 Key terms for chapter 7: Show
algorithms: Strategies—including formulas, instructions, and the testing of all possible solutions—that guarantee a solution to a problem. artificial intelligence (AI): A scientific field that focuses on creating machines capable of performing activities that require intelligence when they are done by people. availability heuristic: A prediction about the probability of an event based on the ease of recalling or imagining similar events base rate neglect: The tendency to ignore information about general principles in favor of very specific but vivid information. cognition: How information is processed and manipulated in remembering, thinking, and knowing. concept: A mental category that is used to group objects, events, and characteristics. confirmation bias: The tendency to search for and use information that supports one’s ideas rather than refutes them. convergent thinking: Thinking that produces the single best solution to a problem. creativity: The ability to think about something in novel and unusual ways and to devise unconventional solutions to problems. culture-fair tests: Intelligence tests that are intended to be culturally unbiased. decision making: The mental activity of evaluating alternatives and choosing among them. deductive reasoning: Reasoning from a general case that is known to be true to a specific instance. divergent thinking: Thinking that produces many solutions to the same problem. dyslexia: A learning disability characterized by difficulty with learning to read fluently and with accurate comprehension, despite normal intelligence. fixation: Using a prior strategy and failing to look at a problem from a fresh new perspective. functional fixedness: Failing to solve a problem as a result of fixation on a thing’s usual functions. gifted: Possessing high intelligence (an IQ of 130 or higher) and/or superior talent in a particular area. heritability: The proportion of observable differences in a group that can be explained by differences in the genes of the group’s members. heuristics: Shortcut strategies or guidelines that suggest a solution to a problem but do not guarantee an answer. hindsight bias: The tendency to report falsely, after the fact, that one has accurately predicted an outcome. inductive reasoning: Reasoning from specific observations to make generalizations. infinite generativity: The ability of language to produce an endless number of meaningful sentences. Social Skills - Interpersonal skills, responsibility, self-esteem, and ability to follow rules and obey Practical Skills - Activities of daily living such as personal care, occupational skills, health care, travel/transportation, and use of the telephone. One of the best known training programs is the Purdue Creative Thinking program. This training intervention was designed by Feldhusen and colleagues in the early 1980s and consists of 28 lessons on audio tape. Trainees listen to 30 minute instructional sessions and work through a series of exercises for each session. The goal of the course designers was to enhance the fluency, flexibility, originality, and elaboration of trainees’ responses during creative thought. As discussed by several creativity researchers since the development of the divergent thinking construct, creativity can also be thought of as the generation of novel, useful solutions to problems (i.e., problem-solving). Problem-solving is defined the act of resolving a complex, ill-defined problem using new ideas that have been developed using multiple pieces of information and expertise in order to provide a framework for implementing a solution. This represents a more extensive description of the processes contributing to creative thought than divergent thinking alone. Rather than emphasizing one process such as divergent thinking, researchers using this approach have identified a wide variety of cognitive processes contributing to creativity. Problem finding, conceptual combination, and idea evaluation are only a few processes that have been identified as being important contributors to the creative process. The problem-solving approach to creativity spawned a well-known training program called the Creative Problem-Solving program. This program was developed by Sidney Parnes and colleagues during the 1970s and presents trainees with six stages of creative problem-solving. These six stages include mess finding, problem finding, information finding, idea finding, solution finding, and acceptance finding. This course was conducted as a lecture along with a discussion of the model presented to trainees. Trainees then completed a set of exercises to practice the techniques they learned during training. Evidence bearing on the effectiveness of this program can be found in Reese, Parnes, Treffinger, and Kaltsounis in 1976 and Basadur, Graen, and Green in 1982. These researchers found gains in divergent thinking on a variety of tasks including social problem-solving and planning. Basadur, Graen, and Green stated that engineers in an industrial organization showing significant improvements in problem finding and problem-solving immediately after training and this finding held 2 weeks later on work related measures. In addition to divergent thinking and problem-solving, creating innovative products, that is, measuring creativity in terms of productivity or performance, has been suggested as an alternative to divergent thinking or problem-solving. One benefit