by Guy Claxton
For scientists, the stimulus is often an unexplained detail or incongruity. The imaginative seed that finally flowered in the theory of relativity was the teenage Einstein’s attempt to imagine what it would be like to ride on a beam of light. While making a routine check through three miles of computer print-out from the radio telescope, a young Cambridge astrophysicist spotted just a few traces that puzzled her. They could easily have been ignored, or written off as noise. But, with a lot of subsequent hard work, this observation finally resulted in the discovery of a completely new type of star. Out of hundreds of tiny fruit flies, one had a misshapen eye. A biologist could not help wondering why. Five years later, his investigations have led him to the discovery of a kind of receptor protein that may well be implicated in the production of cancer cells.3
In the commercial world, the competitive edge belongs to the executive or product developer who is capable of sensing the potential in an apparent setback, or taking time to mull over the meaning of a quirk in the market. And the reflective accounts of artists, too, reveal the importance of this sensitivity to poignant trifles. In the preface to his story ‘The Spoils of Poynton’, Henry James explains how essential such details are. One Christmas Eve he was dining with friends when the lady beside him made, as he puts it, ‘one of those allusions that I have always found myself recognising on the spot as “germs” . . . Most of the stories straining to shape under my hand have sprung from [such] a . . . precious particle. Such is the interesting truth about the stray suggestion, the wandering word, the vague echo, at the touch of which the novelist’s imagination winces as at the prick of some sharp point: its virtue is all in its needle-like quality, the power to penetrate as finely as possible.’4
It seems that such seeds implant themselves only in those who at an unconscious level are already prepared. Even if the issue is an intellectual rather than an artistic one, its recognition is personal, affective, and even aesthetic (such as Nobel laureate Paul Berg talking about how important, in his work, was the sense of ‘taste’ for a problem or an approach). Novelist Dorothy Canfield, in the same vein as Henry James, recounts the incident that formed the nucleus of her story ‘Flint and Fire’. She had some business with a neighbour, and to get to his house had to walk along a narrow path through dark pines, beside a brook swollen with melted snow. Emerging from the wood, she found the old man sitting silent and alone in front of his cottage. Having done her business, and keen not to offend against country protocol, she sat beside him to chat for a few minutes.
We talked very little, odds and ends of neighbourhood gossip, until the old man, shifting his position, drew a long breath and said, ‘Seems to me I never heard the brook sound so loud as it has this spring.’ There came instantly to my mind the recollection that his grandfather had drowned himself in that brook, and I sat silent, shaken by that thought and by the sound of his voice . . . I felt my own heart contract dreadfully with helpless sympathy . . . and, I hope this is not as ugly as it sounds, I knew at the same instant that I would try to get that pang of emotion into a story and make other people feel it.5
Stephen Spender said that his experience of inspiration was that of a ‘line or a phrase or a word or sometimes something still vague, a dim cloud of an idea which I feel must be condensed into a shower of words’.
