1. Number Progression Odd Letters Out
What is the Nature of Creativity?
Kenny L. Hicks, Conor Lacey, Tristan Hackman, & Randall W. Engle
Georgia Institute of Technology
Why study creativity?
Creativity and intelligence have had a weak relationship since the beginning of psychometric testing (Thurstone, 1938; Guilford, 1956;1967).
Creativity has demonstrated social and ecological validity, but the psychometric properties of creativity tests remain poorly understood.
Background
Popular Paradigms
Abbreviated Torrance Test for Adults (ATTA)
Consists of three open-ended activities.
Time consuming scoring procedure with four norm-referenced abilities (fluency, originality, elaboration, and flexibility) and 15 criterion (e.g. colorfulness of imagery, humor, etc.).
Remote Associates test
Thought to be a measure of convergent thinking
Operationalized using Mednick’s theory of associative processes.
Traditional Measurement Approaches
Underwhelming relationship between creativity and intelligence.
Why?
Heavily reliant on verbal materials (Kim, 2005).
Most measures of creativity are verbal.
Spatial tasks are routinely excluded from analyses because they don’t conform to the same scoring metrics.
New Approaches
Improved psychometrics including latent level analyses.
Novel scoring procedures with an emphasis on improved and faster subjective scoring.
Aims of the Current Study
Address limitations of traditional scoring methods of divergent thinking with a novel scoring procedure.
Determine the relationship between key components of creative production: divergent and convergent thinking, and their predictors. .
Method
Subjects: 445 Subjects from Georgia Tech and the Atlanta community.
Tasks
Matrix Reasoning
Number Progression Odd Letters Out
Scoring procedure:
Raters assign scores of 1-3 on each creative response.
Each response evaluated on one or more of four specific attributes (humor, irony, insight, smart).
Standardized scoring for verbal and figural tasks.
Analyses
Conclusions
We found that fluid intelligence predicted both the Divergent and Convergent aspects of Creativity. In fact, the latent variable created from the Torrance accounted for 50% of fluid intelligence. This was a massive improvement over the meta-analytic results of previous studies which found that the two shared a mere 4%, or nothing at all. This study included more rigorous task batteries than most studies of creativity, a larger sample size, and novel scoring procedure that emphasized the quality of creative ideas. This work contributes new evidence that the most predictive aspect of creative problem solving is divergent thinking.
References
Guilford, J. P. (1956). The structure of intellect.
Psychological bulletin, 53(4), 267.
Guilford, J. P. (1967). Creativity: Yesterday, today and tomorrow.
The Journal of Creative Behavior, 1(1), 3-14.
Kim, K. H. (2005). Can only intelligent people be creative? A meta-analysis. Prufrock Journal, 16(2-3),
Intelligence
Creativity
Ravens, Letter Sets, Number Series
Abbreviated Adult Test of the Torrance test of Creativity.
Creativity: Activities from the ATTA
Intelligence: Ravens, Number Series, Letter Sets
Funding: Office of Naval Research N