Collaboration and Creative Character

When we consider what it takes to attain George Meyer’s level of comedic impact, there’s little
question that creativity is a big part of the equation. Carolyn Omine, a longtime Simpsons writer and
producer, says that Meyer “has a distinct way of looking at the world. It’s completely unique.”
Executive producer and show-runner Mike Scully once commented that when he first joined The
Simpsons, Meyer “just blew me away. I had done a lot of sitcom work before, but George’s stuff was
so different and so original that for a while I wondered if I wasn’t in over my head.”
To unlock the mystery of how people become highly creative, back in 1958, a Berkeley
psychologist named Donald MacKinnon launched a path-breaking study. He wanted to identify the
unique characteristics of highly creative people in art, science, and business, so he studied a group of
people whose work involves all three fields: architects. To start, MacKinnon and his colleagues
asked five independent architecture experts to submit a list of the forty most creative architects in the
United States. Although they never spoke to one another, the experts achieved remarkably high
consensus. They could have nominated up to two hundred architects in total, but after accounting for
overlap, their lists featured just eighty-six. More than half of those architects were nominated by more
than one expert, more than a third by the majority of the experts, and 15 percent by all five experts.
From there, forty of the country’s most creative architects agreed to be dissected psychologically.
MacKinnon’s team compared them with eighty-four other architects who were successful but not
highly creative, matching the creative and “ordinary” architects on age and geographic location. All
of the architects traveled to Berkeley, where they spent three full days opening up their minds to
MacKinnon’s team, and to science. They filled out a battery of personality questionnaires,
experienced stressful social situations, took difficult problem-solving tests, and answered exhaustive
interview questions about their entire life histories. MacKinnon’s team pored over mountains of data,
using pseudonyms for each architect so they would remain blind to who was highly creative and who
was not.
One group of architects emerged as significantly more “responsible, sincere, reliable,
dependable,” with more “good character” and “sympathetic concern for others” than the other. The
karma principle suggests that it should be the creative architects, but it wasn’t. It was the ordinary
architects. MacKinnon found that the creative architects stood out as substantially more “demanding,
aggressive, and self-centered” than the comparison group. The creative architects had whopping egos
and responded aggressively and defensively to criticism. In later studies, the same patterns emerged
from comparisons of creative and less creative scientists: the creative scientists scored significantly
higher in dominance, hostility, and psychopathic deviance. Highly creative scientists were rated by
observers as creating and exploiting dependency in others. Even the highly creative scientists
themselves agreed with statements like “I tend to slight the contribution of others and take undue
credit for myself” and “I tend to be sarcastic and disparaging in describing the worth of other
researchers.”
Takers have a knack for generating creative ideas and championing them in the face of opposition.
Because they have supreme confidence in their own opinions, they feel free of the shackles of social
approval that constrict the imaginations of many people. This is a distinctive signature of George
Meyer’s comedy. In 2002, he wrote, directed, and starred in a small play called Up Your Giggy. In