Creativity appears to be an important part of cognitive capacities and problem solving. Creativity is one’s ability to generate ideas that are novel, surprising, and compelling (Kaufman and Sternberg, 2010). This chapter will focus on the creative-cognitive approach, which seeks to further understand how human minds produce creative ideas.

Creativity does not have a dark side. Creative products and efforts can be malevolent, but that is apparent in their impact and is not an inherent quality of creativity nor a requisite trait in the creative personality. Claiming that there is a dark side to creativity is much like arguing that hammers are evil because they can be used to dismantle as well as construct things. Creativity is indeed in some ways a tool of humanity, but of course that is merely a metaphor and, as such, only imperfectly applicable. The important point is that the process that underlies all creative things is not moral or immoral, ethical or unethical, good or evil. It is essentially blind. Like a tool, it can be applied in many different ways, some of which are benevolent and some of which are unethical and immoral, but to understand creativity it is best to be parsimonious and leave out what is extraneous, and that includes all possible effects. This chapter develops this view of parsimonious creativity and describes the ostensible dark side as a function of values and decisions that are ancillary to actual creative work.

There is no denying that creative talents have in the past been used in highly unfortunate ways. Many famous examples of this have been described by McLaren (1993), Stein (1993), and the authors of others chapters in this volume.

The best education is grounded in good science. It is not based on opinion, tradition, or speculation but instead is drawn directly from the reliable information of empirical studies and the logical theories that take into account the empirical data. I have often told my students (many of whom are planning to teach) that it is their ethical responsibility to develop curriculum and follow pedagogy that has been tested and verified.

Fortunately, there is no lack of good information about creativity. This means that educators should have plenty of data and reliable theory to apply in the classroom. There is also quite a bit of bad information about creativity, but if opinion, tradition, and speculation are used to identify untrustworthy sources, it is not that difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Indeed, there may be too much information about creativity. There are different perspectives on various aspects of the creative process (e.g., Simonton, 2007; Weisberg, 2007), which can make it difficult to focus. Many of the differences can be explained by the fact that creativity is a syndrome (MacKinnon, 1965; Mumford & Gustafson, 1988), which is affected by quite a few different influences. Additionally, it takes various forms depending on the creator's age (Runco & Charles, 1997) and the domain (Albert, 1980; Gardner, 1983). Age and domain are especially relevant to education because they indicate that certain things may be best for the creativity of a preschool- or elementary school–aged student, but other things may be best for an adolescent or a young adult.

Creative studies benefit in numerous ways from biographical and autobiographical accounts. The benefits may be especially obvious in studies of writers, given that the evidence is often quite explicit and well articulated. After all, writers are experts at self-expression. Assuming that the biographical or autobiographical account is itself written or is in some way linguistic, it is likely that the data provided by writers are more informative than, say, those provided by a dancer or painter who writes about his or her life. Rothenberg's (1990) account of the novelist John Cheever comes to mind, as does Albert (1996) on the Brontes; Ippolito and Tweney (2003) on Virginia Wolfe; Henrickson (2003) on Mark Twain; and my own modest work on Sylvia Plath (1998).

Certainly there are methodological concerns with all biographical studies. They do not provide the same kind of data as experimental and controlled studies and are open to various biases that can undermine internal validity. Still, they provide useful illustrations and suggest hypotheses that can later be tested in a more controlled fashion. Additionally, biographical studies retain a realistic level of analysis. There is little reductionism, for example, just to name one experimental problem that is largely avoided by biographical studies (Runco & Okuda, 1993). The level of analysis in biographical studies is the creative individual rather than one particular personality trait, one particular cognitive process, or one particular psychological or social need. Experimental studies provide reliable data, but their advantage – experimental control – is also their disadvantage.

Creative things are always original. Originality is not sufficient to guarantee creativity, for some original things are worthless, unattractive, or otherwise uncreative. It is a one-way relationship: creative things are always original, but original things are not always creative. The fact that originality is not sufficient for creativity indicates that creativity involves something in addition to originality. Usually that additional element is defined as a kind of usefulness, appropriateness, or fit (e.g., Runco & Charles, 1993). When the task at hand requires problem solving, creativity leads to a solution that is both original and effective. Bruner (1962) described that part of creativity that is not accounted for by originality as effective surprise. When the task is not a kind of problem, creativity leads to original and aesthetically pleasing results rather than a solution per se. Whatever term we use, this additional element of creativity is important for the present purposes because it requires reasoning. It is reasoning that insures that original things are effective and aesthetically appealing.

In that light, all creative performances depend on reasoning. It is unlike the reasoning that is involved in other cognitive activities, but similar to it – after all, all reasoning is reasoning. There is some sort of commonality. In fact, it is possible to model reasoning in such as way as to capture both creative and noncreative cognition. The differences between creative and noncreative reasoning are easily built into the model. Such a model is described late in this chapter.

An ideal definition of giftedness should be optimally specific and operational. It should be optimal in the sense that it is not too general or too specific. It should not be too general because there are differences between mathematical giftedness and musical giftedness, and further differences between those two and verbal giftedness. There are, in short, clear-cut-domain differences. The mathematical, musical, and verbal domains are just examples; there are numerous others in which an individual can excel. Yet a useful definition of giftedness should be general enough to capture critical commonalities. There must be commonality or else we should probably not refer to these individuals all the same way, as “gifted.” The theory described in this chapter suggests that all expressions of giftedness share the potential for creative work. The gifted child may have domain-specific knowledge and be motivated to invest in only one particular domain; but whichever domain it is, the gifted individual will have the capacity for original work. Creative potential is one of the most critical commonalities among the various domains of giftedness.

The other requirement for the ideal definition – that it is operational – implies that reliable judgments can be made about gifted individuals. It implies that giftedness can be measured, quantified, and predicted. Without this requirement, a definition would be untenable and potentially unfair. One objective of this chapter is to demonstrate how creative giftedness can be operationalized such that it can be reliably assessed.