Creativity
Do two creativity tests tap the same thinking process?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
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.
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
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Key findings
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.
Methodology
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.
Limitations
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.
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