Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention

by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi

The domain of mental testing, including the whole concept of the IQ test and its uses, owes much of its success to the U.S. Army’s need to have a way of selecting recruits for World War I. Afterward the testing technology was transported into the field of education, where it has achieved a prominence that many educators find disturbing. Creativity testing owes its existence to World War II, when the air force commissioned J. P. Guilford, a psychologist at the University of Southern California, to study the subject. The air force wanted to select pilots who in an emergency—the unexpected failure of a gear or instrument—would respond with appropriately original behavior, saving themselves and the plane. The usual IQ tests were not designed to tap originality, and hence Guilford was funded to develop what later became known as the tests for divergent thinking.