Kinds of Defiance in Creativity

There are three kinds of defiance in the triangular theory – of the crowd, of the self, and of the Zeitgeist. Crowds and the Zeitgeist can be of different scopes. The crowd may be one's professional colleagues (e.g., if one is a scientist, lawyer, or medical doctor) or one's constituents (if one is a politician or civil-service worker). Or it may be both groups. Similarly, a Zeitgeist can exist in a professional field or in a society at large. Who or what one is defying depends on the kind of work one does and the audience to which one addresses one's work.

Defying the crowd. Creative people tend to defy the crowd – from the high levels of creativity shown by the great minds in history, such as Galileo Galilei, Albert Einstein, Franz Kafka, Louis Pasteur, Marie Curie, Toni Morrison, and Pablo Picasso – to the more mundane levels of creativity many of us show in our everyday life. It is hard to defy the crowd because others do not like their ideas being challenged, and often act in ways to suppress such challenges, as some scholars, such as Galileo and Copernicus, found out the hard way. Even today, however, things have not changed. Ideas that challenge the existing order often are very hard to get accepted (Hunter, Bedell, and Mumford, Reference Hunter, Bedell and Mumford2007; Kaufman and Gregoire, Reference Kaufman and Gregoire2015; Mumford, Reference Mumford2002; Mumford, Medeiros, and Parlow, Reference Mumford, Medeiros and Parlow2012; see essays in Sternberg, Reference Sternberg2003b; Sternberg, Fiske, and Foss, Reference Sternberg2016).

Defying the crowd is difficult because creative people, perhaps even more than some uncreative ones, want to be appreciated for their work. Part of what motivates them is the renown that may result from their creative ideas. But people, including creative ones, often become uncomfortable, irritated, or downright angry when their ideas are challenged. In the long term, creative people know that ideas that defy the crowd are the ones that change a field. But they also know that, in the short term, it is easier to get articles accepted, grant proposals funded, exhibition halls to show one's work, and concert-goers to listen to one's concerts if one, metaphorically or literally, plays to the crowd (see Sternberg, Reference Sternberg2003b). As a result, often what pays off most in the long term with regard to creative performance – defying the crowd – pays off least in the short term.

Difficult as defying the crowd is, it actually may be easier than the other two kinds of defiance that can be crucial to creativity.

Defying oneself. An even greater challenge, at times, is defying oneself and one's own set of beliefs. It is a greater challenge, in part, because one does not easily recognize it as a challenge. Defying oneself is challenging because virtually everyone tends to become entrenched and tends to accept her own entrenchment, usually viewing others rather than themselves as problematical for creativity. In other words, one can be one's own worst enemy in generating creative ideas.

Simonton (Reference Simonton2004, Reference Simonton, Kaufman and Sternberg2010) has suggested that, even among highly eminent individuals, the best way to maintain one's creativity is to start working in a new area. But most scholars do not do so and, moreover, even finding a new area can be a daunting creative challenge. In other words, scholars become less creative in part because they are unable to combat their own entrenchment – being used to, and comfortable, seeing things in a certain way.

Sometimes, creative individuals seek to work in an entirely new domain. The advantage is that they essentially reset their creativity: They start over. But when creative individuals try to be creative in an entirely new way, for example, in a new domain, they have to be careful, no matter how famous they are, to acquire a strong knowledge base in that field. People who defy themselves in moving into a new field can make seminal contributions, as in the case of Nobel Prize winners Herbert Simon or Daniel Kahneman, or can make serious mistakes, as in the case of two other Nobel Prize winners, William Shockley in his unscientific views on race and eugenics (see Shurkin, Reference Shurkin2006) or Linus Pauling in his views of Vitamin C as something of a miracle drug for heart disease (Fonorow, Reference Fonorow2008).

