What makes some people better at thinking up options for decisions?
People who were good at brainstorming unusual uses for everyday objects also generated more options for real-world problems, and this held even after accounting for their memory, executive control and intelligence.
Source
Option generation in decision making: ideation beyond memory retrieval
Study at a glance
- Design
- Cross-sectional — Two-session individual-differences study: three timed ill-structured option generation problems plus a battery of executive-function, memory, verbal fluency, intelligence, cognitive reflection, alternative uses and decision-rule tasks, analysed with hierarchical regression and path analysis
- N
- N=141 · 141 undergraduate students completed both sessions; all analyses are on this single sample.
- Population
- Italian undergraduate students at the University of Trieste, mostly young and female
- Outcome
- Option generation fluency and diversity, mean and maximum rated quality of generated options, and rated quality of the chosen option, for each of three decision problems
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What they did
Undergraduates had 6 minutes each to list as many ways as they could to solve three open-ended problems: city parking, fund raising for a children's charity, and saving energy at home, then picked their best option. Two trained raters counted the options, sorted them into categories and rated each option's usefulness. In a second session the same students completed tests of working memory updating, inhibition (Stroop), task switching, cued recall, category and letter fluency, fluid intelligence (Raven's matrices), cognitive reflection, a structured decision-rule task, and the alternative uses test of ideation fluency.
What they found
Ideation fluency on the alternative uses test was the strongest predictor of how many and how varied the options were in all three problems, adding predictive power after memory, control, intelligence, verbal fluency and domain knowledge were entered; the full models explained roughly 20 to 30 percent of the variance. By contrast, the structured decision-rule task was predicted by memory, control and intelligence but not by ideation, a double dissociation in two of the three problems. Generating more options tended to lower the average quality of the other options (less is more) but to raise the quality of the best option (quantity breeds quality), and both average and best quality related to better final choices, though these indirect effects were small and varied by problem.
The limits
What it doesn't show
Because this is a correlational individual-differences design, it cannot show that ideation ability causes better option generation, and the authors call for experimental follow-ups. The sample was young, educated undergraduates, which restricts the range of ability and limits generalisation. Several predictor tasks had low reliability (for example letter-memory and the switch cost), which can hide real relationships with memory and control. The less-is-more result depended on statistically controlling for the best option's quality, and the authors note that without this control the fluency–mean-quality correlations were not significant; results also varied across the three problems.
Key terms
- Option generation
- The process of coming up with possible courses of action for a decision problem when the options are not given in advance.
- Ill-structured problem
- A problem whose options, criteria and outcomes are not spelled out and that has more than one valid solution.
- Ideation fluency
- The ability to produce many ideas in response to a prompt, here measured by the alternative uses test (e.g. listing uses for a brick).
- Hierarchical regression
- A regression in which predictors are entered in planned steps, so you can see whether a later predictor explains variance beyond those entered earlier.
- Double dissociation
- When one ability predicts task A but not task B, while another ability predicts task B but not task A, suggesting the tasks rely on different processes.
- Less is more vs quantity breeds quality
- Two opposing claims: that generating fewer options keeps average option quality high, versus that generating more options increases the chance of finding a very good one.
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Quiz yourself
Which test was used to measure ideation fluency?
Common questions
Why did the authors enter verbal fluency before ideation fluency in the regression?
Both involve generating responses, so they share method variance. Entering verbal fluency first gives it that shared variance, making the test of whether ideation adds anything stricter.
Does 'less is more' mean you should generate only a few options?
Not simply. More options lowered the average quality of the set but raised the quality of the best option. Whether that helps depends on being able to pick out the best one and on the problem.
What was the decision-rule task for?
It is a structured decision task that needs no creativity, so it served as a contrast: if option generation depends on ideation rather than general cognitive ability, the two tasks should have different predictors.
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