Date created: | Last Updated:

Category: Project

Description: Abstract: Intelligence has been declared as a necessary, but not sufficient condition for creativity, which was subsequently (erroneously) translated into the so-called threshold hypothesis. This hypothesis predicts a change in the correlation between creativity and intelligence at around 1.33 standard deviations above the population mean. A closer inspection of previous inconclusive results suggests that the heterogeneity is mostly due to the use of suboptimal data-analytical procedures. We apply and compare three methods that allow to handle intelligence as a continuous variable. In more detail, we examined the threshold of the creativity-intelligence relation with a) scatterplots and heteroscedasticity analysis, b) segmented regression analysis, and c) local structural equation models in two multivariate studies (N1 = 456; N2 = 438). We found no evidence for the threshold hypothesis of creativity across different analytical procedures in both studies. Given the problematic history of the threshold hypothesis and its unequivocal rejection with appropriate multivariate methods we recommend to abandon the threshold once and for all. Keywords: creativity; intelligence; threshold hypothesis; necessary-but-not-sufficient condition