So the seed will not germinate unless it makes contact with a ‘body of knowledge’ of the right kind, in a congenial state. But what exactly is the ‘right’ kind? The evidence from studies of conspicuous innovators suggests that this pre-existing body is most fecund when it is full of rich experience – but not to the point where it has become so familiar that it is automated and fixed. One must have the evidence on which to draw, and one must know enough to be able to recognise a good idea when it comes. Clearly one cannot be creative in vacuo. But if one is too steeped in the problem, the danger is that the grooves of thought become so worn that they do not allow a fresh perception, or a mingling of different currents of ideas, to occur. Recall the experiments with the water jars, and the fact that people quite quickly became ‘set in their ways’. The more experience they had had with the complex rule, the less likely they were to spot the simpler solution when it became available. Studies of creative individuals generally show an inverted U-shaped relationship between creativity and age. In mathematics and the physical sciences, for example, the age of peak creativity is between twenty-five and thirty-five.6
To give a more specific example: the New York Times carried a front-page article on 18 February 1993 reporting the discovery of the first successful technique for eliminating the AIDS virus from human cells in vitro, and also for preventing the infection of healthy cells. The inventor of this method was a medical graduate student, Yung Kang Chow, who, precisely because of his relative inexperience, was able to see through a blocking assumption which researchers had, up to that point, been unconsciously making. Chow speculated: ‘Perhaps by virtue of being a graduate student and not having learned much medicine yet, I had more naive insight into the problem.’ Seeing through an existing, invisible assumption, which is often the key to creativity, requires a mind that is informed but not deformed; channelled but not rutted.7
Intuition, as we have seen, tends to work best in situations that are complex or unclear, in which the information that is given may be sketchy or incomplete, and in which progress can only be made by those who can, in Jerome Bruner’s famous phrase, ‘go beyond the information given’, and are able to draw upon their own knowledge in order to develop fruitful hunches and hypotheses. Both novelist and scientist may well need to go out and collect more ‘data’, but the creative idea comes from bringing into maximum contact the ‘problem specification’, the data, and one’s own store of experience and expertise; allowing these to resonate together as intimately and as flexibly as possible, so that the full range of meaning and possibility of both current data and past experience are extracted. The good intuitive is the person who is ready, willing and able to make a lot out of a little.
If you insist on having high-quality information from impeccable sources before you are willing to form a judgement, you may reduce the occasions on which you are obviously ‘wrong’. You will make instead ‘errors of omission’ that are often less visible. By adopting such a conservative attitude, you may also fail to make use of the more tentative, holistic responses that are authorised by the unconscious. On the other hand, if you are indiscriminately intuitive, you are more ready to back hunches on the faintest of whims. The crucial question concerning intuition, therefore, is how to relate to conscious and unconscious in such a way that both kinds of mistake are minimised; so that you are open to the promptings of the undermind, willing to hear and acknowledge them, yet not overrespectful or lacking in discernment.
Are people differentially willing to make judgements and decisions on the basis of inadequate (conscious) information? And if so, of those who are willing, are some better at it than others? Studies by Malcolm Westcott at Vassar College in America show that the answer to both these questions is a clear ‘yes’. Westcott gave his undergraduate subjects one example of a relationship that could hold between two words or two numbers, and their task was to show that they had discovered the rule or relationship by adding the correct ‘partner’ to another word or number. So they might be shown ‘2, 6’, and asked to complete the pair ‘10, ?’, or ‘mouse, rat’, and then ‘weekend, ?’. But subjects were also given other sealed clues, which they could ask to be revealed, one by one, before they were ready to give their answer. They were free to look at as many or as few of these other clues as they wished before responding. When the students gave their answers, they were also asked to rate how confident they were that they were in fact correct. Westcott was thus able to take three measures for each problem: whether the solution was right or wrong; how many clues people wanted to see before they gave their response; and how confident they were. He repeated the experiment with several different groups of subjects both in England and Ameri
ca, and with different kinds of problems.
He found that people differ markedly, and consistently, on all three measures of their performance, so much so that it was possible to identify four quite different sub-groups. There were those who typically required very little information before offering their solutions, and who were likely to be correct. These he called the ‘successful intuitives’. Then there were those who also took little extra information, but who tended to be wrong – the ‘wild guessers’. The third group required a lot of information before being willing to respond, but were generally successful when they did: the ‘cautious successes’. And finally there were those who made use of all the information they could lay their hands on, but who still made a lot of mistakes, the ‘cautious failures’.