Research has shown the susceptibility of experts to entrenchment effects (e.g., Adelson, Reference Adelson1984; Frensch and Sternberg, Reference Frensch, Sternberg and Sternberg1989). Peter Frensch and I (Frensch and Sternberg, Reference Frensch, Sternberg and Sternberg1989) showed that when expert and novice bridge players played against a computer, novices were more susceptible to declines in performance from changes in the game if the changes were surface-structural; in contrast, experts were more susceptible if the changes were deep-structural – that is, fundamental changes in the nature of the game. One interpretation is that the experts had encoded thousands of patterns of play, based on their past experience (Chase and Simon, Reference Chase, Simon and Chase1973); the novices had encoded few or none. It thus was far more costly for the experts than for the novices to endure a major change in the rules of the game. Simonton's (Reference Simonton1999) model suggests that as one advances in one's career, it becomes harder to depart from past patterns. We tend to view others as the greatest obstacles to our creativity. But often, we are our own greatest obstacle. We may have the disposition to create – the attitude that we are willing to blaze our own path (Grant, Reference Grant2016; Schank and Childers, Reference Schank and Childers1988; Sternberg and Lubart, Reference Sternberg and Lubart1995), but we keep blazing the same path again and again.

In sum, when it comes to creativity, we often are our own worst enemy (Dweck, Reference Dweck2007). To be creative not just once, but repeatedly throughout a career, one needs to defy not just the crowd, but also oneself and one's own earlier ideas.

Defying the Zeitgeist. Gardner (Reference Gardner2011) pointed out that creative contributions that truly defy convention are most likely to happen relatively early in a career, with what constitutes “early” differing somewhat from one field to another. Later contributions tend to be more of a synthetic nature. Why might that be?

The greatest threat to creativity, for most of us, is not the set of beliefs we or others (the crowd) are aware of having but rather the set of presuppositions we often do not even consciously know we have. They are the common-cultural presuppositions on which our field and often our world is built – the so-called Zeitgeist. Even those with a creative, defiant attitude cannot easily defy beliefs they do not consciously know they, or others have. The same assumptions that people hold about groups apply to scientific ideas (see Sawyer, Reference Sawyer2008), as Thomas Kuhn (Reference Kuhn1970) pointed out in his work on the structure of scientific revolutions. For the most part, we buy into paradigms embedded in the Zeitgeist without even consciously realizing that these paradigms are the result of untested and often untestable assumptions.

As Kuhn (Reference Kuhn1970) recognized, revolutionary, Zeitgeist-defying creativity inconsistent with current paradigms in research is fundamentally different from normal creativity within a paradigm because it challenges the often unconscious assumptions we hold about what science (or art or literature or whatever) is and can be. Zeitgeist-defying creativity pits one up against a whole cultural way of thinking, whether it is a geographic culture, a scientific culture, an artistic culture, or whatever (see Glăveanu, Reference Glăveanu2015; Lubart, Reference Lubart and Sternberg1999, Reference Lubart and Sternberg2010; Niu and Sternberg, Reference Niu and Sternberg2002, Reference Niu and Sternberg2003; Sternberg, Reference Sternberg2004). In Zeitgeist-defying creativity, the scientist or artist or writer questions the very presuppositions about what is acceptable for the discipline.

According to a propulsion model of creative contributions, there are several different forms of Zeitgeist-defying contributions (Sternberg, Reference Sternberg1999a, Reference Sternberg1999b; Sternberg, Kaufman, and Pretz, Reference Sternberg, Kaufman and Pretz2001, Reference Sternberg, Kaufman and Pretz2002). Redirection occurs when a field is moving in one direction and a researcher then moves it in a totally different direction. For example, parallel models of cognition, especially as realized in computer programs, constituted a redirection from serial models – they were based on a totally different set of assumptions (Rumelhart and McClelland, Reference Rumelhart and McClelland1994). A reinitiation is a do-over: It occurs when someone starts a field anew, as Noam Chomsky (Reference Chomsky1957) did with his book, Syntactic Structures. A synthesis integrates Zeitgeists from different fields – it represents the integration of ideas from two entirely different disciplines. It is what made Herbert Simon so famous with his merging of economic, business, and psychological thinking (see also Gilson and Madjar, Reference Gilson and Madjar2011).

One might argue that defying the crowd and defying the Zeitgeist are two regions on a continuum – that they differ quantitatively rather than qualitatively. But this seems not to be the case. Darwin's theory of evolution was qualitatively different from the various theories that existed before of how God created different creatures on different days of the week. Einstein's theory of relativity was qualitatively different from Newtonian theory, in that it recognized that Newtonian theory was merely a special case of a much more general set of phenomena that Newton could not even have envisioned. The Cubism of Picasso was qualitatively different from art that came before it, and atonal music such as that of Schoenberg is qualitatively different from the tonal music that preceded it. In contrast, most painters and musicians work within already established traditions rather than creating new ones.

