantity or quality. Furthermore, does quantity predict quality, and does publishing deeply rather than broadly pr...

Although there have been many recent advances in the literature on subjective well-being (SWB), the field historically has suffered from 2 shortcomings: little theoretical progress and lack of quasi-experimental or longitudinal design (E. Diener, 1984). Causal influences therefore have been difficult to determine. After collecting data over 4 time...

Although the influence of affect on creativity has received some theoretical and empirical attention, the role of affect as a consequence of creative problem solving has been neglected. This study is the one of the first to examine empirically the affect that results from creative problem solving. In a 2 (group) × 3 (time period) × 2 (task) factori...

Investigated integrative complexity toward research and teaching in a sample of scientists (99 full professors of physics, chemistry, and biology; aged 37–82 yrs). Findings from objective, observer, peer, and self-report data suggest that although scientists who think complexly about research are seen by others as hostile and exploitative, are rate...

This study investigated integrative complexity toward research and teaching in a sample of scientists (99 full professors of physics, chemistry, and biology). Findings from objective, observer, peer, and self-report data suggested that although scientists who think complexly about research are seen by others as hostile and exploitative, are rated b...

In order to determine the psychological influences contributing to scientific eminence, data from interviews, self-reports, peer ratings, observer ratings, and objective productivity measures were obtained on 99 full professors of physics, chemistry, and biology at major research universities in California. A structural model in which psychological...

Many have noted a renewed interest in creativity. However, even with a 40‐year history, little effort has been directed at the study of changes in the field, and no effort has been made to develop a historical perspective of the work being conducted. Which topics have consistently been examined? Which have gone out of favor, and which have shown su...

Evidence is presented suggesting that differences as well as similarities exist between the thought processes of art and science students during the insight phase of problem solving. The nature of these thought processes was investigated at different time periods throughout the creative process with 122 students in art and science. Half of the subj...

Although psychologists and lay people share a common belief that positive self-regard is associated directly with positive regard for others, the influence of parameters such as the nature of the others and their perceived similarity to the self rarely is considered. To investigate the influence of the degree of identification with the others who a...

Who becomes a physical scientist is not completely a coincidence. People with spatial talent and who are thing-oriented are most likely to be attracted to physical science, including astronomy. Additional lessons from the psychology of science suggest that compared with non-scientists and social scientists, physical scientists are most likely to be...