543973

research-article2014
PPSXXX10.1177/1745691614543973SimontonMad-Genius Paradox

Perspectives on Psychological Science

The Mad-Genius Paradox: Can Creative 2014, Vol. 9(5) 470480

The Author(s) 2014
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DOI: 10.1177/1745691614543973
Highly Creative People More Mentally Ill? pps.sagepub.com

Dean Keith Simonton

University of California, Davis

Abstract
The persistent mad-genius controversy concerns whether creativity and psychopathology are positively or negatively
correlated. Remarkably, the answer can be both! The debate has unfortunately overlooked the fact that the creativity-
psychopathology correlation can be expressed as two independent propositions: (a) Among all creative individuals,
the most creative are at higher risk for mental illness than are the less creative and (b) among all people, creative
individuals exhibit better mental health than do noncreative individuals. In both propositions, creativity is defined by
the production of one or more creative products that contribute to an established domain of achievement. Yet when
the typical cross-sectional distribution of creative productivity is taken into account, these two statements can both
be true. This potential compatibility is here christened the mad-genius paradox. This paradox can follow logically
from the assumption that the distribution of creative productivity is approximated by an inverse power function
called Lotkas law. Even if psychopathology is specified to correlate positively with creative productivity, creators as
a whole can still display appreciably less psychopathology than do people in the general population because the
creative geniuses who are most at risk represent an extremely tiny proportion of those contributing to the domain. The
hypothesized paradox has important scientific ramifications.

Keywords
creativity, genius, psychopathology, productivity, Lotkas law

The mad-genius controversy is certainly one of the oldest
and most problematic issues in psychology (Becker,
1978). Ancient Greeks and Romans speculated on the
possible connection between exceptional creativity and
psychopathology (e.g., Seneca, trans. 1932), and research
on the subject continues to the present day (Kaufman,
2014; Silvia & Kaufman, 2010). Moreover, psychologists
often take extreme positions on the topic.
On one side are psychologists who maintain that the
whole concept of the creative mad genius is pure myth,
without an ounce of empirical support (e.g., Sawyer,
2012; Schlesinger, 2009). Indeed, humanistic and positive
psychologists often argue that outstanding creativity con-
stitutes a sure sign of superior mental health (Bacon,
2005; Cassandro & Simonton, 2002). Maslows (1970)
cases of self-actualizers included many highly creative
individuals, such as Benjamin Franklin, John Keats, Pierre
Renoir, and Franz Joseph Haydn (see also May, 1975;
Rogers, 1954).
On the other side are psychologists who believe that
some connection exists between creativity and psycho-
pathology, although few if any would now claim that
creative geniuses are necessarily insane (Eysenck, 1995;
James, 1902; cf. Babcock, 1895; Lombroso, 1891). Instead,
the highly creative share certain cognitive and disposi-
tional traits with people who have some marked vulner-
ability for mental or emotional instability (Carson, 2014).
A shared vulnerability can induce symptoms associated
with psychopathology even when the creator falls short
of a clinical diagnosis. This positive linkage is supported
by research using experimental, psychometric, psychiat-
ric, and historiometric methods (Simonton, 2010, 2014a).
Although any one method must admit the possibility of
Corresponding Author:
Dean Keith Simonton, Department of Psychology, One Shields Ave.,
University of California, Davis, Davis, CA 95616-8686
E-mail: dksimonton@ucdavis.edu