Relations among the Three Types of Defiance

The three types of defiance are not entirely independent, as is also the case for the three elements of the triarchic theory of successful intelligence (Sternberg, Reference Sternberg1981, Reference Sternberg1988a, Reference Sternberg1988d; Sternberg and Grigorenko, Reference Sternberg2004), of the triangular theory of love (1987), and indeed of all major theories of intelligence (see Kim, Cramond, and VanTassel-Baska, Reference Kim, Cramond, VanTassel-Baska, Kaufman and Sternberg2010) except for Gardner's (Reference Gardner1983). In the case of the elements of the triangular theory of creativity, both the self and others are embedded in a society that has various aspects to its Zeitgeist. One often does not realize how the Zeitgeist – and how other people – affect the way one thinks. And even when one defies the Zeitgeist and others, one inevitably relies on their past work, even if it is to tear it down.

All that said, the correlation between the three types of defiance will depend on one's environment. For example, one can defy the crowd but work within the existing Zeitgeist by proposing a new theory – such as a new information-processing theory – within existing ways of seeing things. Similarly, one can defy oneself by admitting that earlier work one did was incomplete or wrong without defying the crowd or the Zeitgeist. And one can defy the existing Zeitgeist but actually getting praise from one's colleagues rather than opposition, as in the case of the Google X lab (a Skunk Works laboratory) and of Xerox PARC before it.

Lack of Creativity

The typical individual, for better or worse, but probably for worse, never develops much or any of a creative attitude. Rather, he learns to conform to the expectations of society. In terms of my theory of successful intelligence (Sternberg, Reference Sternberg2005b), such a person emphasizes analytical or possibly practical skills (Sternberg, Reference Sternberg1997a; Sternberg and Hedlund, Reference Sternberg, Kaufman and Pretz2002; Sternberg and Smith, Reference Sternberg1985) at the expense of creative ones. Analytical skills are important for success on jobs and in life. But they are not the skills that lead people to change the world. That said, not everyone has to be a world-changer.

Sparse Creativity (Defiance of the Crowd Only)

Sparse creativity can be seen in a person who is willing to defy the crowd but not himself and not the Zeitgeist. She is likely to generate one or a small number of creative ideas that defy the crowd, but after that, production diminishes rapidly. The sparsely creative person, because she is unwilling to defy herself – to go beyond her previous ideas – ends up producing variants of earlier work and then, when those variants flame out, so does her creativity. It is largely because of sparse creative scholars that colleges and universities wait six or seven years to award tenure (Sternberg, Reference Sternberg2016). The institutions fear that the first major idea may be the last one.

Minor Creativity (Defiance of Oneself Only)

Minor creativity is by far the kind we most frequently encounter. It is close to what Kaufman (Reference Kaufman2016; Kaufman and Beghetto, Reference Kaufman and Beghetto2009) refers to as “mini-c” creativity, the kind involved in learning. It also covers what Kaufman and Beghetto refer to as “little c” creativity, or the kind of creativity involved in small creative accomplishments. In the triangular view, these two kinds of creativity may differ from each other quantitatively, but they do not differ qualitatively. Minor creativity is what an individual displays in his daily life as he goes beyond what he has done before. He sees how to accomplish a task, such as fixing a leaking sink, in a new way. Or he sees a new way to save money on his purchases. Or he thinks of a new way to make his children happy. The individual keeps going beyond where he has been before, but does not do so at a level that defies the crowd or the Zeitgeist.

Isolated Creativity (Defiance of the Zeitgeist Only)

There are instances of individuals who defy the Zeitgeist but not the crowd or herself as an individual. This would be an individual who creates a shift in Zeitgeist without any opposition from the crowd (or from herself). That is, she has a world-changing idea and everyone immediately congratulates her and showers recognition and gratitude on her. All are grateful to have been shown how foolish they have been in what they did before and are immediately prepared to change their ways. Such an instantiation is relatively rare. There are certainly products that gain quick acceptance (e.g., hit movies such as the Star Wars or the Indiana Jones franchise), but usually the people behind these products (including George Lucas) had many challenges before they achieved success (Grant, Reference Grant2010, Reference Grant2016).