of using performance as a criterion for creativity is that performance is ultimately the outcome of primary concern in real-world settings. Spending time and energy to solve problems or engage in cognitive processes such as divergent thinking do not amount to much in the real-world if nothing is ever produced. Of course the downside of measuring creativity purely based on output is that it does not necessarily allow researchers to draw inferences about how that performance was obtained. However, it is clear is that a person's productivity is an important aspect of their creative performance and should be included in an examination of the effectiveness of creativity training. Lastly, assessing an individual's response to creative work or examining the degree to which an individual accepts or even initiates creative action is an important aspect of creativity that should be examined. Members of organizations often approach creative ideas with skepticism or even resistance. While creative ideas are often the precursor to progress, they also indicate that change is needed and change often has its enemies. Pair this with the fact that creative ideas do not always work out as intended, it is not surprising that people have difficulty accepting creativity. However, assuming creativity is needed, and given that this article is focused on promoting creativity through training, it is valid to consider the degree to which creativity training helps people become more accepting of creative ideas. Components of creativity training courses. Training courses can be thought of as being made up of four primary components: the design of the course, the content included in the course, the way course content is delivered, and the media used during instruction. Additionally, the theoretical framework a course designer used in developing the course is likely to have a pervasive influence on all four of these factors. Course design includes the length of a creativity course, the types of practice opportunities trainees are given (if any), and how the different training sessions are scheduled (i.e., massed versus distributed). Course content includes the factual and conceptual knowledge about creativity the instructor attempts to communicate to the trainees but also includes the types of techniques the instructor promotes for increasing creativity. Course delivery includes variables such as how long the training lasts, the amount of lecture used, the amount of practice time given to trainees, the nature of the practice exercises, the amount of feedback provided to trainees, as well as other variables related to how the instructor communicated material to trainees in order to facilitate learning the content incorporated into the course. Delivery media includes the types of materials that were used to convey material during the course. The use of lectures, A-V equipment, case-based material, or cooperative learning activities fall into this category. View chapterPurchase book Read full chapter URL: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780123750389002260 Creative AbilitiesSelcuk Acar, Mark A. Runco, in Handbook of Organizational Creativity, 2012 Divergent Thinking Applied to OrganizationsDivergent thinking may play several roles in organizations. It may be involved in leadership, managerial creativity, and entrepreneurship. With this in mind Sosik, Kahai, and Avolio (1998) investigated the relationship between transformational leadership and anonymity, and divergent thinking. Four experimental groups; high versus low transformational leadership, and anonymous versus identified groups conditions, were compared with respect to fluency, flexibility, originality and elaboration. They found a main effect for transformation leadership, with the higher transformational leadership group scoring higher in originality and elaboration than the low transformational leadership group. Also, a main effect was found for anonymity. Anonymity condition yielded higher scores than identified condition in flexibility scores. They also found an interaction of transformational leadership and anonymity for flexibility. The highest flexibility was observed in the anonymous high transformational group and the lowest was identified in low transformational leadership. Jung (2000–2001) compared transformational and transactional leadership in the conditions of real versus nominal brainstorming groups. When multivariate analyses were run by controlling for gender and group size, the significant main effects were for leadership and group conditions as well as an interaction effect of both on fluency and flexibility scores. As expected, the transformational leadership group was more flexible and fluent than the transactional group; and also nominal groups were superior to real groups in those regards. Divergent thinking tests were also used for prediction of managerial creativity. Scratchley and Hakstian (2000–2001) used a battery of divergent thinking tests that were developed for industrial settings, including three components: the brainstorming exercise, which requires finding many solutions for a management problem; the similarities exercise, which entails finding many similarities between two different objects; and the association exercise which is about finding a word that connects three dissimilar words. They also used some other measures, including a test of intelligence and openness. The criterion involved a measure