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Mad-Genius Paradox 471
certain artifacts, the diverse methods do not suffer from
the same potential problems, and thus the convergence
among the alternative approaches must provide reason-
able endorsement.
Rather than further examine the pros and cons, it may
prove more instructive to consider seriously a third
option: Both camps might be perfectly correct! It may
depend merely on how researchers frame the question
and what that question actually implies. To see how this
might happen, consider the following two empirical
propositions.
Proposition 1: Among all creative people, highly cre-
ative persons have higher rates of psychopathology
than do less creative persons. In particular, the prob-
ability that an individual displays one or more psycho-
pathological symptoms is a positive linear function of
that persons lifetime creative productivity within a
given domain (cf. Damian & Simonton, 2014; Ludwig,
1992; Simonton, 2014b).
Proposition 2: Among all people, creative persons
have lower rates of psychopathology than do noncre-
ative persons. A creative individual is here defined as
one who creates at least one product that satisfies the
requirements for creativity in a given domain as deter-
mined by expert appraisals (Simonton, 2013; cf.
Kaufman & Beghetto, 2009).
Are these propositions contradictory? At first glance, it
might seem so. The first appears to support the mad-
genius hypothesis, whereas the second seems to reject
that very same hypothesis. Yet the argument here is that
both of these propositions can be not only true but also
mutually supportive. As a group, creative people can be
more mentally healthy than noncreative people. Yet
among all creative people, those who ascend to the sta-
tus of creative genius can exhibit more proclivities toward
mental illness than creative colleagues who do not attain
that high status. Specifically, creative productivity, which
is considered a defining characteristic of genius (Albert,
1975), correlates positively with tendencies toward exhib-
iting certain symptoms or traits associated with psycho-
pathology. This conjectured compatibility between
Propositions 1 and 2 is here termed the mad-genius
paradox.
Treatment of this paradox begins with a formal demon-
stration. Because this demonstration is necessarily abstract,
it is followed by a discussion that fleshes out the mathe-
matical argument, both conceptually and empirically.
Demonstration
The argument in favor of the consistency of Propositions
1 and 2 is based not on empirical data but on pure
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logicalthough the logic itself is founded on a huge
amount of prior empirical data. These data concern the
cross-sectional distribution of creative productivity, the
statistical feature that (a) underlies the variation in life-
time creative productivity that is an essential part of
Proposition 1 and (b) permits the distinction between
creative and noncreative persons required for Proposition
2. I first discuss this distribution and then show how its
distinctive nature would resolve the mad-genius para-
dox.1 Many paradoxes depend on some trick that shows
that the contradiction is only apparent, not real. Classic
examples are Zenos paradoxes, which seem to prove
logically what cannot possibly be true intuitively: In his
arrow paradox, arrows seem to be unable to reach their
targets, but of course they can. As will be seen, the pro-
posed mad-genius paradox also hinges on a kind of con-
ceptual trick, but a highly important one that has
implications for understanding the nature of the creativ-
ity-psychopathology relationship.
Productivity
Psychologists are most likely to posit that individual dif-
ferences on any cognitive, personality, or behavioral trait
are adequately described by the symmetrical Gaussian
distribution, or normal distribution (Simonton, 2008).
Indeed, the most commonly used statistical techniques
postulate normality from the onset. In stark contrast,
when it comes to creative productivity, this assumption
could not be more wrong (OBoyle & Aguinas, 2012;
Walberg, Strykowski, Rovai, & Hung, 1984). It is not sim-
ply that the distribution is highly skewed, for no conven-
tional data transformation can possibly render the
distribution normal (such as square roots or logarithms).
For the creative individuals that define Proposition 1 (i.e.,
those who have created one or more products), the peak
of the distribution is invariably located at the very start, at
the lowest available score (i.e., a single work) rather than
falling somewhere between the lowest and highest scores
(OBoyle & Aguinas, 2012). In short, the modal level of
lifetime creative output among creators is a single nota-
ble product. Thereafter, as the number of total high-
impact products increases, the expected number of
creators producing that amount declines in a negative
monotonic but decelerating function that somewhat
resembles the well-known Ebbinghaus forgetting curve.
To better illuminate the nature of this distribution, I
first present a representative example and then provide a
mathematical specification that will later provide the
basis for the paradox.
Concrete illustration.According to the original offi-
cial guide to the New York Metropolitan Opera, as of the
early 1980s, just 72 composers had created the
472 Simonton

Table 1. Creative Productivity Distribution According to Lotkas Law and the Psychopathology Distribution When the Rate Has a
Positive Linear Relation With Creative Productivity

Total creative Number of persons creating Proportion R(n) showing Number of persons of 155
productivity (n) exactly n total products psychopathology creators showing symptoms
1 100 (100.00) 0.0 0 (0.00)
2 25 (25.00) 0.1 3 (2.50)
3 11 (11.11) 0.2 2 (2.22)
4 6 (6.25) 0.3 2 (1.88)
5 4 (4.00) 0.4 2 (1.60)
6 3 (2.78) 0.5 1 (1.39)
7 2 (2.04) 0.6 1 (1.22)
8 2 (1.56) 0.7 1 (1.09)
9 1 (1.23) 0.8 1 (0.99)
10 1 (1.00) 0.9 1 (0.90)
Sum 155 (154.98) 14 (13.792)

Note: Here creative productivity, or n, is the total number of lifetime contributions, and the corresponding number of creators is given by Lotkas
law f(n) = c/n2, where f(n) is the number of creators with exactly n creative products assuming the constant c = 100 and where 1 n 10. In
line with Proposition 1, the rate of psychopathology for a given level of creative productivity is defined by R(n) = (n 1)/10. Then the number
of creative individuals exhibiting some identifiable psychopathology is then given by f(n) R(n), that is, the product of the second and third
columns. The values in parentheses are the exact values for f(n) and f(n) R(n) used in the calculations; the values preceding the parentheses
have been rounded to the nearest integer so that they can represent whole persons. Hence, according to the two summations, there are
155 creators, only 14 of whom show symptoms of psychopathology.

