Creativity and confidence: price of achievement?

375 people develop and display creativity while figuring out how to put people at ease, others while dealing with drunks, others while creating political turbulence—and so on almost ad infinitum. Creativity is a complex process in which aspects of the environment are in-gested and cumulative and substitutable components of competence built together in a manner analogous to the way in which the organs of the body are assembled to enable the organism to function. However, note that creativity looks very different in different contexts (just as copper looks very different when combined with both sulfur and oxygen and when combined with oxygen alone) and is just as invisible in those contexts as copper is in its contexts until one develops appropriate analytic processes that start by asking, " What kinds of activity is this person strongly predisposed to carry out; what are his or her idiosyncratic motives? " The authors of these articles focused on superstar creativity of a kind valued by, and therefore visible in, Western culture. For the reasons discussed above, psychologists tend to overlook the specific forms of superstar creativity displayed by each and every human being despite the fact that the development and use of all these forms of creativity—this diversity—are vital to the survival of society. Spearman noted the problem back in 1925: Every normal man, woman, and child is a genius at something.. .. it remains to discover at what.. .. It cannot be detected by any of the testing procedures at present in current usage. But these procedures are capable. .. of vast improvement. (p. 8) Finally, let me return to my assertion that psychologists need a range of descrip-tors at different levels. At one level, human beings may be analyzed into patterns of motives and competencies interacting with their environments. At the next level, they may be viewed as wholes in the context of a wider pattern of groups and organizations. To characterize and differentiate these groups, organizations , and societies, psychologists need descriptors at a different level. Yet, as the case studies illustrate, the interactions flow both ways. Psychologists will not get very far in understanding the reasons why human organizations and societies are so dysfunc-tional by summing the properties of the individuals who compose them. No amount of evidence relating to the extent of human destruction of human habitat or of people's awareness of the extent of that destruction will …