Creative abilities in identical and fraternal twins

The present research set out to investigate the possibility of a genetic component in creative ability The pool of subjects for this study consisted of 117 pairs of twins, 13–19 years of age, divided into 28 pairs of identical males, 19 pairs of fraternal males, 35 pairs of identical females, and 35 pairs of fraternal females. A battery of ten creativity tests, including five developed by Guilford, and one measure of verbal intelligence were administered to each subject. The majority of intraclass correlations for both the monozygotic and dizygotic twins on the 11 measures attained statistical significance, with the correlations tending to be somewhat higher in the identical twin groups. When the intrapair variances of the identical and fraternal twins were contrasted directly on the various tests, there were few statistically significant results. Intercorrelations between the 11 tests compared two at a time revealed higher correlations in the monozygotic group, indicating a somewhat more consistent performance from test to test. The overall results, however, failed to provide convincing evidence of a genetic component in creativity.This study was funded by the Connecticut Research Commission.