core repertoire of 150 great operas produced by this
world-famous company (Freeman, 1984). Of these 72,
only 2 composers contributed 10 or more operas (10 by
Richard Wagner and 15 by Giuseppe Verdi), whereas
fully 49 were credited with only 1 each (e.g., Luigi Cheru-
bini, Lo Delibes, Friedrich von Flotow, Alberto Ginas-
tera, Mikhail Glinka, Scott Joplin, Franz Lehr, and Thea
Musgrave). The remaining 21 opera composers were col-
lectively responsible for the final 76 contributions, or an
average of only 3.62 works each, although the vast major-
ity of these composers contributed just 2 or 3 works.
Only a small minority contributed between 4 and 9
operas, and thus they demarcate the onset of the upper
tail of the distribution.
So-called one-hit wonders clearly dominate the oper-
atic productivity distribution (cf. Kozbelt, 2008). More
than two thirds (68%) of the composers satisfy only the
minimum criterion for being considered a creator in this
highly demanding domain (i.e., they wrote only one
opera). Hence, to anticipate the upcoming argument a
tiny bit, whatever personal attributes these 49 creators
might collectively possess might easily overwhelm the
characteristics shared by the 2 most prolific contributors.
Mathematical specification. Although cross-sectional
distributions such as the one just presented have been
described different ways, a decent approximation is the
so-called Lotkas law (Egghe, 2005; Lotka, 1926; Price,
1986). This law can be formally defined as follows: If n is
the total lifetime creative output for a given creator, then
the number of creators producing that particular level of
output is predicted by f(n) = c/n2, where c is a constant
that can vary according to the domain of creativity. The
most significant point is that f(n) represents an inverse
power function that first declines very rapidly before lev-
eling off to an asymptote indicating the point at which
nobody in the field has published more than some maxi-
mum amount. The upper tail of the distribution is also
extremely long, much longer than that for the normal
curve (Simon, 1955; cf. Dennis, 1954; Nicholls, 1972).
The first two columns of Table 1 give the number of
products, n, and the corresponding number of creators,
f(n), where c = 100 and n = 1, 2, 3, . . . 10 (i.e., 1 n
10, explicitly excluding values less than 1 or more than
10). Thus, f(5) = 4 signifies that there are 4 individuals
who created exactly 5 products. Although the parentheti-
cal values of f(n) have been maintained to the second
decimal place for purposes of later calculations, each
value given before the parentheses was rounded off to
the nearest integer to provide a more realistic portrayal of
the distribution. (Even creative individuals cannot man-
age to exist in fractions.) Whether rounded or not, the
nature of the distribution is manifest. The modal output
is a single creative product; fully 100 of the creators fall
into this category. This singular act is what qualifies the
individual as being a creator. That said, because the total
number of creators, according to the parameters and
assumptions, is ~155 (154.98, as shown in the last row of
the table), only 55 creators are left to cover the remaining
productivity levels from 2 to 10. Almost half of these, or
25, can each be credited with just 2 lifetime contributions
(which is very close to the mean output of 1.89), and yet