It might seem as though one could not defy the Zeitgeist without defying the crowd. But a defier of the Zeitgeist basically does not disagree with the answers of the crowd but rather with the questions the crowd asks. When someone defies the Zeitgeist, he basically labels the questions that the crowd is asking as irrelevant and suggests instead a different set of questions to ask. He may even agree with the crowd's answers to their questions. He just does not think those are the right questions to ask.

Defiers of the Zeitgeist may be isolated but not frustrated. In rare cases, they work in environments that actually encourage defiance of the Zeitgeist, such as the former XeroxParc, Google X (both mentioned earlier), or the various Skunk Works that companies set up to isolate creative thinkers from the pressures toward conformity that exist in most organizations. Such environments are relatively rare but certainly not unheard of.

Major Creativity (Defiance of the Crowd and of Oneself Only)

Major creativity is the kind one sees among skilled practitioners in a variety of professions. It comes closest to what Kaufman and Beghetto (Reference Kaufman and Beghetto2009) refer to as Pro c. Major creativity comprises willingness to defy the crowd and to defy oneself. It is not paradigm-changing, but rather tends to be a small to moderate step forward for a field, what Sternberg (Reference Sternberg1999b) refers to in the propulsion model as a forward propulsion. Major creativity is what enables fields to progress – to move forward within a paradigm. For example, Baddeley and Hitch (Reference Baddeley, Hitch and Bower1974) published a seminal paper on working memory; thousands of forward incrementations then followed. The same happened for Festinger and Carlsmith's (Reference Festinger and Carlsmith1959) classic research on cognitive dissonance. Thousands of studies ensued. Major creativity in extending a paradigm is the bread and butter of creative endeavor – it is what keeps a field moving forward.

It might seem, at least at first, that forward propulsion, because it builds on rather than rejecting current ideas, is not in any sense defiant. On the contrary, it is defiant, although in a minimal way. In particular, the scientist who engages in forward propulsion rejects, within a given paradigm, the current state of knowledge and argues that it is possible to move on from that state of knowledge. It is defiance, although of a mild kind.

Major Sparse Creativity (Defiance of the Crowd and of the Zeitgeist Only)

Major sparse creativity occurs when an individual has one truly great idea that defies both the crowd and the Zeitgeist of the day.

J. D. Salinger flamed out early, from a certain point of view, but one of the works he produced when he was young, Catcher in the Rye, was read, at least for many years, by high school students throughout much of the United States. It was a radically new kind of novel, at least in some respects, and was banned in many schools. Reverend Thomas Bayes has become known for his revolutionary Bayes's theorem, which has transformed the way in which many statisticians (and psychologists!) view significance testing; the theorem was his only major contribution to statistics.

Quiet Creativity (Defiance of Oneself and the Zeitgeist Only)

Quiet creativity occurs when an individual makes major contributions to a field but basically works for himself or for an organization that keeps its creative work under wraps. The individual either has little or no interest in publicizing his work or he is unable to. Sometimes, the work is discovered only by happenstance. Or it may never be discovered at all, in which case whether it is actually “creative” becomes roughly comparable to the question of whether a tree that no one hears fall in a forest actually makes a noise.

People who work for defense agencies – the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and so forth – may do highly creative work in the intelligence sector, but be unable to publicize the work. Similarly, hackers do highly creative work but often keep it a secret from the public. Indeed, the whole idea, for a hacker, often is to keep her work, or at least her identity, a secret. He or she may seek fame, but only under an assumed name so that no one can identify who actually did the work. The government was recently able to open the iPhone of the late terrorist primarily responsible for the San Bernardino massacre. Originally, neither the government nor Apple thought that the government would be able to open the iPhone without secret codes (themselves quietly creative) from Apple. But a hacker enabled the government to open the phone, in a major example of quiet creativity. The success was widely reported, but not how or by whom the phone was opened.

Consummate Creativity (Defiance of the Crowd, Oneself, and the Zeitgeist)

Consummate creativity involves all three components of the triangular theory – defiance of crowd, self, and Zeitgeist. It is what Kaufman (Reference Kaufman2016) and others refer to as Big C creativity. The great discoveries in science, for example, usually represent an evolution in thinking of their discoverers that culminate in revolutionary ideas – Darwin's theory of evolution, Einstein's theory of relativity, Pasteur's discovery of the principles of vaccination. It is what many scientists strive for but few achieve. Monet's Impressionism or Picasso's and Braque's cubism would be examples of consummate creativity in art, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in literature, or Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in music.