Westcott also gave various personality tests to his subjects, so that he was able to see what the characteristics of the successful intuitives (and of the other groups) were. He found that the good intuiters tend to be rather ‘introverted’; they like to keep out of the social limelight, but feel self-sufficient and trust their own judgement. They like to make up their own minds about things, and to resist being controlled by others. They tend to be unconventional, and comfortable in their unconventionality. In social gatherings they are ‘composed’, but are capable of feeling strongly, and showing their feelings in more intimate or solitary situations. They enjoy taking risks, and are willing to expose themselves to criticism and challenge. They can accept or reject criticism as necessary, and they are willing to change in ways they deem to be appropriate. They describe themselves as ‘independent’, ‘foresighted’, ‘confident’ and ‘spontaneous’. ‘They explore uncertainties and entertain doubts far more than the other groups do, and they live with these doubts and uncertainties without fear.’8
In contrast, the ‘wild guessers’ are much more socially orientated. But ‘their interactions are characterized by considerable strife, they seem to be quite self-absorbed, and their “affective investments” seem to be directed towards themselves’. These traits often manifest themselves as ‘a driven and anxious unconventionality, coupled with strong and rigid opinions, and overlaid with cynicism. . .’ They describe themselves as ‘alert’, ‘quick’, ‘headstrong’ and ‘cynical’. Westcott comments that these people ‘appear to be striving for a grasp of reality which so far eludes them, and they are likely to attempt different modes of attack [on uncertainty] in a somewhat chaotic manner’.
The ‘cautious successes’ are distinguished by ‘a very strong preference for order, certainty and control’, and they have a high respect for authority. They are well-socialized, in the sense that their stated interests and values are in the mainstream of their culture, but they do not recognize that they have been influenced in this. Their desire for certainty and order seems to lead them to some social awkwardness and anxiety in the uncertain world of interpersonal relations. Affect is difficult for them to handle, unless it is very well structured, and they describe themselves as ‘cautious’, ‘kind’, ‘modest’ and ‘confident’. The overall picture of this group, according to Westcott, is ‘one of conservative, cautious, somewhat repressive people who function well in situations where expectations are well-established and well met’: d-mode types, we may assume.
Finally, the ‘cautious failures’ have a view of the world ‘in which everything is risky at best, and they are essentially powerless to influence or control it. There is a broadly generalized passivity, a sensitivity to – and felt inability to deal with – injustice, and a wish for a quiet, certain status quo; through all of this they lack self-confidence . . . They are quite conservative, presumably as the best defence against the great uncertainties of life, and they seem to wander through life just managing to keep their heads above water, not making waves. They see themselves as “cautious”, “kind” and “modest”.’
Perhaps the most significant of all these interesting findings is that the group who are most at ease with uncertainty and doubt, the most able to ‘live with it’, are the group who are most able to make successful use of the inadequate information they have. They can use their unconscious resources to help them make good guesses in uncertain situations, and are willing to do so. This provides some powerful empirical corroboration for the idea that the flight from the experience of uncertainty pushes people into the exclusive use of a cognitive mode which is ill suited to dealing with some puzzling situations. It is also very significant that, having reviewed the relevant studies to date, Westcott concludes that ‘intuition is most likely to occur when the information on which an inference is based is excessively complex, apparently absent or limited, or when the time necessary for explicit manipulation of data is not available. . . These are all conditions which remove the thinker from direct application of adult, socially validated logic.’9 American social scientist Donald Schon has recently argued that it is situations of just this sort that are routinely faced by professionals such as teachers and lawyers.10 Although there are bodies of helpful precedents and maxims, such people spend much of their time dealing with cases that are sufficiently unique, and sufficiently complex, to prevent the straightforward application of any rule-book. They are off the well-laid-out highways of ‘technical rationality’, trying to find their way through what Schon refers to as the ‘swampy lowlands’ of professional practice.
Sometimes this resonating of data and experience – perception and cognition – happens quickly. Westcott’s puzzles are sufficiently simplified and stylised to allow intuition to work quite rapidly. Not much experience has to be brought to bear. No remote analogies or metaphors need to be found. No very subtle patterns connecting apparently disparate elements have to be uncovered. Very often, though, when the predicament is more intricate, the undermind needs to be left to its own devices for a while, and then the need for patience – the ability to tolerate uncertainty, to stay with the feeling of not-knowing for a while, to stand aside and let a mental process that can neither be observed nor directed take its course – becomes all important.