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Mad-Genius Paradox 473
another ~11 (11.11) account for 3 each. All of this amounts
to a precipitous drop given that about 88% of the creators
are now included in the accumulation. From these condi-
tions arises the long subsequent tail, very much like the
scree in the successive eigenvalues of a factor analysis.
The most productive creator in the sample, with 10 cre-
ative products, stands all alone, although rounding to the
nearest integer renders the creator with 9 creative prod-
ucts equally solitary. From the perspective of the normal
distribution, these two suggest outliers who stand heads
and shoulders above the restthe bona fide creative
geniuses.
Specification justification. I must emphasize that the
constant c = 100 was chosen simply to keep later analy-
ses sufficiently succinct to make the necessary points
about the paradox. The resulting Lotka distribution would
describe a domain of creativity in which major products
are few and far betweensuch as creating successful
novels, histories, or operas. In such domains, producing
even a dozen high-impact works in a career would mark
a truly exceptional achievement. More importantly,
although I will assume that c = 100, the resolution of the
mad-genius paradox is not by any means contingent on
the particular value chosen for c. It could easily be
increased to accommodate the productivity seen in
domains that feature smaller least publishable units,
such as journal articles in science or patent applications
in technology (Price, 1986). Just as significantly, the solu-
tion to the paradox is not even dependent on the specific
application of Lotkas law. Any inverse power law of the
form f(n) = c/na, where a > 1 (e.g., the Pareto distribu-
tion, in which a = 1.5), would yield comparable conclu-
sions regarding the paradox. Propositions 1 and 2 can
still prove consistent. Lotkas law was chosen simply
because of its empirical robustness as an approximation
and the simplicity of its formulation (Egghe, 2005).2
Psychopathology
Given the distribution of creative productivity shown in
Table 1, the next step in the demonstration is to specify
how proclivities toward psychopathology might vary as a
function of creative productivity, as denoted by n in
Lotkas law. Although psychopathology is probably best
viewed as a dimensional or quantitative variable that rep-
resents a range of clinical and subclinical symptoms (e.g.,
Post, 1994; Simonton, 2014b; see also Caspi etal., 2014),
I will simplify the analysis by treating it as a discrete or
qualitative variable (e.g., Damian & Simonton, 2014;
Ludwig, 1992). For example, it might be defined as the
appearance of symptoms that are sufficiently severe as to
incapacitate the individuals creative work either tempo-
rarily (e.g., the paranoid episodes that sometimes
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stymied mathematician John Nash, as portrayed in the
2001 film A Beautiful Mind; Grazer & Howard, 2001) or
permanently (e.g., recurrent depressions that eventually
lead to suicide, as in the case of Sylvia Plath; Kaufman,
2001). In any case, although the actual function may
adopt a variety of forms, it will be assumed just for the
moment that the productivity-psychopathology relation
is defined by a positive linear function (cf. Ko & Kim,
2008; Simonton, 2014b).
Positive linear function. For reasons that will become
more clear shortly, let us simply define the rate of such
symptoms appearing according to the linear equation
R(n) = (n 1)/10, where R(n) is the expected rate for
individuals with exactly n creative products and where n
must lie between 1 and 10, inclusively. This specification
is mathematically equivalent to the linear regression line
R(n) = 0.1 + 0.1 n. The application of this formula is
shown in the third column of Table 1.
By design, the numbers in this psychopathology rate
column have four key features. First, the figures are all
proportions indicating the probabilities that an individual
with n number of creative products might display, even
transiently, disabling symptoms of psychopathology.
Second, these probabilities all increase with n: The more
creative productivity, the higher the likelihood of psycho-
pathology. Third, for creators at the bottom of the distri-
bution, who produced only one creative work, the rate is
set at zero (i.e., 0.1 + 0.1 1 = 0). In other words, almost
two thirds of the creators would manifest no disabling
symptoms! Fourth and last, at the top end of the distribu-
tion, where the creative genius has the maximum output,
the probability of the person experiencing at least one
mental or emotional breakdown increases to 90% (i.e.,
0.1 + 0.1 10 = 0.9). That means that the odds highly
favor some degree of psychopathology in the most pro-
lific creatorsthose who might produce the largest
number of high-impact works or masterpieces.
The hypothesized increased risk associated with the
more productive creators is represented graphically in
Figure 1, where the count of creators per level of output
has been rescaled to a proportion of all creators to facili-
tate direct comparison. On the one hand, the highly
skewed nature of distribution is quite apparent, with the
inevitable mode at n = 1 and a long tail leading to the
maximum set at n = 10 masterworks. On the other hand,
the rapidly increasing risk is also apparent: The creative
geniuses exhibit the highest psychopathology rates.
Paradoxical implication. The third column in Table 1
represents a deliberate imposition of Proposition 1 on
the hypothetical data. Has the truth of Proposition 2 been
rendered impossible by this maneuver? At first, one might
think so, for the mean rate of psychopathological
474 Simonton
1.0
0.9
0.8
0.7
0.6
Proportion
0.5
0.4
0.3
0.2
0.1
0.0
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
Creative Productivity (n)
Fig. 1.Proportion of people at each level of creative productivity
(number of works; black bars) and proportion of people at risk of psy-
chopathology at each level of productivity (gray bars).
symptoms for creative people would seem to equal 0.45.
Almost half of all creators would experience disruptive
mental problemssuggesting that creators might be
more prone to psychopathology than noncreators. But
importantly, that figure results only if the average is com-
puted down the column without paying attention to the
crucial fact that each value of n corresponds to an often
radically different count of the number of creators with
