Professor, Consultant, Entrepreneur
(Co-CEO with Myriam Augereau-Landais, Managing Director, AFNOR International)
Director, Creativity Profiling Project, Paris Descartes University (Sorbonne)
Psychological Researcher & Associate Member of Philosophy, University of Oxford (former Lecturer, Director of Studies & Fellow in Psychology)
Vice President, Professor & Director of Research, Preparing Global Leaders
(Amman, Skopje, Sophia, Split, Washington, D.C.)
Vice President, Omni Art Design, USA
Associate Editor, Journal of Design, Business & Society
Visiting & long-term Adjunct Professorships: Georgetown University
(McCourt School of Public Policy); Sorbonne (Economics & Psychology), RANEPA (Global Leadership); Beijing University & People’s University, China (English Literature & Western Culture)
BA, Yale: Ethics, Politics & Economics (+thesis in literature with Harold Bloom; VP of study government)
MDiv, Harvard: World Religions (4-year graduate degree; Director of Boston/Harvard’s Inter-religious Dialogue Program)
PhD (DPhil), University of Oxford: Psychology (Harvard University Knox Fellow at Oxford)
Profile & Approach
My degrees, research, and applied work has always been interdisciplinary, spanning several different fields, but each of them is united by fundamental grounding in rigorous empirical research at the highest level and associated with the best institutions.
I strongly believe that psychology, optimally pursued, should be re-envisioned as a sub-discipline of many other fields, providing tools and perspectives to improve the full range of human processes and interactions.
The different fields of my public work are united by the following themes and areas of academic research:
- Individual Differences (personality, intelligence, culture, gender, decision-making, leadership, psychometric tests, questionnaire construction, etc.)
- Creativity & Innovation (identification, measurement, and individual & group enhancement for different tasks, professions, and domains)
- Critical Thinking, Cognitive biases, and their relation to other 21st century skills (creativity, communication & collaboration)
- Psychology of Religion (broadly construed as psychology of culture and meaning making—another crucial “human factor”—with focuses on fundamentalism, conflict, ideology, visionary personalities, and powerful transformative experiences)
- Technology (e.g., AI & VR) and interactions with human psychology that will produce our collective future
In practice, I am an interdisciplinary creative problem-solver capable of anatomizing tasks, projects, problems and situations into measurable individual differences that can be used to understand or improve the situation and performance.
I bring the resources of several fields and noteworthy institutions to bear on individual, organizational, and public problems—all in the context of my keen interest in technology and other forces shaping the future. I design bespoke studies, including psychometric tests and questionnaires, and lead workshops on the themes of my research in several different countries. Through my background in art and design, I sometimes also consult for large scale public meaning, identity, and community-building projects.
If you have a project, event, or other opportunity that might be of mutual interest, please contact me.
News:
Free Creativity—and All of Human Thought!
I am very pleased to have co-authored the chapter on Creativity in the definitive new textbook on human thought. Edited by Robert Sternberg and Joachim Funke, it “is an ‘open access’ collection of peer-reviewed chapters [covering] all areas of higher cognitive processes.” With topics ranging from intelligence to decision making and creativity to wisdom, leading figures were asked to provide accessible, up-to-date, classroom-ready surveys of their areas of individual expertise.
Lubart, T., & Thornhill-Miller, B. (2020). Creativity: An Overview of the 7 C’s of Creative Thought. In R. Sternberg & F. Joachim (Eds.), The Psychology of Human Thought: An Introduction (pp. 277–305). Heidelberg University Publishing.
New Article:
“Creativity, Critical Thinking, Communication, and Collaboration:
Assessment, Certification, and Promotion of 21st Century Skills
for the Future of Work and Education”
What’s left for us mortal humans to focus on in the era of AI? Isn’t it about time we stop focusing assessment and development only on the individual and start fostering and developing 21st century skills at the group, institutional and systemic levels? See this article recently published in the Journal of Intelligence in which I am happy to have led group of leading experts from the Sorbonne.
Partly as a result of my work over the last four years on 21st Century Skills and the future of education and work with the International Institute for Competency Development and the OECD, I had previously outlined a model for understanding, packaging, and promoting the 4Cs, potentially helpful both for pedagogical and policy purposes.
“‘Crea-Critical Collab-ication’: a New Dynamic Interactionist Model of the 4Cs”
(Diagram illustrating the interpenetration of Creativity, Critical thinking, Collaboration, and Communication in dimensional space and according to their differing potential cognitive & individual vs social & interpersonal emphases)