Someone who cannot abide uncertainty is therefore unable to provide the womb that creative intuition needs. Milton Rokeach, having, as we saw in Chapter 4, showed that creativity is enhanced when people are forced to slow down, concludes that ‘differences between people characterised as rigid, and others characterised as less rigid, may be attributable . . . to personality differences in time availability . . . Time availability [i.e. the willingness to think slowly] makes possible broader cognitions, more abstract thinking . . . and consequently greater flexibility.’ And he goes on to offer a plausible speculation as to how these differences may arise. ‘Some individuals, because of past experiences with frustrating situations involving delay of need satisfaction, become generally incapable of tolerating frustrating situations. To allay anxiety, such individuals learn to react relatively quickly to new problems . . . The inevitable consequence is behavioural rigidity.’11 Whether one is or is not a good intuiter therefore turns out to be a matter of cognitive habits or dispositions – but these are underpinned by emotional and personal characteristics that may be quite deep-seated. If one is threatened by the experience of ignorance, then one cannot dare to wait, and may, as a result, cling to a mode of cognition – d-mode – that is purposeful and busy, seeming to offer a sense of direction and control, which may be the wrong tool for the job in hand.
There is a wealth of evidence to confirm the common impression that when people feel threatened, pressurised, judged or stressed, they tend to revert to ways of thinking that are more clear-cut, more tried and tested and more conventional: in a word, less creative. Studies with the Luchins’ water jars problem have shown that adherence to the over-complicated solution, when an easier one becomes available, is increased by stress. In an old study (which would certainly not be approved these days by an ethics committee), students were told that, on the basis of a previously administered questionnaire, there was evidence that they possessed some ‘maladapted personality features’,
and that their performance on the water jars problem would clarify the situation. The more threatened the subjects felt, the more tenaciously they clung to the outdated solution, and the less likely they were to spot the new possibility.12
Less severe degrees of stress also disrupt performance. Arthur Combs and Charles Taylor gave people the task of encrypting some sentences according to the kind of simple transposition code that one finds in spy stories in children’s comics. Some of the sentences were ‘incidentally’ of a personal nature, such as ‘My family do not respect my judgement’, while others were neutral (‘The campus grew quite drab in winter’). Some of the neutral sentences were preceded by the experimenter saying mildly, ‘Can’t you do it a little bit faster?’ The ‘personal’ sentences tended to be encoded more slowly, and with more mistakes, but the worst condition of all was when a neutral sentence was accompanied by the time pressure. Even in such a straightforward task, where the degree of creativity required is minimal, the exhortation to ‘hurry up’ is entirely counterproductive.13
The deleterious effect of time pressure on the quality of thinking is also shown in a study by Kruglansky and Freund. Students were given some personal data about a hypothetical applicant for a managerial job and asked to predict his likely success in the position. Half the students were given positive information followed by negative, and the other group were given the same information in the reverse order. Those students who received the positive information first gave significantly higher predictions of success than the others. And this tendency was exaggerated when the students were asked to make their judgements against the clock. What seems to happen is that we build up an intuitive picture of the situation as we go along, and it takes work to ‘dismantle’ this picture and start again. So if later information seems to be at odds with the picture so far, we may unconsciously decide to reinterpret the dissonant information, rather than radically reorganise the picture. And the more we feel under pressure, the less likely we are to make the investment of ‘starting from scratch’. This tenacity is a considerable pitfall for intuition, for when we are making real-life decisions it often happens that information is not available to us all at once, but arrives piece by piece. If we ‘make up our minds’ quickly and intuitively, it means that later pieces of information may be ignored or downgraded if they do not happen to confirm the judgement that has already been made.14
