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Institute of Personality Assessment and Research

The Institute of Personality Assessment and Research (IPAR) was where the study of personality characteristics related to creativity emerged as a major topic in the 1950s, samples of highly creative individuals were then intensively assessed, and many aspects of creative personality have been studied. This entry describes IPAR's origins and main contributions to creativity research.

Origins and Early Years

IPAR was founded at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1949 to study leadership, originality, soundness, and other kinds of effective functioning using empirical techniques of the relatively new field of personality psychology. The first director, Donald MacKinnon, had studied with Henry Murray at Harvard and headed one of the stations of the Office of Strategic Services in World War II. MacKinnon brought together a talented staff with diverse interests, all committed to assessing subjects by means of inventories, perceptual-cognitive tests, and interviews, and particularly by observing them in informal interaction, group discussions, and situational tests, and recording these observations by such means as ratings and adjective check lists. During the 1950s, many important tools for describing people were developed at IPAR, including Harrison Gough's California Psychological Inventory and Jack Block's Q Sort, still in use today.

Originality was one of the areas of effective functioning discussed at IPAR from the beginning, even before J. P. Guilford's 1950 American Psychological Association presidential address brought its empirical measurement to prominence in psychology. Frank Barron argued that originality was almost habitual with people who showed any markedly novel insight, whereas other people were virtually never original: thus, patterns of enduring personality characteristics must encourage or discourage original acts. In a sample of military officers studied at IPAR, Barron measured the consistency of original behavior across several tasks. Using measures that he and his colleagues had been developing, he supported hypotheses that originality was related to independence in judgment, complexity of outlook, forcefulness, and disinclination to use suppression to control impulse.

The Study of Highly Creative Persons

The emphasis at IPAR shifted from originality to the creative person after the Carnegie Corporation funded a proposal to study highly creative individuals. MacKinnon described the rationale for IPAR's approach: Because true creativity included the development of new ideas to the full, it should be studied after it had been realized in identifiable creative products, and the criterion measure of it should be ratings by qualified experts. Following this procedure, MacKinnon directed a study of architects, Barron of writers, Gough of research scientists, and Ravenna Helson and Richard Crutchfield of mathematicians. Without claiming that the creative personality was entirely the same across fields, MacKinnon reviewed consistent findings that emerged across these studies on many personality inventories and scales. Though the earlier work on originality and other creative traits continued to find support, motivational factors, such as values, interests, and affective involvement in work, now received emphasis. For example, MacKinnon studied architects at three levels of creativity, and applied to them Otto Rank's theory of creative, conflicted, and adapted types, based on how individuals dealt with the conflict between their own will and the will of parents and society.

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