that degree of productivity. Accordingly, a weighted
mean must be calculated that yields the same mean that
would have emerged if the data were first disaggregated
into the 155 separate creators, 100 of whom display no
risk whatsoever for psychopathology.
To carry out the last task, I generated the fourth col-
umn in Table 1, which gives the number of creators of
the 155 who showed symptoms of psychopathology.
The resulting value for each entry is given by the prod-
uct of the second and third columns, f(n) R(n), which
is the number of individuals creating exactly n products
times the rate that those individuals might succumb to
some degree of a mental or emotional disorder. Again,
because we cannot have partial persons, these numbers
are rounded off to the nearest integers, once more put-
ting the exact numbers in parentheses. Although not
much seems to be happening here, the variation looking
minimal, these values address only Proposition 2 when
they are summed up and then divided by the total num-
ber of creators (see the second summation in the last
row of the table). If the sum of 14 is divided by 155 (or
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13.792/154.977), the result is 0.09 (or 0.089)a measly
9%. The latter rate implies that creators as a whole dis-
play only a tenth of the risk seen in the creative genius
at the top of the distribution.
This rate of psychopathological symptoms for the
entire sample of 155 creators is very likely to be smaller
than that seen in the general population, just as suggested
in Proposition 2. For example, using a nationally repre-
sentative sample, Kessler, Chiu, Demler, Merikangas, and
Walters (2005) estimated the lifetime prevalence of any
disorder to be 46.4%, which means that we can set R(0) =
0.46 as an approximation. Given this value, people cre-
ative enough to make at least one distinguished contribu-
tion to a domain remain more mentally healthy than those
who never do. If researchers had obtained a control group
of noncreative individuals with a sample size also equal to
155, they would predict that 71 (rather than just 14) would
exhibit psychopathology. Proposition 2 is thus confirmed
despite the assumed truth of Proposition 1.
10
In contrast, if creative productivity were normally dis-
tributed, with the tails ending at n = 1 and n = 10 and the
center placed midway between, then the rate of mental
illness would be identical with the 0.45 figure mentioned
earlier, which is coincidentally very close to the Kessler
et al. (2005) estimate. After all, about two thirds of the
creators would now fall right in the middle part of the
hypothesized psychopathology dimension (i.e., 1 SD),
and thus would flatly contradict Proposition 2. The highly
skewed inverse power distribution really makes a dra-
matic difference. The general risk rate would increase
fivefold if the productivity distribution were described by
the normal distribution rather than Lotkas law (i.e.,
0.45/0.089 = 5.06), yielding a risk rate comparable with
that of the general population. Obviously, this contrast in
expected psychopathology is far from trivial.
Finally, it cannot be overemphasized that the potential
consistency of Propositions 1 and 2 is not dependent in
any manner on the absolute number of noncreative per-
sons relative to the absolute number of creative persons.
The former number may be much smaller than, exactly
equal to, or much larger than the latter, and the mad-
genius paradox would still hold. It matters not one iota
whether f(0) equals a dozen, a hundred, a thousand, or a
million. The crux of the comparison is not the absolute
numbers but the relative rates: the mean rates of those
persons for whom n 1 and those for whom n = 0.
Discussion
Judging from the hypothetical but plausible statistics gen-
erated in Table 1 and illustrated in Figure 1, both propo-
sitions posed earlier can readily be true, thus confirming
the paradox. In line with Proposition 2, less than 10% of
all individuals making at least one creative contribution
Mad-Genius Paradox 475
to a domain can be expected to suffer from symptoms
sufficiently severe to interfere with their work. Better yet,
nearly two thirds of the total sample of creators (i.e.,
those who made one and only one creative contribution)
have no chance whatsoever of experiencing such a psy-
chological setback. Thus, for the bulk of creators, the rate
of psychopathology is very low. Nevertheless, consistent
with Proposition 1, the former results were predicated on
the assumption that tendencies toward psychopathology
increase with creative productivity, where each additional
masterwork adds a 0.1 increment to the potential rate.
That surprising outcome took full advantage of the well-
established fact that the cross-sectional distribution must
be described by an inverse power function. This distribu-
tion makes the highly prolific creative geniuses such a
tiny percentage of the wholefar less than 1%that the
overall rate of pathology is effectively determined by
their potentially healthier and more numerous one- and
two-hit colleagues.
As noted at the beginning, paradoxes that embody
only apparent contradictions usually depend on some
trick. By now, this trick should be manifest: Whatever the
appearances on first look, Propositions 1 and 2 actually
propose extremely different comparisons. Simply put, the
first proposition compares the more creative people with
the less creative people within the group of creative indi-
viduals, whereas the second proposition compares all
creative people with all noncreative people. Only the lat-
ter comparison requires the introduction of R(0), the rate
of psychopathology for those who have not produced a
single creative product, whereas the former comparison
restricts the analysis to creative individuals with rates
R(1) to R(n). That is why R(0) is omitted from both Table
1 and Figure 1, which present the explicit argument for
Proposition 1. In terms of data analyses, Proposition 1
requires the estimate of a regression line that best fits a
bivariate scatterplot between quantitative variables,
whereas Proposition 2 demands a statistical test of a
mean difference that might be graphically represented by
a histogram. Consequently, the two statements can be
decoupled so that either can be true or false without ref-
erence to the truth or falsity of the other. The specific
decoupling inducing the mad-genius paradox is founded
on the fact that the distribution of creative productivity is
better described by Lotkas law than by the normal
