John M. Eger, a distinguished professor at San Diego State University who was an advisor to two U.S. presidents, has written a timely book titled Arts Education and the Innovation Economy: Ensuring America's Success in the 21^st Century. This work appears to be relevant to the idea that Jobs' coursework in the arts influenced his capacity to innovate.

Eger also recently wrote an interesting article on The Huffington Post titled Debate Over Intelligence and Creativity Holds Little Relevance writing that "an age old question has been raised anew in the last few weeks." 

The question is: What is the relationship between intelligence and creativity?

Eger notes that "What makes all this so important is simply that creativity is now widely recognized as one of the most important ingredients to success in the new economy."

I couldn't agree more. In their most recent book, That Used To Be Us, Thomas Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum highlight repeatedly that what matters is the ability to create and out innovate our nation's competition in the coming years. Eger thinks that the age old debate over intelligence and creativity holds little relevance. I think that this debate holds a great deal of relevance, and I'm going to explain why.

We Know How to Measure Intelligence Quite Well

For whatever reason, there is a widespread public belief that we don't know how to measure intelligence and creativity very well. The truth is that we have over a century of research demonstrating that we know how to measure intelligence quite well (see The g Factor by Arthur R. Jensen which illustrates a quantitative definition of intelligence that is widely-although not universally-accepted in the intelligence community). It's creativity that we don't have a reasonable consensus on how to assess. And it all comes down to psychological measurement, and specifically the concepts of reliability and validity.

A Short (and Simplified) Primer on Psychological Measurement

The tricky part of measurement in psychology (or psychometrics) is that we can only get indirect measures of what we call constructs (such as intelligence or creativity), which are theoretical entities. What we use to get at these constructs are (imperfect) instruments like an intelligence or standardized test or a test with items intending to measure creativity. In psychometrics, two key concepts are reliability and validity. In order to have "construct validity," which basically means the theoretical construct actually exists and is not just this concept floating around in our heads, at the very least we need to know that a measure of this construct is both reliable and valid. Reliability is basically the idea that if we take a test more than one time, our score will be about the same each time. If a test is not reliable, then the test cannot have validity. Validity is basically the idea that the test is valid for predicting certain outcomes. A test is valid in the sense that it can be used to predict some real world outcomes such as earning a Ph.D., patent, publication, or even tenure at a top U.S. university. What my colleagues and I have shown in our research is that the math portion of the Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT) can be used to validly predict these outcomes, which are clearly important innovation benchmarks for the economy.

Why this is relevant to the age old intelligence and creativity debate is that intelligence tests have been widely demonstrated to be both reliable and valid for predicting important real world outcomes.  However, it is not as clear whether creativity researchers have reached reasonable consensus on 1. a definition of creativity (verbal or quantitative in nature) and 2. a reliable and valid measure of creativity that predicts important real world outcomes.

The Jangle Fallacy: What You Call Something Doesn't Make It So

"How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg? Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg." -attributed to Abraham Lincoln

In my article If You Are Creative, Are You Also Intelligent? I mentioned that using two different terms doesn't necessarily mean you're talking about two entirely different things. This comes from Truman Kelly's jangle fallacy, or "the use of two separate words or expressions covering in fact the same basic situation, but sounding different, as if they were in truth different." The key take home message of Kelly's insight is this: What we choose to name or label a construct is largely independent of what we are actually able to measure when we use a test to assess the construct.

For example, I can come up with the term creative intelligence and tell you how important creative intelligence is for the future of innovation. I personally think it sounds quite compelling (and I'm probably not the first person to use this term). But it really does not matter whether I have come up with this fancy term. What does matter is whether or not I can actually reliably and validly measure this psychological construct I've now invented. And perhaps even more importantly, what if the test I invent to measure creative intelligence just ends up measuring intelligence to a large degree?  I certainly would not want, if I could help it, to reinvent the wheel.

Eger noted that "We may never figure out how to measure creativity—although some states are trying."

I think what is more critical than ever is to figure out how much overlap there is between intelligence and creativity (and correspondingly how much and where they do not overlap). That's why Emily Nusbaum and Paul Silvia's work is so critical because they are pursuing the question: Are intelligence and creativity really so different? The flipside of this question is: Are intelligence and creativity really so much the same? And perhaps even more important is the question: How critical is intelligence for the various domains of creativity? We know that intelligence is likely important for any field of creativity that requires a cognitive component or problem solving, but is it also important for areas in the arts? Howard Gardner once noted that he thought the individuals profiled in his excellent book Creating Minds (which included people from the arts) likely all had to have an IQ of at least 120 which indicates they were at least in the top 10% of ability.