When MacKinnon created IPAR in 1949, he was already one of the world’s leading assessors of human aptitude. He had sharpened his talents during World War II as the director of Station S in Fairfax, Virginia, for the Office of Strategic Services (precursor to the CIA). There MacKinnon screened candidates for jobs in irregular warfare — as spies, counterespionage agents, leaders of resistance groups. The elaborate battery of psychological tests honed at Station S became known as “the assessment method,” and after the war, MacKinnon wondered how else it could be put to productive use. Then Berkeley called.
当麦金农在1949年创建IPAR时，他已经是世界上领先的人类能力评估者之一。第二次世界大战期间，他在弗吉尼亚州费尔法克斯担任战略服务办公室(CIA的前身)S站主任，磨练了自己的才能。在那里，麦金农筛选了从事非正规战争工作的候选人——间谍、反间谍特工、抵抗组织领导人。在S站精心设计的一系列心理测试被称为“评估方法”，战后，麦金农想知道它还能有什么其他有效的用途。直到接到伯克利打来的电话。
Initially the admissions office tasked MacKinnon with creating better assessments for selecting graduate students. But soon, with funding from the Carnegie Corporation, IPAR’s mission expanded to unlocking the secrets of personality.
最初，招生办公室给麦金农的任务是为挑选研究生制定更好的评估方法。但很快，在卡内基公司的资助下，IPAR的使命扩展到解开人格的秘密。
“MacKinnon brought that same [OSS] methodology to IPAR,” says William Todd Schultz, professor of psychology at Pacific University, who is working on a book about the IPAR writers studies. “It was very ambitious.”
太平洋大学的心理学教授威廉·托德·舒尔茨说:“麦金农把同样的(OSS)方法带到了IPAR。”他正在写一本关于IPAR作家研究的书。“它非常有野心。”
At Berkeley, the former spy screener assembled a group of eclectic, high-powered psychologists to join him. Early IPAR research focused on the concept of the “effective person.” They wanted to know both the ingredients of the successful personality and the societal conditions that allowed such people to thrive — the nature and nurture of success.
在伯克利，这位前间谍筛选者召集了一群兼收并蓄、实力雄厚的心理学家加入他的行列。早期的IPAR研究集中在“有效人士”的概念上。他们想知道成功人格的成分和使这些人茁壮成长的社会条件——成功的先天与后天条件。
But in the mid-1950s, an obsession with creativity took hold in America. Not the watercolor and pottery kind, but rather creative thinking as a means to solve the world’s most pressing problems. As author Pierluigi Serraino noted in his 2016 book, The Creative Architect: Inside the Great Midcentury Personality Study, the project was considered to be of existential importance: “As alarming visions of an Orwellian society dominated by automated technologies were going viral in postwar Western civilization, the investigation on creativity was seen as a crucial tool in the race for humanity’s very survival, saving it from an obliteration of its own making.…”
但在20世纪50年代中期，一种对创造力的痴迷在美国生根发芽。不是水彩画和陶器，而是创造性思维作为解决世界上最紧迫问题的一种手段。正如作家Pierluigi Serraino在其2016年出版的《创意建筑师:中世纪伟大人格研究》一书中指出的那样，该项目被认为具有生存重要性:“随着奥威尔式社会由自动化技术主导的令人担忧的愿景在战后西方文明中迅速传播，对创造力的调查被视为人类创新竞争的关键工具。
As it happened, IPAR had a creativity expert on staff. Psychologist Frank Barron was known for blending ideas from philosophy, religion, and the arts into his personality research. He and MacKinnon had an idea: If they could bring America’s most formidable writers (and architects, mathematicians, etc.) to the fishbowl for a few days and use MacKinnon’s assessment tools on them, the secrets of creativity might just be revealed.
碰巧的是，IPAR的员工中有一位创意专家。心理学家弗兰克·巴伦以将哲学、宗教和艺术的思想融合到他的人格研究中而闻名。他和麦金农有了一个想法:如果他们能把美国最令人生畏的作家(以及建筑师、数学家等)带到鱼缸里几天，用麦金农的评估工具对他们进行评估，创造力的秘密可能就会揭晓。
From the moment Capote and his fellow writers entered the IPAR house that winter morning, they were under careful observation by note-taking graduate students. The group, which included novelists, a poet, and a literary critic, was subjected to numerous assessments, some familiar, like Myers-Briggs and Rorschach tests, and others not so much. One required them to arrange colored tiles into a mosaic. Another tasked them with choosing their favorite pattern from a series of Scottish tartans. Group activities had them discuss contingency plans for the end of the world and collaborate on story plots. There was even a test using a Ouija board to measure the writers’ suggestibility.
那个冬天的早晨，从卡波特和他的同事们进入IPAR的房子的那一刻起，他们就受到了做笔记的研究生们的仔细观察。这个小组包括小说家、一位诗人和一位文学评论家，他们接受了许多评估，有些是我们熟悉的，比如迈尔斯-布里格斯(Myers-Briggs)和罗夏(Rorschach)测试，有些则不太熟悉。其中一项要求他们将彩色瓷砖排列成马赛克。另一项任务是让他们从一系列苏格兰格子中选择自己最喜欢的图案。小组活动让他们讨论世界末日的应急计划，并合作编写故事情节。甚至还有一个使用占卜板的测试来衡量作者的易受暗示能力。
“One of the distinctive things about IPAR is they believed that personality was a complicated whole,” says Schultz. “And to really get a sense of a person you need to come at that person from multiple angles.”
