Creative people often combine traits that most people treat as opposites. Psychologist Frank Barron reached that conclusion when he studied highly creative writers, architects, scientists, and mathematicians at the University of California, Berkeley, and described them as both more primitive and more cultivated, madder and saner, than the average person. His subjects also preferred complexity and disorder to neat, simple patterns. On personality tests they looked troubled, yet they scored high on ego strength, the ability to recover from setbacks, close to what psychologists now call resilience.
A French management article in Journal du Net retold this work under the idea that such people are often misunderstood by those around them. Barron’s studies measured creativity and personality. They did not measure whether creative people feel misunderstood, and they did not compare misunderstood people with anyone else.
How Berkeley studied creative people
The work took place at the Institute of Personality Assessment and Research (IPAR), which psychologist Donald MacKinnon founded at Berkeley in 1949, according to a California magazine history of the IPAR creativity studies. The institute was based in a former fraternity house just off the campus. The same article reports that Barron brought 31 prominent writers there for assessment, among them Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, and the poet William Carlos Williams.
Other IPAR teams assessed research scientists, mathematicians, and architects, including Eero Saarinen and I. M. Pei, the magazine reports. According to a memorial page published by the Esalen Institute, the participants were ranked by their peers for originality and spent several days at the institute for interviews and psychological testing. Barron described this research on the traits of creative individuals for general readers in Scientific American.
Creative people preferred complexity and disorder
One of the personality measures Barron designed was the preference for complexity. In a paper on complexity and simplicity as a personality dimension, he described a trait that runs from a preference for perceiving and dealing with complexity to a preference for simplicity, when a person has to choose between the two.
The creative subjects sat at the complex end. According to the California magazine history, they thrived on ambiguity, had a high tolerance for chaos, tended to have a good opinion of themselves, and were risk-takers on the whole. Their profiles were full of contradictions. Barron himself said the creatives were both more primitive and more cultivated, more destructive, a lot madder and a lot saner than the average person, as the magazine quotes him.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a psychologist known for his work on flow, reached the same conclusion from his own research on how creative people live and work. Writing in Psychology Today, he said that if he had to name in one word what set their personalities apart, it was complexity. He listed paired traits such as high energy and quiet rest, playfulness and discipline, extroversion and introversion, humility and pride, and rebellion and tradition.
Troubled on tests, yet high in ego strength
The link to resilience comes from ego strength. In a paper in the Journal of Consulting Psychology, Barron described an ego-strength scale built from items of the MMPI, a standard clinical personality questionnaire, to predict which patients would respond well to psychotherapy. He proposed it as a predictor wherever an estimate of a person’s adaptability and resourcefulness was needed.
The Esalen memorial summarizes what the IPAR tests showed: the most creative participants appeared highly neurotic on personality tests, but they also showed high ego strength, which let them direct their difficulties into their work. In the words of the University of California, Santa Cruz obituary of Barron, his analysis of ego strength as the power to rally from setbacks and hardship anticipated much of what psychologists now study as psychological resilience.
Resilience is now studied for its own sake. Gromeus has covered how being mentally resilient is linked to living longer in a large study of older adults.
Above a minimum, intelligence did not predict creativity
IPAR also tested how creativity related to intelligence. The California magazine history reports that, above a certain minimum level of intelligence, the researchers found no correlation between creativity and intelligence. In his report in American Psychologist, MacKinnon wrote that within the creative samples the relationship was essentially zero, except among mathematicians, where it was low and positive.
Later research has looked at other traits tied to creativity. Gromeus explains how being open to new things helps creativity and learning, and how creative flow quiets the brain’s control areas in practiced musicians.
Limits of the Berkeley studies
The IPAR findings rest on small groups of famous people, selected for success and tested in the 1950s and 1960s, the period the UC Santa Cruz obituary gives for the studies. The California magazine history notes that the subjects were overwhelmingly white and male, and quotes Berkeley psychologist Robert Levenson, who points out that the sample sizes were small. The studies describe what eminent creative people had in common. They do not show that combining opposite traits causes creativity, or that anyone can become more creative by adopting those traits.
Sources and related information
California magazine – Spying the secrets of creativity – 2023
Coby McDonald’s history of the Berkeley institute documents the IPAR studies of writers, architects, and scientists: the 1949 founding, the 31 writers Barron assessed, the traits observed, Barron’s madder and saner remark, the intelligence finding, and the limits of the samples.
The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology – Complexity-simplicity as a personality dimension – 1953
Barron’s paper (volume 48, pages 163 to 172) defines preference for complexity as a personality trait. DOI 10.1037/h0054907.
Journal of Consulting Psychology – An ego-strength scale which predicts response to psychotherapy – 1953
This paper (volume 17, pages 327 to 333) introduces Barron’s MMPI-based ego-strength scale and proposes it as a measure of adaptability and resourcefulness. DOI 10.1037/h0061962.
UC Santa Cruz – Frank X. Barron, pioneer in the psychology of creativity, dies at 80 – 2002
The university’s obituary links Barron’s ego strength to modern resilience research and places the IPAR creativity studies in the 1950s and 1960s.
Esalen Institute – In memoriam Frank Barron – n.d.
The memorial page summarizes the neurotic test profiles and high ego strength of the most creative IPAR participants, who were ranked by their peers for originality and assessed over several days.
American Psychologist – The nature and nurture of creative talent – 1962
MacKinnon’s report found essentially zero link between intelligence and creativity within the creative samples, except a low positive link among mathematicians. DOI 10.1037/h0046541.
Psychology Today – The creative personality – 1996
Csikszentmihalyi describes complexity as the mark of creative personalities and lists the paired, contradictory traits he observed.
Scientific American – The psychology of imagination – 1958
Barron’s own account for general readers of the study of creative individuals’ characteristics, volume 199, issue 3. DOI 10.1038/scientificamerican0958-150.
Journal du Net – Context – Misunderstood people and complexity – 2024
The French article that prompted this piece retells Barron’s findings under the misunderstood-people angle. It is background only and carries no figure used here.