Diana B. Bogoyavlenskaya

The concept of “competitiveness” has been most thoroughly developed in the framework of modern economics and management. Apart from economic factors, this concept also embraces social and psychological factors, but economic models do not reveal the psychological essence of the concept of “competitive personality.”

Analytical review of the psychological and educational case studies of the competitive- personality problem has brought to light the ambiguity in this concept along with a multitude of models that distinguish individual aspects of a competitive personality. Most creators of the various models emphasize the quality of the conditions necessary for forming and developing a competitive personality. In economics, competition is an essential, inherent feature of various types of activity where conflicts of interest occur. However, the established economic model of competitive personality reduces and replaces the psychological content of the concept.

Theoretically and experimentally the authors of this article substantiate their disclosure of the competitive-personality concept via its creative potential. Results of an in-depth study confirm that the ability to achieve success through one’s own initiative, anticipating the demands of competition, appears to be the backbone for competitiveness of personality.

This paper reports on the results of the 40-year longitudinal studies based on the author’s conception of creativity as generation of activity at one’s own initiative and pursued by the method Creative Field, which has been developed by the author purposely to explore this particular phenomenon. The method allows dividing people with high abilities into those who attain proficiency and those who push the boundaries and move to the level of art even in science, which characterizes the higher forms of creativity. The universality of the method as a diagnostic instrument proves the possibility to identify creative abilities on samples of seemingly alternative professions: in exact sciences and in art. The validity of this method is confi rmed by the absolute coincidence of the diagnostic findings and the life course of the subjects in the given samples. Moreover, the diagnostic findings in children of school age have been sustained for a period of over 40 years, which speaks for the apparent prognostics of the method.

This article stresses the social importance of the problem of giftedness and in this connection the necessity to clarify this concept scientifically. The history of this problem reveals the origins of reduction of the concept and the wide-spread notion of giftedness as "intelligence level above average. "There are two reasons of it: 1) Galton's components of giftedness were put into a complex; 2) there were no measuring techniques of this complex. The unit of the analysis of giftedness was formed after Galton's notion of giftedness as comprised of components was supplemented with the method of measurement -"systematic observation"- and understood as an ability to generate activity at one's own initiative. Then it became possible to realize Galton's concept of giftedness as a manifestation of mind and character.

At the current stage the history of researching creativity appears to have drawn a curve which agrees with the methodological conceptions of L.S. Vigotsky. His idea, that of a psychology which intends to study phenomena in their complexity, should replace the methods of dividing into elementary components (atoms) by methods which single out essential non-elemental units, and should make obvious the logic of understanding creative abilities, as it historically developed in the 19lh and 20lh centuries.