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The scientific study of creativity, which began in the midnineteenth century among English naturalists concerned with “hereditary genius,” took a great leap forward in America after the Second World War. It was propelled then by the same “never again!” spirit that animated the study of prejudice and resulted in a summa of prejudice study, Gordon Allport's The Nature of Prejudice (1954). Prejudice and creativity seemed like the “bad” and “good” sides of the same coin. Scientists felt that if they could understand prejudice, they could work to prevent another Holocaust; and if they could understand creativity, they could contribute to the American scientific competition against the Soviets, channeling talent of the sort that had made the Manhattan Project such a success.
Of course, when scientific studies are so immediately utilitarian in motive, they are usually framed to yield instant answers or to confirm some preexisting answer. In the 1950s, studies of specific prejudices were neglected, as all prejudices were assumed to be similar and all prejudiced people were authoritarian “ethnocentrists.” Creativity study fared better because the major American student of creativity, Lewis Terman, had already begun to break down a misleadingly vague definition of creativity as superior intelligence, so the assumption that all highly intelligent people are creative, and creative similarly, did not congeal. Terman's work had focused on a prejudice about intelligence that he had observed, having been the victim of it himself. Children identified as precociously highly intelligent were expected to experience (or encouraged to experience) an intellectual and social decline as they matured: “Early ripe, early rotten.” By studying over time one very bright group of children (using scales created on the basis of Alfred Binet's “intelligence quotient,” or IQ) and one very dull group, Terman showed that the expectation that the bright ones would decline was