But how do people study events and personalities so far removed in time and place?

The seminal book, Human Information Processing (Schroder, Streufert, et al., 1967) introduced “conceptual complexity” as a personality trait that guides the cognitive aspects of processes such as creativity, problem-solving, and decision-making, including information search and evaluation, flexibility, monitoring, perspective-taking, hypothesis-building, and tolerance of heterodoxy, uncertainty, and lack of closure.