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by Dean Keith Simonton

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  • ISBN: 0898623707
  • Category: Health & Fitness
  • Author: Dean Keith Simonton
  • Subcategory: Psychology & Counseling
  • Other formats: lrf doc lrf txt
  • Language: English
  • Publisher: The Guilford Press; 1st edition (May 20, 1994)
  • Pages: 502 pages
  • FB2 size: 1335 kb
  • EPUB size: 1405 kb
  • Rating: 4.9
  • Votes: 786
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The book is, in short, a tour de force: spirited, erudite, and entertaining - well within the reach of advanced undergraduates.

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Home Browse Books Book details, Greatness: Who Makes History and Wh. In this path-breaking work, Dean Keith Simonton examines a range of important personalities and events that have influenced the course of history.

Home Browse Books Book details, Greatness: Who Makes History and Why. Greatness: Who Makes History and Why. By Dean Keith Simonton.

In this path-breaking work, Dean Keith Simonton examines a range of important personalities and events that have influenced the course of history.

Simonton's book is bound to overwhelm you. There is so much information packed into this tome that I found . The book satisfies the universal interest we have in those who are great, those who can be and those who could have been. There is so much information packed into this tome that I found myself jumping from chapter to chapter. But a lot of this is fascinating. I am most impressed with the statistics and tables that he presents. Even if you like to just "look at the pictures," they still convey the most interesting things.

Dean Keith Simonton .

Who Makes History and Why. Dean Keith Simonton. The book covers history-making events such as international crises, technological innovations and scientific breakthroughs, popular TV shows, natural disasters, and many more.

Greatness: Who makes history and why. DK Simonton. Guilford Press, 1994. Creative productivity: A predictive and explanatory model of career trajectories and landmarks. Scientific creativity as constrained stochastic behavior: The integration of product, person, and process perspectives. Psychological Bulletin 129 (4), 475, 2003.

Dean Keith Simonton is a Distinguished Professor of Psychology at UC-Davis. He is particularly interested in the study of human intelligence, creativity, greatness, and the psychology of science. Simonton was born on January 27, 1948, in Los Angeles (Glendale), California. He obtained his . at Harvard in 1973, and his PhD in 1975. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a fellow of the American Psychological Association.

Dean Keith Simonton, P. a professor of psychology at the University of California at Davis, has published more than 100 articles and five books on various aspects of history-making personalities and events. Библиографические данные. Автор.

