This study reports on 677 intellectually precocious youth identified by age 13 (433 males, 244 females). They were assessed through above-level testing with the SAT and were in the top 1% on mathematical and/or verbal reasoning ability. They were also assessed on the Allport, Vernon, and Lindzey (1970) Study of Values (SOV), an ipsative instrument that profiles six value sentiments: theoretical, economic, aesthetic, social, political, and religious. A ten-year longitudinal study of these participants conducted a discriminant function analysis showing that both the SAT and SOV provided incremental validity, relative to each other, in the prediction of different types of college degrees (Achter, Lubinski, & Benbow, 1999). Ten years later, the same discriminant function scores predicted participants’ age 33 occupational trajectories (Wai, Lubinski, & Benbow, 2005). The latter study documented that the predictive validity of these functions, based on age 13 assessments and calibrated against age 23 educational outcomes, generalize to age 33 occupational outcomes.
These participants are currently age 50, and it is now possible to examine the longitudinal potency of these functions for distinguishing genuine manifestations of eminence using ultimate criteria (Thorndike, 1949). These criteria include, for example, full professorship at research-1 universities, executive roles at Fortune 500 companies, and positions as lawyers and judges in major leadership roles. Our results demonstrate that the same discriminant function structure matrix, based on age 13 assessments and calibrated against age 23 educational outcomes, generates scores that populate different regions of eminence as defined by age 50 ultimate criteria. These findings support theoretical concepts cutting across “aptitude complexes” (Snow, Corno, & Jackson, 1996) and “trait clusters” (Ackerman, 1996; von Stumm & Ackerman, 2013), which give rise to differential learning and development, as well as familiar psychological “taxons” found in the world of work (Dawis & Lofquist, 1984). For the first time, the verisimilitude of these ideas is generalized to creativity and eminence among intellectually precocious youth.