Properties of Triangles of Creativity

Triangles of creativity have three important immediate properties – size, shape, and modifiability.

Size. The size (area) of the triangle is determined by the magnitude of the creative contribution, as judged by peers. Larger triangles correspond to creative contributions having larger impact. Size can increase because of high levels of all three kinds of defiance, or because of high levels of just one or two kinds.

Shape. The shape of the triangle is determined by the nature of the contribution – the extent to which it emphasizes the different components of the theory. A given contribution, for example, may represent a major advance for the individual, but a smaller advance for a field, and only a tiny advance in terms of moving the Zeitgeist. Or a contribution might represent a major shift in terms of defying the crowd, a major advance for an individual, but not much of a change in Zeitgeist. Different contributions make changes of different kinds in different amounts.

Modifiability. Creativity is defined in terms of an attitude toward life and work, not in terms of a fixed set of attributes determined at conception or birth. Although genetic factors no doubt play a role, in that underlying attributes such as openness to experience show some heritability (Jang, Livesley, and Vernon, Reference Jang, Livesley and Vernon1996), genes interact with environment such that people can modify their attitudes toward producing creative work – or practically anything else (Gottesman, Reference Gottesman, Sternberg, Fiske and Foss2016). Moreover, as discussed below, abilities play a role as well.

Someone who starts off afraid to defy the crowd may change as a result of particular experiences. Indeed, many revolutionary thinkers started out as ordinary thinkers but became revolutionary in part as a result of circumstances. People like Benjamin Franklin, John Hancock, and Thomas Jefferson, for example, were not raised to become revolutionaries but became revolutionaries in part as a result of the times and circumstances in which they lived.

Gardner's (Reference Gardner2011) and Simonton's (Reference Simonton1997) models of development of creative careers both suggest that creative innovation may decrease over time. But whether it does decrease depends on a number of factors, including the individual's own self-efficacy for producing creative work and the amount of decline in the individual's fluid-thinking abilities.

In sum, creators can vary both in magnitude and in the kind of creative contribution they make with respect to defiance of the crowd, individual, and Zeitgeist. They also can change the magnitude and balance of their triangles of creativity as the circumstances of their lives change and as their motivations for being creative change.

Is There a Best Kind of Creativity?

It would seem, at first glance, that some manifestations of creativity are better than others – for example, consummate creativity would seem in some sense better than individual creativity. But what kind of creativity is “best” really depends on goals, much as does what kind of intelligence is needed to achieve specific goals (Sternberg, Reference Sternberg1997b). What is “best” depends on the goals one is trying to reach. Unfortunately, though, smart and creative people are just as susceptible to foolish goals as are people with less intellectual endowment (Sternberg, Reference Sternberg2002b). So the goals need not only to be reachable, but ones that contribute to one's own good, the good of others, and the good of society as a whole (Sternberg, Reference Sternberg2003c, Reference Sternberg2003d, Reference Sternberg2010a, Reference Sternberg, Cropley, Cropley, Kaufman and Runco2010b, Reference Sternberg, Ferrari and Weststrate2013, Reference Sternberg, Moran, Cropley and Kaufman2014a).

Is There a Worst Kind of Creativity?

Unfortunately, there are a lot of awful examples of creativity in the world today. The rise of creative demagogues in the world, including in the United States, is an extremely ominous development. Most of the people alive today were not alive for World War II, and so there is a risk of repeating the same foolishness that led to that war, except with the possibility of far worse outcomes. Unfortunately, neither creativity nor intelligence provides any protection whatever against the rise of demagogues – narcissistic, sociopathic, Machiavellian individuals with extremely inflated views of themselves who are able to convince other people to follow their irresponsible and potentially deadly leadership (Sternberg, Reference Sternberg, Kaufman and Pretz2002, Reference Sternberg, Cropley, Cropley, Kaufman and Runco2010b). The question, therefore, is whether creativity will be a force for good or for evil as we advance into the twenty-first century. At this point in time, it is unclear how things will go. It would be a shame if humans’ creativity, which is capable of bringing so much good to the world, proved to be the source of the demise of the world as we know it. Such a fear may sound apocalyptic. It is, but so is the possible future that awaits us unless we temper creativity with common sense and wisdom (Sternberg, Reference Sternberg2003d).