Ellis Paul Torrance

Ellis Paul Torrance (October 8, 1915 - July 12, 2003) was an American psychologist from Milledgeville, Georgia.

After completing his undergraduate degree at Mercer University, he went on to complete a Master's degree at the University of Minnesota, and then a doctorate from the University of Michigan. His teaching career spanned from 1957 to 1984, first at the University of Minnesota and then later the University of Georgia, where he became professor of Educational Psychology in 1966.

In 1984, the University of Georgia established the Torrance Center for Creativity and Talent Development.

Torrance on creativity
Professor Torrance was best known for his pioneering research in the study of creativity. He developed a benchmark method for quantifying creativity and invented in 1974 the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking, which showed that the IQ test was not the only way to measure intelligence. Building on Guilford's work, they involved simple tests of divergent thinking and other problem-solving skills, which were scored on:
 * Fluency. The total number of interpretable, meaningful, and relevant ideas generated in response to the stimulus.
 * Flexibility. The number of different categories of relevant responses.
 * Originality. The statistical rarity of the responses among the test subjects.
 * Elaboration. The amount of detail in the responses.

Torrance and the threshold hypothesis
There has been debate in the psychological literature about whether intelligence and creativity are part of the same process (the conjoint hypothesis) or represent distinct mental processes (the disjoint hypothesis).

Evidence from attempts to look at correlations between intelligence and creativity from the 1950s onwards, by authors such as Barron, Guilford or Wallach and Kogan, regularly suggested that correlations between these concepts were low enough to justify treating them as distinct concepts. Some researchers believe that creativity is the outcome of the same cognitive processes as intelligence, and is only judged as creativity in terms of its consequences, i.e., when the outcome of cognitive processes happens to produce something novel, a view which Perkins has termed the "nothing special" hypothesis.

A very popular model is what has come to be known as "the threshold hypothesis", proposed by Ellis Paul Torrance, which holds that a high degree of intelligence appears to be a necessary but not sufficient condition for high creativity. This means that, in a general sample, there will be a positive correlation between creativity and intelligence, but this correlation will not be found if only a sample of the most highly intelligent people are assessed.

Research into the threshold hypothesis, however, has produced mixed results ranging from enthusiastic support to refutation and rejection.