distribution.3
To explain this paradox more fully, I must now briefly
discuss three issues: alternative specifications, substan-
tive explanations, and investigative implications.
Alternative specifications
The previous demonstration was based on the assump-
tion that the risk of psychopathology was a positive
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linear function of creative productivity. Moreover, this
function was specified by a particular regression line:
R(n) = 0.1 + 0.1 n. This particular equation was
selected because it connects two illustrative endpoints:
(a) the 100 1-product creators with zero risk and (b) the
single 10-product creator with a 90% risk. Nonetheless,
alternative specifications that could yield varying out-
comes can be easily hypothesized. For example, the
equation specifying Proposition 1 can be changed so that
the risk at n = 1 is higher, the risk at n = 10 is lower, or
both at once, which would weaken the positive relation
between productivity and psychopathology, even to the
degree that the paradox might entirely vanish. In fact,
nothing prevents the regression slope from becoming
either zero (i.e., there is no relationship between produc-
tivity and psychopathology) or negative (i.e., creative
geniuses are the most mentally healthy). Some published
data actually suggest the latter possibility as a special
case. For instance, Ko and Kim (2008) found that for cre-
ative scientists whose work preserved the current para-
digmsincrementally developing rather than challenging
and overthrowing received theories, questions, and
methodseminence was negatively correlated with psy-
chopathology. Only for scientists who rejected the old
paradigms and introduced new paradigms did the rela-
tion become positive. Given that the strongest correlate
of eminence is lifetime creative productivity (Simonton,
1997), this crossover interaction effect would probably
hold for productivity as well, so that the mad-genius par-
adox might be valid only for scientists leading paradig-
matic revolutions. Revolutionary scientists such as Isaac
Newton and Charles Darwin exhibited conspicuous lev-
els of subclinical psychopathology (Ko & Kim, 2008; Post,
1994).
Matters can be taken even further by dispensing alto-
gether with the linear creativity-psychopathology func-
tions and replacing them with curvilinear relations (cf.
Richards, Kinney, Lunde, Benet, & Merzel, 1988). For
instance, a recent empirical investigation concerned the
relation between eminence and psychopathology across
the five creative domains represented by scientists, think-
ers, writers, artists, and composers (Simonton, 2014b).
Although the associations for literary and artistic creators
were effectively positive linear associations, those for sci-
entists, thinkers, and composers were best described by
curvilinear, single-peaked functions. Furthermore, the
peak for scientists came at much lower levels of psycho-
pathology than the peak for composers, whereas the
peak for the thinkers was in the most severe range
almost but not quite positive monotonic. Still, only the
scientists exhibited a function in which the most severe
psychopathology was associated with less eminence than
having no psychopathology at all. Combining this
inverted-J curve with the skewed distribution would then
476 Simonton
invalidate the mad-genius paradox. In contrast, because
the linear component of the trend for the composers and
thinkers is clearly positive (yielding inverted backward-J
curves), the paradox could apply to those creators almost
as much as to the literary and artistic creators.
Again, these inferences assume a strong correlation
between eminence and creative productivity so that the
former can serve as a proxy variable for the latter. It is
worth pointing out, however, that distributions of emi-
nence are far more skewed than those for creative pro-
ductivity (e.g., Zusne, 1985). Accordingly, the suggested
paradox could actually become more exaggerated when-
ever creativity is assessed by impact rather than output.
In English literature, for example, William Shakespeares
eminence is well out of proportion to the number of
masterworks credited to his pen (Martindale, 1995).
In sum, it is possible to anticipate when the mad-
genius paradox is most prone to emerge in a given cre-
ative domain. The specified association must be analyzed
only in the context of the skewed distribution, which
accentuates whatever happens at the beginning of the
curve where lifetime creative productivity approaches
one and only one major work. Because these one-hit
creators make up around two thirds of all creators in the
domain, they dominate any statistics computed for all
contributors to the domain.4
Substantive explanations
So far, no rationale has been provided for why the mad-
genius paradox might actually be expected. The conjec-
tured harmony of Propositions 1 and 2 was merely
derived from the highly skewed cross-sectional distribu-
tion of creative productivity. However, it would be useful
to identify any psychological processes that might pro-
vide for the phenomenon. These processes can most
likely be grouped into two broad categories.
First, the paradox might ensue from the personal
antecedents of creativity. For instance, Carson (2014) has
systematically studied the role of cognitive disinhibition
in the creative process. To a certain degree, creativity
requires that the person not filter out putatively extrane-
ous ideas and stimuli, thereby allowing the individual to
think outside the boxthe box that defines the con-
straints governing routine thinking. Yet cognitive disinhi-
bition is also associated with increased vulnerability for
psychopathology. In fact, this mental proclivity is posi-
tively associated with elevated scores on psychoticism, a
measure of subclinical personality traits (Eysenck, 1995;
see also Stavridou & Furnham, 1996). Fortunately, the
risk of mental illness can be ameliorated by high general
intelligence, which provides more metacognitive con-
trol, converting a potential liability to a decided asset
(Carson, 2014). Even so, at the higher levels of cognitive
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disinhibition that are likely to be necessary for excep-
tional creative productivity, the ability of intelligence to
exert its moderating effect might become more precari-
ous, which increases the possibility of one or more
psychopathological episodes. After all, the requisite
metacognitive control would become more rare when
