Intelligence in childhood and creative achievements in middle-age: The necessary condition approach

•A unique, 40-year-long longitudinal data from the Warsaw Study were analyzed.•The relationship between intelligence in childhood and creative achievement in middle-age was examined.•Both correlational and the Necessary Condition Analysis (NCA) approaches were applied.•NCA supported the hypothesis that intelligence is a necessary yet not sufficient condition for creativity.•Minimal chances for creative achievement among individuals whose intelligence in childhood was low were observed.

This paper explores longitudinal links between intelligence measured at age 11 (N = 1594) and 13 (N = 255) and creative achievement as tested forty years later (at age 52). Using a dataset from the most recent (fifth: 2015) follow-up to the Warsaw Study (Firkowska et al., 1978), we examined the hypothesis that intelligence forms a necessary-yet-not-sufficient condition for creative achievement. Although the links between intelligence and creativity as estimated with the use of linear (correlations) and nonlinear (segmented regression) analytical methods were generally ambiguous, the recently developed Necessary Condition Analysis (NCA, Dul, 2016a) presented a much clearer pattern demonstrating that high creative middle-age achievement was unlikely with low intelligence in childhood. The strength of the NCA effect size was moderated by the domain of creativity, being higher for cognitively demanding domains (science, inventions, humor, architecture, or writing) than for artistic or everyday domains (cooking, dance, music, visual arts or theatre).