舒尔茨说:“IPAR的一个独特之处在于，他们认为人格是一个复杂的整体。要真正了解一个人，你需要从多个角度来看待这个人。”
The subjects were often skeptical. One of Barron’s subjects, Kenneth Rexroth, known as the “godfather of the beat poets,” later described his IPAR experience in a long, caustic prose poem entitled “My Head Gets Tooken Apart.”
研究对象通常持怀疑态度。被称为“垮掉派诗人教父”的肯尼斯·雷克斯罗斯(Kenneth Rexroth)是巴伦的研究对象之一，他后来写了一首名为“My Head Gets Tooken Apart”的长篇刻薄散文诗，描述了他在IPAR的经历。
“I sorted things and interpreted symbols. A rather frightened, puzzled, but very determined looking young woman took me in the attic, blindfolded me, led me into a dark room, and spent twenty minutes finding out if I could tell vertical from horizontal. Honest to God, cross my heart, hope to die. I could, pretty good.”
“我把东西分类，解释符号。一个相当害怕、困惑但看起来很坚定的年轻女子把我带进阁楼，蒙上我的眼睛，带我进了一个黑暗的房间，花了二十分钟来检验我是否能分辨垂直和水平。对天发誓，我发誓，我希望去死。我可以，很好。”
At times the subjects were given breaks to drink and socialize, but these cocktail hours were actually assessments in disguise. Utilizing what MacKinnon called the “house party” approach, assessors took careful note of their behavior and interactions.
有时，研究对象会得到休息时间喝酒和社交，但这些鸡尾酒时间实际上是伪装的评估。利用麦金农所说的“家庭聚会”方法，评估人员仔细记录了他们的行为和互动。
“It’s kind of a cool, unusual thing that’s unimaginable today,” says Schultz. “One thing about that group of researchers was that there were no limits. They were extremely broad-minded. They were going to try anything.” In other words, they were getting creative.
舒尔茨说:“这是一件很酷、很不寻常的事情，在今天是无法想象的。那组研究人员的一个特点是没有限制。他们的心胸极其宽广。他们什么都想尝试。”换句话说，他们变得越来越有创造力。
And perhaps they needed to, given the elusive nature of their subject. Creativity is a nebulous concept, variously defined, and difficult if not impossible to measure. The field of creativity research, MacKinnon felt, had long been awash in untested theories and what he called “armchair model-building.” He was determined that with empirical studies he could wrestle the concept to the ground once and for all.
也许他们需要这样做，因为他们的主题是难以捉摸的。创造力是一个模糊的概念，定义多种多样，即使不是不可能衡量，也很难衡量。麦金农认为，创造力研究领域长期以来一直充斥着未经检验的理论和他所谓的“扶手椅模型构建”。他下定决心，通过实证研究，他可以一劳永逸地推翻这个概念。
While Rexroth was clearly unimpressed, Capote was an enthusiastic and forthcoming participant. He provided researchers plenty of raw material, holding forth about his famous friends, difficult childhood, nightmares, and more. And the three days at IPAR may have been productive for Capote too. According to Merve Emre, author of The Personality Brokers, during one collaborative assessment, Capote workshopped an early version of Holly Golightly, the future protagonist of Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
虽然力士乐显然没有被打动，但卡波特是一个热情而坦率的参与者。他为研究人员提供了大量的原始资料，滔滔不绝地讲述他著名的朋友、艰难的童年、噩梦等等。在IPAR的三天对卡波特来说可能也很有收获。据《个性经纪人》一书的作者默夫·埃莫雷(Merve Emre)说，在一次合作评估中，卡波特创作了《蒂凡尼的早餐》的未来主人公霍莉·戈莱特利(Holly Golightly)的早期版本。
Barron would ultimately bring 31 prominent writers to IPAR for assessment, among them Norman Mailer, Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist MacKinlay Kantor, and poet William Carlos Williams. (Two years later, Barron would co-found the infamous Harvard Psilocybin Project along with a former IPAR graduate student, Timothy Leary.)
巴伦最终将31位著名作家带到IPAR进行评估，其中包括诺曼·梅勒、普利策奖得主小说家麦金莱·坎特和诗人威廉·卡洛斯·威廉姆斯。(两年后，巴伦与前IPAR研究生蒂莫西·利里(Timothy Leary)共同创立了臭名昭著的哈佛裸盖菇素项目。)
And it wasn’t just writers who were put in the fishbowl. Creativity studies were also conducted on mathematicians, research scientists, and architects. The latter was practically a Who’s Who of mid-century modern masters. Eero Saarinen, Richard Neutra, George Nelson, I.M. Pei, they were all there. (IPAR study subjects were overwhelmingly white and male, a longitudinal study of Mills College graduates being a notable exception.)