the general intelligence required would itself have to
come from the upper tail of its own cross-sectional dis-
tribution (even if, in this case, it was approximately nor-
mal rather than skewed).5 This delicate balance would
too often mean that the vulnerable person could teeter-
totter between creativity and psychopathologyan
instability seen in the lives of many creative geniuses.
Second, the paradox might prove to be an effect of the
personal consequences of creativity. That is, the very pro-
cess of generating creative products can induce stresses
and other ramifications that can threaten mental health.
More specifically, at the commencement of most creative
careers, the situation might be described by Proposition
2, but as careers accumulate creative products, Proposition
1 may tend to kick in. For example, consider the Social
Adjustment Rating Scale that assesses events that disrupt
everyday life (whether for good or ill) and thereby make
the individual more susceptible to certain psychological
disorders (Holmes & Holmes, 1970). Among the items on
this scale is any outstanding personal achievement. A
single one of these events earns the person 28 disrup-
tion points, or about the same as having troubles with
the boss, beginning or ending formal schooling, having a
son or daughter leave home, or gaining a new family
member. Undoubtedly, the creation of a major product,
such as a novel or opera, must obtain at least 28 points if
not far more, and the greater the number of products cre-
ated the more points accumulated, with potential adverse
consequences down the line. Tellingly, roughly positive
linear creativity-psychopathology functions have been
found for writers, artists, thinkers, and revolutionary sci-
entists (Ko & Kim, 2008; Simonton, 2014b). These cre-
ators contribute to low-consensus domains in which new
products may be more subject to rejection, criticism, or
neglect (Simonton, 2009). A career in these fields is often
an unrelenting uphill battle, each new work providing
more aggravation than vindication.
Another explanation can be derived from the increased
eminence that often comes with increased creative pro-
ductivity. Schaller (1997) has provided evidence that
becoming famous can lead to enhanced self-consciousness,
an unpleasant mental state that the creator often sedates
by substance abuse, especially alcohol. It may be no acci-
dent that alcoholism constitutes one of the most common
psychopathologies among highly creative people, par-
ticularly for literary creators who are more likely to
achieve popular renown than, say, scientists or philoso-
phers (Ludwig, 1990; Post, 1996). The novelist Ernest
Mad-Genius Paradox 477
Hemingway provides an archetypal case. Ultimately, the
substantive explanation for any mad-genius paradox is
an empirical question, which brings us to the last issue.
Investigative implications
Although the emphasis of this article has been on the
logical compatibility of the two propositions underlying
the mad-genius paradox, it should be obvious that the
argument has fundamental repercussions regarding
empirical research. One such implication concerns the
specific nature of the sample drawn to assess the cre-
ativity-psychopathology relationship. Ideally, research-
ers should sample participants that represent the full
distribution, from the vast majority of low-output cre-
ators to the supreme elite of prolific creators (plus some
comparable nonproducers as control subjects). Yet that
comprehensive sampling never happens in actual
research. On the contrary, the usual composition of the
sample depends largely on the research method
adopted. On the one hand, investigators who apply
historiometric methods will study creative geniuses at
the upper end of the distribution (Damian & Simonton,
2014; Kaufman, 20002001, 2001, 2005; Ko & Kim, 2008;
Ludwig, 1992; Post, 1994; Simonton, 2014b). Including
such prototypical examples of mad genius as Vincent
Van Gogh and Virginia Woolf, these historiometric stud-
ies most often support Proposition 1 (Simonton, 2014a).
On the other hand, researchers who use psychometric
or interview methods will investigate creators at the
lower end of the distribution (Feist, 2014; Nakamura &
Fajans, 2014). In doing so, they will more likely support
Proposition 2 (see, e.g., Csikszentmihlyi, 1997; Roe,
1953).
To be sure, on occasion a psychometric sample may
include enough of the distribution to be able to track a
segment of the positive monotonic function expressed in
Proposition 1 (e.g., Barron, 1963; Gtz & Gtz, 1979;
Rushton, 1990). Such studies have found that the most
creative members of the sample exhibit higher rates of
subclinical symptoms or traits than do the less creative
members of the same sample. Yet these investigations
rarely if ever include any people who might possibly
qualify for the designation genius. Even if the samples
did manage to do so, we would still have to wonder
whether the recruited geniuses were representative of
geniuses as a whole. After all, it is conceivable that those
with severe inclinations toward psychopathology might
be less likely to volunteer to serve as participants in psy-
chological assessments. Luminaries such as the creative
writer J. D. Salinger might rather stay home. Worse still,
because the creators at the upper end are so terribly rare,
the odds of obtaining even one person among the sam-
ple size typical of most research of this type can become
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essentially zero unless considerable effort is devoted to
oversampling at the upper tail.
One last implication concerns the baseline rate for
psychopathology among noncreative people, or what
has been formally represented as R(0). Although this
value is not required for assessing the truth of Proposition
1, it is mandatory for testing Proposition 2, which then
makes the rate essential for detecting the mad-genius
paradox. In the earlier demonstration, this rate was
defined by the lifetime prevalence of any disorder in a
representative sample of the population (Kessler et al.,
2005). Yet it is not self-evident that the general popula-
tion provides the best base rate for comparison. For
instance, individuals who create in domains that require
higher education, such as the sciences, will have a higher
likelihood of being drawn from a more select (even elite)
population that would probably display lower rates of
psychopathology (Simonton, 2009). This problem helps
explain why many historiometric studies introduce
