A Statistical Analysis of Special Cases of Creativity

For some special cases of creativity, we find that its occurrence in each individual's career is random and Poisson‐distributed. That is, the rate of production of outputs is constant over each individual's career. The exceptions to this rule are no more than what would be expected by chance fluctuation alone. The distribution of individual productivity across each sample is exponential. That is, most individuals have low productivity and few have high productivity. Similarly, the distribution of career duration is also exponential. We show that these findings are in substantial agreement with the Campbell‐Simonton theory of creativity. We also show that these findings are consistent with the statistics of exceedances.