Age and Achievement: Talent Development Across the Life Span.

Harvey C. Lehman's Age and Achievement: Talent Development Across the Life Span. A review of Lehman, H. C. (1953). Age and Achievement. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press

The first scientific study of exceptional achievement was conducted way back in 1835. At that time Alphonse Quetelet did a quantitative study of how creativity changes across the life span. His particular sample consisted of eminent French and English playwrights, and his measure of creativity was their output of plays in consecutive 5-year periods. Yet, somewhat surprisingly, researchers essentially ignored this subject for an entire century.

The investigator who deserves primary credit for reviving research on this topic is Harvey C. Lehman. Born in 1889, Lehman received his PhD from the University of Chicago in 1925, and spent most of his career at Ohio University, dying in 1965. His first research concentrated on early child development and educational psychology, including investigations into sex differences, giftedness, and play. His work on the last subject was the subject of his 1927 book on The Psychology of Play Activities. His interests began to shift toward adult development, and eventually in 1935 he published a piece in Psychological Bulletin on the relation between creative productivity and chronological age. Lehman devoted increasingly more time to discovering the connections between age and outstanding achievement, until it became the research topic for which he is best known. Although Lehman continued to publish on the subject until his very last year (Lehman, 1966), his investigations can be said to have culminated in his 1953 book on Age and Achievement.

In this volume he summarizes the results of nearly 20 years of research. Virtually all forms of achievement are covered: creators, like philosophers, scientists, composers, and artists; leaders, like religious figures, entrepreneurs, politicians, and commanders; and miscellaneous celebrities, like champion athletes to movie stars and directors. Not since Francis Galton's (1869) classic on Hereditary Genius had a psychologist attempted to encompass so many distinct domains of human excellence in a single volume. The book is crammed with tables and figures showing the relation between age and achievement, with special emphasis on the optimal years. The findings that often received the most attention, however, concerned the apparent decline in creativity, leadership, or performance in the post-peak period of an achiever's life. In fact, Lehman's (1953) Age and Achievement was the focus of all kinds of scathing critiques, especially from the hand of Wayne Dennis (1954, 1956, 1966), the notable developmental psychologist. Despite the fact that Lehman (1956, 1961) defended himself well in a series of rejoinders, he died before his critics, and they got the last word. This led many later developmental psychologists to dismiss his work.

There is no doubt that Lehman's (1953) work is often flawed (Simonton, 1988). Indeed, in certain respects his research is less sophisticated than what Quetelet (1835/1968) had carried out a century before. Nevertheless, I have devoted a large portion of my own career attempting to replicate Lehman's main empirical results using far more advanced designs and statistics. For instance, my very first publication showed that poets do indeed publish their best work at a younger age than do other creative writers, just as Lehman reported (Simonton, 1975). Moreover, for creative achievement, at least, I have used mathematical models to subsume Lehman's core findings under a cohesive psychological theory of creativity (Simonton, 1984, 1989, 1991b, 1997a). Hence, Lehman's Age and Achievement has been placed on a much more secure empirical and theoretical footing. As a consequence, his work now deserves to be counted among the classics in the study of exceptional accomplishment - in the same league with Galton's (1869) Hereditary Genius and Cox's (1926) Early Mental Traits of Three Hundred Geniuses.

Admittedly, those who are most interested in childhood and adolescent giftedness might conclude that Lehman's (1953) book only peripherally relevant. After all, his age curves merely indicate how the potential talent of youth becomes manifested as the actualized accomplishments of adulthood. However, such an inference would be misguided. In line with his early fascination with giftedness, Lehman investigated individual differences in the early developmental origins of exceptional performance. In particular, Chapter 12 of Age and Achievement is devoted to the subject of "Early Achievement and Total Output" (see also Lehman, 1946). After providing many concrete examples of notable accomplishments by mathematicians in their teens or early twenties, Lehman then systematically scrutinized the careers of 444 mathematicians. He calculated the sizable correlation of -.61 between the age at which they made their first important contribution and the total number of contributions eventually made to mathematics. He then proceeded to demonstrate that similarly strong correlations hold for other domains of creative achievement, including physics, chemistry, philosophy, literature, painting, and music. This finding has also been replicated repeatedly in subsequent research (e.g., Simonton, 1977, 1991a, 1991b). Precocious productivity predicts not just total lifetime contributions, but also the overall rate of output, including the amount of productivity expected to emerge in the final years of life (Simonton, 1997a).