不仅仅是作家被放进了鱼缸。对数学家、研究科学家和建筑师也进行了创造力研究。后者实际上是中世纪现代大师的名人录。Eero Saarinen, Richard Neutra, George Nelson, I.M. Pei，他们都在那里。(IPAR的研究对象绝大多数是白人和男性，米尔斯学院(Mills College)毕业生的纵向研究是个明显的例外。)
The influence of the IPAR studies is lasting, the work still cited in both scientific and popular literature. Monty Python comic John Cleese drew two salient conclusions from the architect study in his 2020 book, Creativity: A Short and Cheerful Guide. One was that the most creative architects know how to play. The other one, perhaps less intuitive, was that they deferred important creative decisions to the last moment. They weren’t procrastinating so much as giving their minds more time to work on the problem.
IPAR研究的影响是持久的，这项工作仍然在科学和通俗文学中被引用。巨蟒剧团的喜剧演员约翰·克利斯在他2020年出版的《创造力:简短而愉快的指南》一书中从建筑师的研究中得出了两个重要结论。一个是最有创意的建筑师知道如何玩。另一个可能不那么直观的原因是，他们把重要的创造性决策推迟到最后一刻。他们不是在拖延，而是在给他们的大脑更多的时间来解决问题。
Among the other conclusions, IPAR researchers noted that creatives tended to have a good opinion of themselves; they were also risk-takers, on the whole, who thrived on ambiguity and complexity and had a high tolerance for chaos; and they often scored high on traits that in 1950s America were widely viewed as feminine, including self-awareness and an openness to their feelings. Notably, the studies revealed that “above a certain required minimum level of intelligence” there was no correlation between creativity and intelligence. MacKinnon wrote that, in some creative individuals, IQ was “surprisingly low.”
在其他结论中，IPAR的研究人员指出，创意人员往往对自己有良好的看法;总的来说，他们也是冒险家，喜欢模棱两可和复杂，对混乱有很高的容忍度;在20世纪50年代的美国，她们通常在被广泛视为女性的特质上得分很高，包括自我意识和对自己情感的开放。值得注意的是，研究表明，“超过一定的最低智力要求水平”，创造力和智力之间没有相关性。麦金农写道，一些有创造力的人的智商“低得惊人”。
There were also contradictions aplenty. Barron himself commented that the creatives were “both more primitive and more cultivated, more destructive, a lot madder and a lot saner than the average person.” Not exactly a consistent profile. And not everyone in the field was sold.
也有很多矛盾。巴伦自己评论说，创意人员“比普通人更原始，也更有教养，更具破坏性，更疯狂，也更理智。”不完全一致的侧写。并不是所有人都买账了。
“The research was a little bit what we call in science ‘underpowered,’” says former director of the institute, Professor Emeritus Robert Levenson. The sample sizes were small, “and a lot of the measures were not replicable, in the sense that if you gave a person the same test on a different day, they might perform in a different way.”
“这项研究有点像我们在科学上所说的‘动力不足’，”该研究所前主任、名誉教授罗伯特·利文森(Robert Levenson)说。样本量很小，“而且很多测试都是不可复制的，也就是说，如果你在不同的日子让一个人做同样的测试，他们可能会以不同的方式表现出来。”
The research continues, albeit with a different focus. In 1992, the Institute of Personality Assessment and Research received a new name: the Institute of Personality and Social Research. It was a change that reflected shifts in both American society and the field of psychology. Gone was the obsession with individual genius.
研究仍在继续，尽管关注点有所不同。1992年，人格评估与研究研究所获得了一个新的名称:人格与社会研究研究所。这一变化反映了美国社会和心理学领域的变化。对个人天才的痴迷消失了。
“One of the core ideologies behind a focus on identifying the exceptional person is individualism,” says IPSR’s new director (as of July), Professor of Psychology Iris Mauss. “And that’s much more aligned with the ‘P’ in IPSR.” The “S,” she says, “was added to reflect that you can only understand the human mind by looking at the social aspects of people’s psychology.”
IPSR的新主任(7月上任)、心理学教授艾瑞斯·莫斯(Iris Mauss)说:“关注识别杰出人士背后的核心意识之一是个人主义。这更符合IPSR中的‘P’。“S”，她说，“是为了反映你只能通过观察人们心理的社会方面来理解人类的思想。”
Today’s IPSR is focused more on health and well-being for everyone, she says. Personality still has a role to play however. “We aren’t all the same, right? People differ, including in how they respond to the social conditions they live in, and how they respond to their communities,” Mauss says. “And so to understand who will thrive and who will not do so well, we absolutely need to understand personality differences, as well as social context. We need both.”
她说，如今的IPSR更关注每个人的健康和福祉。然而，个性仍然起着一定的作用。“我们不都是一样的，对吧?”人们是不同的，包括他们如何应对他们所生活的社会条件，以及他们如何应对他们的社区，”莫斯说。“因此，为了了解谁会茁壮成长，谁不会做得很好，我们绝对需要了解性格差异，以及社会背景。我们两者都需要。”
