James C. Kaufman

Introduction

James C. Kaufman (born 21 September 1974) is an American psychologist and one of the most prolific researchers working on creativity. He is a professor of educational psychology at the University of Connecticut, where he works in the Neag School of Education, and he has written or edited more than forty-five books along with several hundred articles and chapters.

Kaufman is known for two things in particular. The first is theory: with Ronald Beghetto he developed the Four-C model of creativity, which extends the familiar contrast between eminent and everyday creativity by adding mini-c, the personally meaningful novelty of learning, and Pro-c, professional-level creativity that has not yet been historically recognized. The second is a body of research on creativity and mental illness, above all the "Sylvia Plath effect," a term he coined in 2001 for the finding that eminent female poets showed higher rates of mental illness than other writers and other eminent women. He has since become one of the most prominent critics of that early work, including his own.

Early Life and Education

Kaufman was born in Great Neck, New York, into a psychological household: both of his parents, Alan S. Kaufman and Nadeen L. Kaufman, are psychologists known for work on intelligence testing. He grew up around tests, assessment and the measurement of individual differences, an environment that later shaped his interest in how creativity might be measured.

He took his bachelor's degree at the University of Southern California, graduating in 1995. At USC he worked with the psychometrician John L. Horn, which grounded him in the quantitative study of abilities, and also studied writing with the novelist T. Coraghessan Boyle. The combination of a measurement tradition and a working writer's perspective on the creative process recurs throughout his later work. He then went to Yale University, where he earned a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology in 2001 under Robert J. Sternberg, himself a major figure in creativity research and the author of the investment theory of creativity.

Academic and Professional Career

Kaufman began his academic career at California State University, San Bernardino, joining the psychology department in 2002 and later directing the university's Learning Research Institute. It was there that he did the widely reported work on creativity and mental illness and began the collaborations with John Baer on domain specificity that produced the Amusement Park Theoretical model.

In 2013 he moved to the University of Connecticut as a professor of educational psychology, where he has remained. His research has broadened from creativity and psychopathology toward creativity assessment, the structure of creative domains, and what he calls creativity and social justice, including the argument that measures of creativity could be used as a supplement in college admissions to reduce ethnic bias and capture talent that grades and standardized tests miss.

Alongside his own research he has been an unusually influential editor. He was the founding co-editor of two journals published by the American Psychological Association, Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts and Psychology of Popular Media Culture, and he edits the Explorations in Creativity Research series for Academic Press. The editorial work, together with handbooks and textbooks, is a large part of why his framing of the field has travelled so widely.

Major Contributions to Psychology

The Four-C model of creativity

With Beghetto, Kaufman proposed that the standard two-category scheme of Big-C and little-c creativity leaves out most of what matters for education. Mini-c names the novel and personally meaningful insight a learner has while learning something, before any outside audience is involved. Pro-c names the level reached by a professional creator who has mastered a domain and works creatively within it but has not yet had the historical impact that qualifies as Big-C. The model reframes creativity as a developmental trajectory rather than a fixed trait, and it gave educators a vocabulary for treating classroom insight as genuinely creative rather than as a preparation for it.

Creative metacognition

Extending the model, Kaufman and Beghetto introduced creative metacognition, the capacity to know one's own creative strengths and limits and to recognize when and where it is appropriate to express creativity. The construct is meant to be teachable, and it connects the developmental claim of the Four-C model to classroom practice: students can be taught to judge their own ideas better and to choose contexts wisely.

The Amusement Park Theoretical model

With John Baer, Kaufman addressed the long-running dispute over whether creativity is domain-general or domain-specific. The APT model proposes layered generality: initial requirements such as intelligence, motivation and environment apply broadly, then general thematic areas, then domains with their own skills and knowledge, then specific micro-domains. The model is an attempt to stop asking which side of the generality debate is right and instead to specify the level at which each claim holds.

