Do two creativity tests tap the same thinking process?
Imagining consequences of impossible events started more slowly, produced fewer but more creative early ideas, and unfolded more steadily than thinking up uses for objects, suggesting it relies less on simple memory recall.
Source
Use or Consequences: Probing the Cognitive Difference Between Two Measures of Divergent Thinking
Study at a glance
- Design
- Human experiment — Within-subject comparison of three Alternative Uses and three Consequences prompts (3 minutes each, block order counterbalanced) with keypress-timed responses collected online
- N
- N=67 · 72 MTurk workers recruited; 67 analysed after excluding logging errors and participants who did not press ENTER
- Population
- US Amazon Mechanical Turk workers aged 19-69
- Outcome
- Fluency, cumulative response-time curves, first-response latency, similarity of successive responses and rated creativity across response order
Structured fields used in claim comparison tables when every cited study has a complete layer.
What they did
Online participants did two classic divergent-thinking tasks: listing creative uses for a brick, hammer and car tire, and listing consequences of impossible situations such as humans no longer needing sleep or gravity ceasing to exist. Each prompt lasted 3 minutes and a web app timed every response. The researchers borrowed tools from memory research: they fitted curves to how responses accumulated over time, compared how long the first idea took, had raters judge the similarity of consecutive responses, and had other raters score each response's creativity.
What they found
People gave more responses to Alternative Uses prompts than Consequences prompts (a small-to-medium difference). The first response came later for Consequences prompts, and for two of the three Consequences prompts the build-up of responses over time was more linear rather than the fast-then-slowing pattern typical of memory search. Creativity rose with response order for both tasks (the serial order effect), but Consequences responses started out more creative. Contrary to prediction, the link between time between responses and their similarity did not differ between tasks.
The limits
What it doesn't show
The sample was small and drawn from MTurk, and inter-rater reliability for the creativity ratings was only fair for several prompts. The two tasks used different creativity rating scales, and the Consequences scale rewarded detail, so higher Consequences ratings could partly reflect longer answers. The instructions were a compromise between 'be creative' and 'be fluent', which may have been interpreted differently by participants. Response times cannot say whether the slower start reflects counterfactual reasoning, slower encoding, or greater executive demand.
Key terms
- Divergent thinking
- Generating many different ideas in response to an open-ended prompt; commonly used as a measure of creative potential.
- Alternative Uses task
- A creativity test where people list as many unusual uses as they can for an everyday object such as a brick.
- Consequences task
- A creativity test where people list what would happen if an impossible situation came true.
- Serial order effect
- The finding that later ideas in a divergent-thinking session tend to be rated more creative than early ones.
- Cumulative response curve
- A plot of how many responses someone has produced over time; memory search typically rises fast then levels off exponentially.
- Inter-response time
- The time gap between two consecutive responses, used to infer how memory is being searched.
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Quiz yourself
Which task asks people to list what would happen if gravity ceased to exist?
Common questions
Why does the shape of the response curve matter?
Classic memory recall produces a curve that rises quickly then flattens as easy items are used up. A more linear curve suggests ideas are being constructed steadily rather than retrieved from a limited store.
Are the two creativity tasks interchangeable?
This study suggests not entirely: they differ in speed, output and early creativity, so researchers should be careful about treating them as equivalent measures.
Why were early Uses responses less creative?
Earlier work suggests people start by recalling uses they already know from experience, which are ordinary, before generating genuinely new ones.
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