Cognitive ability and creativity: Typology contributions and a meta-analytic review

Our meta-analysis provides a comprehensive examination of the correlation between cognitive ability and creativity. Introducing an integrative typology of creativity, we assess how, at the individual level, cognitive ability at Stratum III, as well as different cognitive ability dimensions at Stratum II from Carroll's (1993) Three-Stratum Theory, correlate with three creativity perspectives (person, process, and product), and different dimensions within them. Using 135 independent samples containing 65,829 subjects, we found an observed meta-analytic correlation between cognitive ability at Stratum III and overall creativity of 0.27 (the corrected mean correlation was 0.33). The mean correlation was strongest for variables in the process perspective of creativity. We also observed that the Stratum II dimensions of cognitive ability most strongly related to creativity are broad retrieval ability and broad visual perception. In addition, we found that several conceptual and methodological moderators (e.g., cognitive ability measure, creativity measure, creativity domain, type of ratings) had a noticeable impact on the strength of the meta-analytic correlation. Dominance and sensitivity analyses tended to support our meta-analytic results. We discuss our study's contributions and practical implications and suggest future research avenues.