The propulsion model

With Sternberg and Jean Pretz, Kaufman developed the propulsion model of creative contributions, set out in The Creativity Conundrum. It classifies creative work by how it moves a field: replication, redefinition, forward or forward-redirectional movement, redirection, reconstruction and reinitiation. The scheme is intended to explain why some technically novel work changes a discipline while other equally novel work leaves no trace.

Creativity and mental illness

Kaufman's historiometric studies of eminent writers used biographical reference works to code signs of mental illness. In a study of 1,629 writers he found that female poets were significantly more likely than female fiction writers, and than male writers of any kind, to show such signs; a second analysis of 520 eminent American women found poets more likely than journalists, visual artists, politicians and actresses to have experienced mental illness and personal tragedy. He called the pattern the Sylvia Plath effect. Related work on the mortality of poets attracted wide coverage in newspapers and on radio and television.

Assessment and equity

A substantial part of Kaufman's recent work concerns creativity assessment, including the Kaufman Domains of Creativity Scale, a self-report instrument organized by domain, and practical guidance on how to assess creative work fairly. He has argued that including creativity in admissions and identification procedures could broaden who is recognized as talented, and he has studied biases in lay conceptions of creativity, including the tendency to associate it almost exclusively with the arts.

Major Publications

The Creativity Conundrum (with Robert J. Sternberg and Jean Pretz).
Essentials of Creativity Assessment (with Jonathan A. Plucker and John Baer, 2008).
The Psychology of Creative Writing (with Scott Barry Kaufman, 2009).
The Cambridge Handbook of Creativity (with Robert J. Sternberg, 2010).
Teaching for Creativity in the Common Core Classroom (with Ronald A. Beghetto and John Baer, 2014).
Creativity 101 (2016).
Pseudoscience: The Conspiracy Against Science (with Allison B. Kaufman).

Impact and Legacy

Kaufman's influence on the study of creativity is largely organizational and conceptual. The Four-C model has been taken up widely in education, where it gave teachers a way to speak about creativity without restricting it to genius, and it continues to generate research; with Denis Dumas he extended it in 2024 by arguing that the appropriate evaluator of an idea changes as the creator's expertise grows, from self for mini-c to consumers and domain critics for Big-C. His handbooks and his founding editorships helped consolidate creativity research as a recognized subdiscipline with its own journals.

The Sylvia Plath effect is the part of his work that has drawn the sharpest criticism, and unusually, the most forceful critic has been Kaufman himself. The standard methodological objections to research on creativity and mental illness apply to it: selection bias in which figures get biographies at all, controls that are not blinded, reliance on biography rather than diagnosis, retrospective design, and loose definitions of both creativity and illness. In a 2017 editorial in Europe's Journal of Psychology he wrote that he had been young and stupid, that the study rested on brief biographies in reference works, that it is easy to over-extrapolate because biographies of entirely ordinary people are rarely written, and that he had made several arguments against the importance of his own work. He also complained that the effect was widely misread in the press as a claim that all poets, or all creative people, are mentally ill.

Two other lines of criticism are alive in the field rather than directed at him personally, and he has engaged both. The domain-generality question his APT model addresses has not been settled: a 2024 meta-analytic confirmatory factor analysis of his own Kaufman Domains of Creativity Scale tested a single general factor against a two-factor structure, and the debate over how far creativity transfers across domains remains open. And his proposal to use creativity measures in college admissions, advanced on the grounds that they could reduce ethnic bias, raises the standard difficulty that judgments of creativity are subjective and potentially coachable; Kaufman's answer has been to work on the reliability and validity of assessment, including how raters with different levels of expertise should be used, rather than to abandon the project.

He has also written on the darker side of the construct, including work on dark creativity and on deception, and he continues to publish actively, with recent co-authored papers on biases in laypeople's beliefs about creativity and on keyword trends across four creativity journals.

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References

Kaufman, J. C., & Beghetto, R. A. (2009). Beyond big and little: The Four C model of creativity. Review of General Psychology, 13(1), 1-12.