These empirical conclusions thus have implications for understanding the developmental link between youthful giftedness and adulthood achievement (Simonton, 1997b). The critical transformation between potential and actual genius is to be found at that point when an individual first attempts to make contributions to a specific domain of achievement. The earlier in the life that transition takes place, the greater will be the expected accomplishments. Moreover, because it takes a considerable amount of time and commitment to acquire the necessary domain-specific expertise before a person can begin making contributions (Simonton, 2000), gifted education should be most strongly oriented toward encouraging the early acquisition of the requisite skills and knowledge. Childhood giftedness cannot become adulthood genius without first being focused on a single achievement domain (Winner, 1996). The earlier that concentration of training occurs in the gifted child's developmental pathway, the more impressive will be the adulthood career trajectory.

REFERENCES

Cox, C. (1926). The early mental traits of three hundred geniuses. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Dennis, W. (1954). Review of Age and Achievement. Psychological Bulletin, 51, 306-308.

Dennis, W. (1956). Age and Achievement: A critique. Journal of Gerontology, 9, 465-467.

Dennis, W. (1966). Creative productivity between the ages of 20 and 80 years. Journal of Gerontology, 21, 1-8.

Galton, F. (1869). Hereditary genius: An inquiry into its laws and consequences. London: Macmillan.

Lehman, H. C. (1927). The psychology of play activities. New York: Barnes, 1927.

Lehman, H. C. (1935). The chronological ages of greatest productivity: chemists, inventors, poets, et altera. Psychological Bulletin, 32, 676.

Lehman, H. C. (1946). Age of starting to contribute versus total creative output. Journal of Applied Psychology, 30, 460-480.

Lehman, H. C. (1953). Age and achievement. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Lehman, H. C. (1956). Reply to Dennis' critique of Age and Achievement. Journal of Gerontology, 11, 128-134.

Lehman, H. C. (1962). More about age and achievement. Gerontologist, 2, 141-148.

Lehman, H. C. (1966). The psychologist's most creative years. American Psychologist, 21, 363-369.

Quetelet, A. (1968). A treatise on man and the development of his faculties. New York: Franklin. (Reprint of 1842 Edinburgh translation of 1835 French original)

Simonton, D. K. (1975). Age and literary creativity: A cross-cultural and transhistorical survey. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 6, 259-277.

Simonton, D. K. (1977). Eminence, creativity, and geographic marginality: A recursive structural equation model. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 35, 805-816.

Simonton, D. K. (1984). Creative productivity and age: A mathematical model based on a two-step cognitive process. Developmental Review, 4, 77-111.

Simonton, D. K. (1988). Age and outstanding achievement: What do we know after a century of research? Psychological Bulletin. 104, 251-267.

Simonton, D. K. (1989). Age and creative productivity: Nonlinear estimation of an information-processing model. International Journal of Aging and Human Development, 29, 23-37.

Simonton, D. K. (1991a). Career landmarks in science: Individual differences and interdisciplinary contrasts. Developmental Psychology, 27, 119-130.

Simonton, D. K. (1991b). Emergence and realization of genius: The lives and works of 120 classical composers. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 61, 829-840.

Simonton, D. K. (1997a). Creative productivity: A predictive and explanatory model of career trajectories and landmarks. Psychological Review, 104, 66-89.

Simonton, D. K. (1997b). When giftedness becomes genius: How does talent achieve eminence? In N. Colangelo & G. A. Davis (Eds.), Handbook of gifted education (2nd ed., pp. 335-349). Boston: Allyn & Bacon.

Simonton, D. K. (2000). Creative development as acquired expertise: Theoretical issues and an empirical test. Developmental Review, 20, 283-318.

Winner, E. (1996). Gifted children: Myths and realities. New York: BasicBooks.

Reviewed by Dean Keith Simonton, professor of psychology at the University of California, Davis. He has published more than 200 articles, chapters, and books concerning various aspects of genius, creativity, leadership, and talent. His most recent book Origins of Genius: Darwinian Perspectives on Creativity received the 2000 William James Book Award of the American Psychological Association.