of global change and incremental criteria and a measure of general managerial creativity, both measures were domain specific. The composite of divergent thinking was correlated (both zero-order and part correlations) with the measure of global change and general managerial creativity, but not with the incremental change. They also showed that a divergent thinking test used with the openness test has validity when workplace criteria are used. Ames and Runco (2005) tested the usefulness of SWOT (the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) analysis as an adapted version of divergent thinking tasks to predict entrepreneurship. The participants were entrepreneurs who started different numbers of businesses. The Runco Ideational Behavior Scale (RIBS) was also administered (Runco, Plucker, & Lim, 2000–2001). This is a self-report measure, assessing ideational skills in a natural environment. These analyses indicated that RIBS predicts entrepreneurship while the divergent thinking task based on SWOT analysis does not. However, scores from the SWOT are correlated with scores from the RIBS. The authors argued that skills measured by RIBS in the natural environment might come easier than a problem solving tasks. They concluded that the selection of tests is important even when they seem to measure same or similar skills. View chapterPurchase book Read full chapter URL: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780123747143000069 Creative competence and ageKenneth J. Gilhooly, Mary L.M. Gilhooly, in Aging and Creativity, 2021 Summary and conclusionsSummaryDivergent thinking tasks require the production of many alternative responses and are widely used to test for creative potential. The main tasks of this type are the alternative uses task in which as many new uses as possible for familiar objects are to be reported, often with a time limit; and the Torrance tests such as the Circles test, in which participants have to make as many different figures as possible using circles printed on the test sheets, again usually within a time limit. Divergent responses can be scored in a number of ways: mainly, for fluency, flexibility, originality and, sometimes, elaboration. Over a number of studies using timed presentations, an inverted U pattern of performance has generally been found, with an increase up to middle age in fluency and originality and a gradual decline thereafter. Age effects diminished or vanished when tests were untimed. When timed tests were used, but differences in processing speed or working memory were taken into account, again age differences were greatly reduced. Overall, declines with age in (timed) divergent performance seem to be attributable to declines in processing speed and related declines in working memory with age. There is some evidence of a cohort effect in that more recent birth cohorts seem to be doing worse on divergent tasks, in particular, on the Torrance Figural Test over the period 1974–2008. As this is the reverse of the Flynn cohort effect for fluid intelligence, it cannot be explained by changes in fluid ability over cohorts. ConclusionsOverall, empirical studies of age-related changes in divergent test performance, and particularly in alternate uses, with timed tasks, tend to support a “peak and decline” pattern, with the peak being in early middle age. In terms of our original question at the start of this chapter, the pattern of the relationship between age and divergent thinking is broadly an inverted U with a prolonged, relatively flat, peak, or plateau, followed by a late drop off. A likely explanation for the inverted U pattern of performance with age is that, growth in knowledge of objects and of possible uses with age tends toward aiding in alternate uses generation, but declines in processing speed with age tend toward impairing use generation and ultimately cause performance to drop, particularly with timed tests. Declines with age are much less marked with untimed divergent tasks which do not penalize the slower processing rates of older participants. View chapterPurchase book Read full chapter URL: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780128164013000020 Brain and NeuropsychologyO. Vartanian, in Encyclopedia of Creativity (Second Edition), 2011 Divergent ThinkingDivergent thinking has long been viewed as an important component of creative problem solving. The Alternate Uses Test is one of the most popular divergent thinking tasks. Early EEG results from pioneering studies by Colin Martindale distinguished alpha wave activity in relation to engagement in the Alternate Uses Test from activity in relation to engagement in the Remote Associates Test and intelligence tests. These three tasks vary in the extent to which performance is a function of reliance on divergent versus convergent processes: whereas the Alternate Uses Test is generally perceived to be a relatively ‘pure’ measure of divergent processes, the Remote Associates Test is considered to depend both on divergent and convergent processes, and intelligence tests are perceived to depend primarily on convergent processes. Highly creative people exhibited the greatest variation in EEG alpha wave activity across the three tasks. Specifically, whereas low-creativity subjects exhibited low EEG alpha on all three tasks, high-creative subjects exhibited high EEG alpha only during work on the Alternate Uses Test. Given that alpha wave activity is an inverse