What do Madonna, Confucius, and Jackie Robinson have in common? What does it take to go down in history as a great political leader? Why do revolutions occur, riots break out, and lynch mobs assemble? Which events do people find the most shocking or memorable?This path-breaking work offers the first comprehensive examination of the important personalities and events that have influenced the course of history. It discusses whether people who go down in history are different from the rest of us; whether specific personality traits predispose certain people to become world leaders, movie stars, scientific geniuses, and athletes, while others are relegated to ordinary lives. In exploring the psychology of greatness, this volume sheds light on the characteristics that any of us may share with history-making people.Throughout, the book addresses two broad questions: what sorts of people are responsible for historic events and achievements, and what kinds of events are most likely to be seen as history-making at their time of occurrence. Providing a wealth of examples, the text probes the lives of important figures, from charismatic political and military leaders to famous writers, Nobel Prize winners, child prodigies, and Olympic athletes. The book covers history-making events such as international crises, technological innovations and scientific breakthroughs, popular TV shows, natural disasters, and many more.With unerring insight, Simonton examines the full range of phenomena associated with greatness--everything from genetic inheritance, intuition, aesthetic appreciation, and birth order, to formal education, sexual orientation, aging, IQ, and alcohol and drug abuse. The work embeds psychological topics in the larger contexts of science, art, politics, and history to essentially define a new interdisciplinary field of study: the psychology of history.Written in an engaging style, and offering the first in-depth examination of a topic with universal appeal, GREATNESS will be welcomed by everyone interested in the people and events that have made the world what it is today.
Reviews about Greatness: Who Makes History and Why (7):
terostr
This book is pretty interesting for a very dry academic study... if that makes any kind of sense at all. If you are interested in background information of the great, the Nature vs. Nurture questions involved,enviornment personality type birth order etc., then you might enjoy this Tome. Not enjoyable light reading by any means, but it does site some very interesting and diverse views and theories. However if the subject is of interest to you, you might read this in tandem with Orson Scott Card's "Pastwatch", or "Enders Shadow", as well as C.J. Cherryh's Cyteen. These are the stories that brought me to the interest of the study that Dr. Simonton investigates here. But you'd have to be a lot smarter than me to read it for fun. The TV series Malcolm in the Middle gives a much more entertaining look at the subject, and if you are an academic that doesn't understand the correlation, then, that is a show you should watch from the Pilot episode to the Finale.
Yozshugore
Simonton's book is bound to overwhelm you. There is so much information packed into this tome that I found myself jumping from chapter to chapter. But a lot of this is fascinating. If you want to know about the correlation between intelligence and productivity or birth order and greatness, you can find it here. There is a treasury of great anecdotes about great people (my favorite is Brahms's comment about treading in the footsteps of a giant--Beethoven), and the book is a fast read (page-by-page that is--it's quite a lengthy book).
The drawback of the work is that it may lead you to think that we can really know what greatness is. Simonton has done his research and offers many arguments along these lines, but I couldn't help feeling at the end of it, that though I had a better understanding of different aspects of greatness--intelligence, productivity, charisma etc.--it wasn't entirely clear how they fit together in the form of an individual. There is still no sure way (and there will probably never be) of knowing beforehand whether someone will be great. Greatness cannot be made with any amount of certainty, even if we have all the ingredients (which we don't). Luck and contingency play too large a role.
Nevertheless this is a fun read and you can learn a lot!
Arith
This is a good in-depth overview of why some people become great, but only from a psychological perspective. The book is 15 years old so it is also getting dated since the book is referencing a lot of research. Still worh reading if you are interested in the subject.

With psychological perspective I mean that the book is somewhat narrow. It does not deal with social networks and how a network can lift an individual. It does not deal with luck or interaction between personal traits and situation. This is a major weakness to understand greatness, but one book cannot cover it all. Still I would have been more comfortable if the author himsel was aware of these limitations.
Gigafish
This broad and mediocre survey of psychology of people who stand out in history probably contains a fair number of good ideas, but it's hard to separate them from the many ideas that are questionable guesses. He's inconsistent about distinguishing his guesses from claims backed by good evidence.

One of the clearest examples is his assertion that childhood adversity builds character. He presents evidence that eminent figures were unusually likely to have had a parent die early, and describes this as the "most impressive proof" of his claim. He ignores the possibility those people come from families with a pattern of taking sufficiently unusual risks to explain that evidence.

In other places, he makes mistakes which seemed reasonable when the book was published, such as "Mendelian laws of inheritance are blind to whether an individual is first-born or later-born" (parental age has a measurable effect on mutation rates).

He avoids some of the worst mistakes that a psychology of history could make, such as trying to psychoanalyze individuals without having enough information about them.

He mentions some approaches to analyzing presidential addresses and corporate letters to stockholders, which have some potential to be used in predicting whether leaders have the appropriate personality for their jobs. I wonder what would happen if many voters/stockholders demanded that leaders pass tests of this nature (I'm assuming the tests can be scored objectively, but that may be shaky assumption). I'm confident that we'd get leaders with rhetoric that passes those tests. Would that simply mean the leaders change their rhetoric, or would it be hard enough to maintain a mismatch between rhetoric and thought patterns that we'd get leaders with better thought patterns?
Yla
I must say that this is one of the best psychology textbooks that I own. While most of them sit on a shelf, only to be picked up occasionally for reference, Dr. Simonton's book is one that I've read a number of times... and I'm not even a psychologist.
It is written in a style that is both entertaining and informative and the progression of topics is perfect. The book satisfies the universal interest we have in those who are great, those who can be and those who could have been.
I am most impressed with the statistics and tables that he presents. Even if you like to just "look at the pictures," they still convey the most interesting things.
It has provided me with hours of conversation which is a definitive way to judge a non-fiction book. The best ones are those that you think and talk about.

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