comparison groups that cannot represent the general
population (Simonton, 2014a). I already mentioned how
Ko and Kim (2008) contrasted scientists who made para-
digm-preserving contributions with scientists who made
paradigm-rejecting contributions (i.e., the scientific revo-
lutionaries). Alternatively, creators in one domain may be
compared with creators in one or more different domains
(Raskin, 1936; Simonton, 2014b) or even with eminent
individuals in supposedly noncreative domains, such as
political, military, or entrepreneurial leadership (Damian
& Simonton, 2014; Ludwig, 1992; Post, 1994; Simonton &
Song, 2009). This superfluity of options pinpoints a cen-
tral difficulty in conducting empirical research on the
paradox: Although the central terms in Proposition 1 are
precisely defined, the corresponding terms in Proposition
2 are not. Creative individuals contributing notable prod-
ucts to the same domain can be directly compared with-
out reservations, but the choice of noncreative individuals
against whom to compare creative individuals may
require some arbitrary choices that will strongly deter-
mine the inferences drawn.
Conclusion
Despite the difficulties mentioned in the previous sec-
tion, I am not arguing that the whole research topic is
hopeless. Quite the opposite is the case: I maintain that
more empirical research is needed, not less. Furthermore,
future research on the creativity-psychopathology rela-
tion should continue to use the full range of experimen-
tal, psychometric, psychiatric, and historiometric methods.
Each method captures different parts of the distribution,
and each in its own way (Simonton, 2010). I argue that
empirical researchers should adopt a more subtle per-
spective on this question. An investigation confirming
478 Simonton
Proposition 1 does not necessarily disconfirm Proposition
2, and vice versa. The realistic set of circumstances dem-
onstrated in this article (e.g., the scenario shown in
Table1 and Figure 1) justifies both propositions, which
validates the existence of the mad-genius paradox.
Whether or not both propositions are true in a given
domain ultimately requires scrutiny of the entire distribu-
tion of creative productivity, including those persons
who contributed nothing at all to any creative domain.
Finally, the foregoing complications could very well
apply to many other research questions in psychological
science. Although the focus of this article is on the
creativity-psychopathology relationship, it is clear that
parallel issues would arise in any behavioral domain in
which the cross-sectional distribution is best described by
a power function rather than the normal curve (for numer-
ous examples, see OBoyle & Aguinas, 2012; Walberg
etal., 1984). For instance, the factors that distinguish ath-
letes from nonathletes do not have to be equivalent to
those that distinguish the rare competitors who won mul-
tiple gold medals from those in the same Olympic events
who earned only a single bronze medal. Some of those
factors might even be antithetical. The same cautionary
tale may also apply to antisocial behaviors, such as homi-
cidal aggression. Variables that distinguish murderers
from the general population may not be identical with
those that distinguish the more rare serial killers from the
much larger pool of murderers. In general, before under-
taking any empirical inquiry into extreme human actions,
whether good or bad, the investigator must first ponder
whether the data and the hypotheses prove functionally
analogous to the mad-genius paradox.
Acknowledgments
I thank the four referees, the associate editor, and the editor for
helping me substantially improve the original submitted
manuscript.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no conflicts of interest with respect to the
authorship or the publication of this article.
Notes
1. Feists (1998) meta-analysis of research on the personality-
creativity relation showed that the traits that distinguished
scientists from nonscientists were not identical to those that dis-
tinguished highly creative scientists from less creative scientists.
Unfortunately, these comparisons did not include psychometric
assessments of subclinical psychopathology (e.g., psychoticism
or schizotypy; cf. Acar & Runco, 2012; Acar & Sen, 2013).
2. An example illustrating its simplicity: if both sides of this
function are log-transformed, the result is log f(n) = log c a
log n. This represents a straight line with a slope a. Hence,
for Lotkas law, the slope is 2. In any event, if n and f(n) are
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plotted on log-log axes, the outcome is a line with a negative
slope (see, e.g., Price, 1986, p. 39, Fig. 2.1). The term log c just
gives the intercept.
3. This distributional postulate is what makes the conjectured
paradox utterly distinct from superficially similar paradoxes,
such as the well-known Simpsons paradox (for a recent review,
see Kievit, Frankenhuis, Waldorp, & Borsboom, 2013). In the
absence of Lotkas law, the paradox would most likely vanish:
Propositions 1 and 2 then could not both be true.
4. In more general terms, whenever R(0) > 0 but R(1) < R(0), so
that the risk rate is lower among the one-hit creative individu-
als relative to the comparison group, then the paradox would
most likely still emerge whenever R(1) < R(2) < R(3) < . . .
R(n 1) < R(n). Hence, a positive monotonic function can be
easily substituted for the positive linear function in Proposition 1.
5. Carsons (2014) research uses the self-report Creative
Achievement Questionnaire (CAQ; Carson, Peterson, & Higgins,
2005). Scores on the CAQ correlate positively not only with
cognitive disinhibition (as assessed by reduced latent inhibi-
tion) but also with divergent thinking and openness to experi-
ence, two variables associated with creativity (Carson, Peterson,
& Higgins, 2003, 2005). Significantly, the CAQ assesses creativity
largely in terms of creative products or their evaluations, and
ranges from no such products (the noncreative individuals in
Proposition 2) to many such products, including award-winning
works (the creative persons in Proposition 1). In addition, con-
sistent with the argument in this article, the distribution of
scores on this measure is neither normal nor log normal; rather,
it corresponds reasonably well to an inverse power function,
low scores being the most common and high scores the least
common, a concave curve connecting the two extremes.
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