Donald MacKinnon: Creativity Scholar

Donald MacKinnon

1903 – 1987

"The courage of the creative person manifests itself in many forms and in many different behaviors. It is the courage to be oneself in the fullest sense, to grow in great measure into the person one is capable of becoming, developing one's abilities and actualizing one's self. "

Personal Biography

Professional Milestones

bibliography

IPAR

• 1927-1933 Professorships at University of Maine, Harvard University, and as a Sheldon Traveling Fellow from Harvard at University of Berlin andwith Carl G. Jung in Zurich
• 1933 - 1944 Professorship at Bryn Mawr College
• 1944-1946 Served as director of Station S for the U.S. Office of Strategic Services. His work there included helping to design assessments to determine which candidates were best fits for service with the OSS. These assessments and procedures laid the groundwork for many common HR practices today (job descriptions and specifications, etc.)

• 1947-1970 Professorship at University of California, Berkeley, where he founded the Institute of Personality Assessment and Research
• 1951-1952 President of the Division of Personality and Socal Psychology of the American Psychological Association
• 1974-1987 Trustee of the Creative Education Foundation
• 1978: Publishes book In Search of Human Effectiveness, focusing on nurturing creative traits and individual potential and how to teach and impart creativity to the next generation

Between 1931 and 1981, MacKinnon published over 100 papers, chapters, and books. His written work includes themes such as creativity, motivation, hypnotizability, personality structure, and issues in assessment methodology.

Craik, K., Gough, H., Hall, W., & Helson, R. University of California: In Memoriam, 1987. Online Archive of California. (n.d.). http://texts.cdlib.org/view?docId=hb6z09p0jh;NAAN=13030&doc.view=frames&chunk.id=div00016&toc.depth=1&toc.id=&brand=oac4

MacKinnon, D. (1964). "The Creative Personality." Alex Osborn Creative Studies Collection. Archives & Special Collections Department, E. H. Butler Library, SUNY Buffalo State. https://digitalcommons.buffalostate.edu/cs-speakers/1

MacKinnon, D., Clark, J., Freank, R. Summer, & Smith. (1969)."The Creative Person, Teacher and Student; Creative Education through Existing Person; Creatively Experiment in Formal Subject Matter; Statistics and Creativity, New Math." Alex Osborn Creative Studies Collection. Archives & Special Collections Department, E. H. Butler Library, SUNY Buffalo State.nhttps://digitalcommons.buffalostate.edu/cs-speakers/20

MacKinnon, D. (1974). How assessment centers were started in the United States: The OSS Assessment Program. Development Dimensions International, Inc.

Mackinnon, D. W. (1965). Personality and the realization of creative potential. American Psychologist, 20(4), 273-281. doi:https://doi.org/10.1037/h0022403

Popova, M. (2017, January 14). The creative architect: Inside psychology’s most ambitious and influential study of what makes a creative person. The Marginalian. https://www.themarginalian.org/2016/12/29/the-creative-architect/

Founded in 1949 by Donald MacKinnon, the Institute of Personality Assessment and Research (IPAR) at University of California, Berkeley was one of the first global centers dedicated to personality research and the exploration of creativity though a rigorous scientific lense. In the words of writer Pierluigi Serriano, IPAR lead the effort to "take the alchemy out of any conversation on creativity." While research at IPAR included topics of creativity in education, creative personality, and other related themes, MacKinnon's most notable work from his time at the instute was a study of some of the world's leading architects, seeking insights into the origins of their creativity and the implications thereof for nurturing and educating creativity in others. In a time of great leaps in technology and the threat of nuclear war, IPAR's work was an antidote to fears of human obsolescence and the inevitable consiquences of contemporary policies. To this day, IPAR (now IPSR) continues to pursue research into personality and creativity in a cross-disciplinary context.

Participants in IPAR's salient study of creativity in architects

click here to explore IPAR's current activities (now the Institute of Personality and Social Research)

Donald Wallace MacKinnon was born in 1903 to parents Norman MacKinnon and Abbie Etta Whitehouse in Augusta, Maine. He completed his undergraduate studies at Bowdoin College in Maine, and his M.A. and Ph.D. at Harvard University. During his studies he married Mary Clare Linehan, a Ph.D. holder and published author in her own right. Together he and Mary had two daughters, and later 4 grandchildren. He died in 1987 in Stockton, California. MacKinnon's colleagues, family, and friends describe him as being kind, generous in his support of colleagues and students, of keen intelligence, and having possessed a "delightful sense of humor."