Student or educator? Sign up with your school email and get 6 months of Pro free.
CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 199

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 13 of the 13 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Creativity and Discovery as Blind Variation: Campbell's (1960) BVSR Model after the Half-Century Mark

Simonton, Dean Keith·2011·Review of General Psychology
DOI 10.1037/a0022912
Open this paper in CoChat — free account

Abstract

This article assesses and extends Campbell's (1960) classic theory that creativity and discovery depend on blind variation and selective retention (BVSR), with special attention given to blind variations (BVs). The treatment begins by defining creativity and discovery, variant blindness versus sightedness, variant utility and selection, and ideational variants versus creative products. These definitions lead to BV identification criteria: (a) intended BV, which entails both systematic and stochastic combinatorial procedures; and (b) implied BV, which involves both variations with properties of blindness (variation superfluity and backtracking) and processes that should yield variant blindness (associative richness, defocused attention, behavioral tinkering, and heuristic search). These conceptual definitions and identification criteria then have implications for four persistent issues, namely, domain expertise, ideational randomness, analogical equivalence, and personal volition. Once BV is suitably conceptualized, Campbell's theory continues to provide a fruitful approach to the understanding of both creativity and discovery.

Overview

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1037/a0022912

Cites

13 of 13 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Verification

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Citations

Cites

Show all 13 references

Cited by

See all 199

Metadata

Authors
Simonton, D. K.
Venue
Review of General Psychology
Publisher
SAGE Publications
Published
2011-06
Volume
15
Issue
2
Pages
158-174
ISSN
  • 1089-2680 (ISSN-L)
  • 1939-1552
DOI
10.1037/a0022912
OpenAlex
W2036343254
Cited by
199
References
13
FWCI
14.23
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review

How to cite

Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.

This page
CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Creativity and Discovery as Blind Variation: Campbell's (1960) BVSR Model after the Half-Century Mark. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1037/a0022912
The paper
Simonton, D. K. (2011). Creativity and Discovery as Blind Variation: Campbell's (1960) BVSR Model after the Half-Century Mark. Review of General Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0022912

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.