measure of cortical activity, this finding confirms that creativity is linked to task-related variation in cortical function. Recently, Andreas Fink, Aljoscha Neubauer and colleagues have employed the Alternate Uses Test to study brain activity using EEG and fMRI in the same study design. Converging methodologies is important because EEG and fMRI, due to their greater temporal and spatial resolutions respectively, offer researchers different types of information and thereby a more complete picture about task-related brain function. When EEG data were analyzed along the lower (8–12 Hz) and upper (10–12 Hz) alpha frequencies, the results demonstrated that the generation of unusual uses in the context of the Alternate Uses Test is associated with greater alpha synchronization in lower and upper bands compared to a task in which subjects were instructed to think of typical characteristics of conventional everyday objects. Greater alpha synchronization was especially prevalent in frontal areas of the brain. Interestingly, when subjects were categorized based on the originality of uses generated in the context of the Alternate Uses Test, those with higher originality scores showed greater synchronization in the right than left hemisphere. However, predictably, a different picture emerged from fMRI data. Specifically, the Alternate Uses Task activated a left-lateralized network comprising the inferior frontal gyrus extending to the supplementary motor area and anterior cingulate. This network is frequently activated in linguistic tasks, and its involvement is not surprising given the verbal nature of the stimuli and the task. This indicates that the characteristics of the task are reflected in the activations perceived in imaging technologies. This should sensitize researchers to task features when interpreting imaging results. Another classic divergent thinking task is Match Problems. Unlike the Alternate Uses Task, Match Problems is a visuospatial problem-solving task. Whereas some match problems can be solved by a sequence of generate-evaluate cycles, others involve start states that create strong mental sets that implicitly obstruct certain transformations. For this reason it has been argued that good performance on Match Problems necessitates ‘set shifts.’ By relaxing the constraints placed on the problem space, set shifts effectively widen the problem space. Furthermore, set shifts are facilitated by mental representations of the start state that are more abstract and ambiguous than the one provided in the problem statement. This enables subjects to remain noncommittal about solution paths and strategies while flexibly generating potential moves. Laurie Miller and Lynette Tippett studied the neural architecture underlying the solution of Match Problems in patients with focal brain lesions. Their results have shown that patients with focal right frontal lobe lesions were impaired specifically on those match problems that required set shifts. This selective impairment was especially apparent in patients with lesions to right ventral (as opposed to dorsal) prefrontal cortex (PFC). This deficit has been attributed to the role of the right frontal region in permitting flexible strategy shifts. These neuropsychological results have been corroborated with fMRI data. Specifically, Vinod Goel and Oshin Vartanian have shown that whereas engagement in Match Problems was associated with activation in left dorsal lateral PFC and right ventral lateral PFC, the latter structure was activated exclusively when subjects successfully solved problems that required set shifting. The convergence of neuropsychological and imaging results provides strong support for the role of right ventral lateral PFC in flexible strategy shifts in the context of Match Problems. Some Match Problems allow the generation of multiple solutions to the same problem. Divergent thinking is relevant here because it reflects the ability to generate many solutions to a problem or prompt (i.e., fluency). In the context of Match Problems, activation in right dorsal lateral PFC has been shown to covary parametrically with the number of generated solutions. There are at least three possibilities for its involvement in divergent thinking ability. First, generating additional hypotheses in divergent trials requires their maintenance in working memory. The involvement of right dorsal lateral PFC in working memory for maintaining and storing information is well established. Second, as subjects generate and evaluate hypotheses, they need to keep track of successful and unsuccessful attempts. On a cognitive level, one would expect a positive correlation between the number of hypotheses generated and the demand on monitoring resources and relations. In fact, right dorsal lateral PFC has been implicated in tasks that require the integration of multiple relations and monitoring subgoal processes, as would be required here. A third possibility involves conflict resolution. As additional solutions are generated, not only is there a need to update previous responses, but also to resolve the conflict between responses. As one generates more responses, the conflict of choosing between multiple responses would increase accordingly. The role of the right dorsal lateral PFC in conflict detection and/or resolution is widely recognized. Of course, these three explanations are not mutually exclusive, and possibly all contribute to divergent production. View