Scott Barry Kaufman is an American cognitive scientist, author, podcaster, coach, popular science writer, and mentalist. His writing and research focuses on intelligence, creativity, and human potential. Most media attention has focused on Kaufman's attempt to redefine intelligence. Kaufman is founder and director of the Center for Human Potential and has taught courses at Columbia, NYU, the University of Pennsylvania, and elsewhere. From 2014 to 2025, Kaufman hosted The Psychology Podcast, and for close to a decade he wrote the "Beautiful Minds" column, first at Psychology Today and later at Scientific American. He is the author or editor of numerous books, including Ungifted: Intelligence Redefined (2013), Wired to Create (2015), Transcend: The New Science of Self-Actualization (2020), and Rise Above (2025). He also performs as a mentalist under the stage name "The Amazing Dr. Scott".
Early life Kaufman grew up in Pennsylvania. As a young child he experienced a series of ear infections and was diagnosed with central auditory processing disorder, which made it difficult for him to process spoken language in real time. He was held back in third grade and placed in special education classes for several years. In ninth grade, a special education teacher questioned why he was still in the program, an encounter Kaufman has credited with prompting him to take on more challenging coursework. He went on to earn high grades in high school; although his earlier IQ scores had not qualified him for his school's gifted program, a teacher allowed him to take gifted classes. Kaufman has said these experiences shaped his later research on intelligence and his critique of how it is measured, themes he developed in his 2013 book Ungifted: Intelligence Redefined.
Education Kaufman received his B.S. from Carnegie Mellon University, where he double majored in psychology and human-computer interaction, and where he was Herbert A. Simon's last research assistant and a student of Randy Pausch. In 2005, he received his M.Phil. from King's College, Cambridge under a Gates Scholarship, where he worked with Nicholas Mackintosh. After Cambridge, Kaufman earned his Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from Yale University where he was mentored by Robert Sternberg, Jeremy R. Gray, and Jerome L. Singer. From 2009-2010, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Center Leo Apostel for Interdisciplinary Studies.
Research
Gifted education and twice exceptionality Much of Kaufman's work concerns the identification and education of gifted and twice exceptional students, a focus he has connected to his own schooling: he was placed in special education classes as a child and has said his early IQ scores did not qualify him for gifted programs, before he went on to earn graduate degrees at Cambridge and Yale. In Ungifted: Intelligence Redefined (2013), he argued that intelligence and ability are dynamic—developing through the interaction of engagement and ability over time—and on that basis criticized the practice of classifying children as "gifted" or "not gifted" on the basis of a single IQ cutoff. He has argued for a broader conception of giftedness—one that counts capacities such as creativity and imagination, rather than analytic ability alone. He has discussed this more expansive view of intelligence in public forums including NPR's Hidden Brain. Kaufman has written extensively on twice-exceptional ("2e") students—children who have both exceptional abilities and a learning difficulty such as dyslexia, ADHD, or autism. He edited the volume Twice Exceptional: Supporting and Educating Bright and Creative Students with Learning Difficulties (Oxford University Press, 2018), which characterizes the 2e student as "neither exclusively disabled nor exclusively gifted" but as a dynamic interaction of both. He has argued that such students are frequently overlooked in schools because their strengths and difficulties can mask one another. In a 2014 Education Week opinion piece written with several colleagues, Kaufman argued that gifted education itself is valuable but criticized how the "gifted" label is applied—citing schools that spend their entire gifted-education budget on the tests used to classify students, leaving little for programming, as well as the under-use of academic acceleration. He has advocated broadening access to advanced learning—through approaches such as universal screening and serving students' demonstrated needs rather than certifying a fixed category—and has more recently argued that giftedness is more widely distributed than conventional identification admits. He has argued that a single high-stakes test captures only a "slice in time" and that potential, being a moving target, is better assessed holistically over an extended period rather than at a single decisive moment.
Dual-process theory of human intelligence Most theories of human intelligence and tests of intelligence emphasize controlled and deliberate reasoning as the hallmark of human intelligence. While agreeing that such thought processes are an important component of intelligence, Kaufman argues that spontaneous forms of thinking such as insight, imaginative play, daydreaming, implicit learning, and a reduced latent inhibition are also important contributors to a wide range of intelligent behaviors as well as creativity. Integrating modern dual-process theories of cognition with research on human intelligence, Kaufman proposed the dual-process theory of human intelligence. The theory emphasizes the importance of adaptation to task demands as the essence of intelligent functioning. At the same time, the theory takes into account an individual's personal goals and accommodates a wide range of intelligent behaviors in a wide range of fields, from the arts to the sciences. A key assumption of the theory is that abilities are not static entities but are constantly changing throughout the life span as the person continually engages with controlled and spontaneous modes of thought. In Ungifted: Intelligence Redefined, Kaufman expanded his dual-process theory to make the point that his theory is also fundamentally developmental, because it views intelligence as the dynamic interplay of engagement and ability over time in the pursuit of personal goals.
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