Social benefits and individual costs of creativity in art and science: A statistical analysis based on a theoretical framework

Abstract

In this study, we statistically identified and characterized the relationship between the long-run social benefits of creativity and the in-life individual costs (in terms of happiness and health) of creativity. To do so, we referred to a theoretical framework that depicts a creator’s life. We generated a balanced dataset of 200 creators (i.e., composers, painters, mathematicians and physicists, and biologists and chemists born between 1770 and 1879), and calculated standardized evaluations of the long-run social benefits in different domains (performances, exhibitions, citations). We performed regression analysis and identified the statistical determinants of the relationship between a creator’s social benefits and the costs to their happiness and health. We found that creativity represented an individual cost for all four creator groups, with a larger impact on happiness than on health; the cost was greater if creativity was based more on divergent than on convergent thinking or if authors faced greater language issues. The impacts of long-run social benefits on individual happiness and health were similar in the arts and sciences if institutional differences were taken into account.