chapterPurchase book Read full chapter URL: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780123750389000315 PhasesDavid H. Cropley, in Creativity in Engineering, 2015 Constraints and DesignThe differences between divergent thinking in the top-down sense and divergent thinking in the bottom-up sense may seem trivial, and indeed, this is of little consequence to the general concept of divergent thinking. However, in the context of the complete design (or creative problem-solving) process, where divergent synthesis is followed by convergent analysis, it highlights an element that is critical to any discussion of the interaction between engineering design and creativity. Divergent thinking, in isolation, is free to consider any possible solution that enters the mind of the designer. Thus, there is no limit on the possible uses of a tin can, and no limit to the number of ways passengers could be carried. However, divergent thinking, as the precursor to convergent thinking and taking place within a creative problem-solving (or top-down engineering design) process, does not have the same complete freedom. It is true that there are an infinite number of ways that passengers could be carried, but achieving a practical solution dictates that many of these will be rejected during the stage of convergent analysis that follows our divergent synthesis. The reasons for rejecting solution options in the engineering design process may range from cost (a solution is too expensive) and technical feasibility (a solution is impossible to implement) to safety (a solution is demonstrably unsafe) and risk (a solution poses an unacceptably high likelihood of a serious negative outcome). Each of these parameters introduces constraints that, in effect, limit the available range of solutions from all possible solutions to a subset of feasible, practical solutions. However, knowing that these constraints exist should not cause us to bypass divergent thinking. Rather, these constraints are the basis of the analysis that follows our divergent thinking, and knowing what they are is a necessary part of the engineering problem-solving process. View chapterPurchase book Read full chapter URL: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780128002254000033 The relationships between abstraction and creativityMassimiliano Palmiero, in Creativity and the Wandering Mind, 2020 Abstraction and divergent thinkingThe concept of divergent thinking was primarily proposed by Guilford (1950, 1967) and has been used in a lot of studies investigating creativity. It underpins the creative potential rather than creativity (e.g., Runco & Acar, 2012), which relies on an open-ended mental process aimed at finding different solutions to open problems (e.g., alternative uses for a brick—Kaufman, Plucker, & Baer, 2008). Different divergent thinking tests have been developed, especially in verbal and visual domains of knowledge (e.g., Torrance, 1974). The Torrance Test of Creative Thinking is the most widely used test to assess divergent thinking and creativity. This test is composed by word-based exercises—verbal form (e.g., ask-and-guess causes and consequences, product improvement, unusual uses), and picture-based exercises—figural form (e.g., picture completion starting from given stimuli of shapes). In addition, divergent doing tasks have also been developed (e.g., Bertsch, 1983; Moraru, Memmert, & van der Kamp, 2016; Wyrick, 1968) to assess divergence in motor domain, for example, asking participants to produce as many actions as possible on an agility ladder laid on the ground (e.g., stepping, skipping). A motor-form divergent thinking task, consisting in producing acted motor forms (e.g., a basketball player), has been also developed (Palmiero et al., 2019). Divergent thinking/doing tests are scored in terms of fluency (number of ideas/motor solutions), flexibility (number of categories, mutually exclusive, encompassing ideas/motor solutions), and originality (uniqueness or infrequency of ideas, or overall evaluation of motor solutions by at least two independents judges). Visual and verbal divergent thinking can also be scored in terms of elaboration (numbers of details provided along with the ideas). What type of thinking allows many different solutions to a problem?Divergent thinking refers to the creative solutions you could find for a problem. This type of thinking allows for more freedom and helps you generate more than one solution by typically using brainstorming as the cognitive method.
What is meant by divergent thinking?Divergent thinking is cognition that leads in various directions. Some of these are conventional, and some original. Because some of the resulting ideas are original, divergent thinking represents the potential for creative thinking and problem solving.
What is an example of convergent thinking?Scientific experiments are great examples of convergent thinking. Scientists conduct experiments to find the best possible answer to a problem. Experiments also follow a logical sequence of events and compare unknowns to proven scientific facts.
What is divergent thinking examples?Some other examples of divergent thinking include: Wondering how many ways you can use a fork. Showing a person a photo and asking them to create a caption for the photo. Giving a child a stack of blocks and asking them to see how many shapes they can create with those blocks.
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