Verbal fluency and creativity: General and specific contributions of broad retrieval ability (Gr) factors to divergent thinking☆
Introduction
How do people come up with clever and creative ideas, and why are some people better at it than others? Most research on these questions has used divergent thinking tasks, which prompt people to generate ideas than can be scored, based on a variety of systems, for creativity (Kaufman et al., 2008, Plucker and Renzulli, 1999). In the Cattell–Horn–Carroll (CHC) model of cognitive abilities (McGrew, 2005, McGrew, 2009), idea generation tasks fall under the second-level factor known as broad retrieval ability, abbreviated as Gr (Carroll, 1993). But as many researchers have argued, traditional methods for assessing divergent thinking yield only a fluency score—the simple number of valid responses—or yield quality scores that are confounded with quantity (Hocevar, 1979b, Michael and Wright, 1989, Silvia et al., 2008). Two problems result: (1) divergent thinking tasks might resemble verbal fluency tasks too closely, leading to questions of construct validity, and (2) the weak correlations between creativity and intelligence observed in past work (Kim, 2005) might be due to weak assessment of creativity, not to a genuinely small effect size.
The present research thus addresses two issues. First, when newer assessment methods that effectively dissociate creativity and fluency are used, how does creativity fit within the Gr domain? The dominance of fluency-based scoring systems available at the time of Carroll's (1993) landmark analysis might have inflated the association of divergent thinking and Gr. Second, how does divergent thinking relate to both the Gr factor and to its first-level factors? What first-level factors contribute the most to generating creative ideas? In the present research, people completed two divergent thinking tasks and 16 Gr tasks that mapped on to six lower-order Gr factors: word fluency, associational fluency, associative flexibility, ideational fluency, letter fluency, and dissociative ability. Using structural equation modeling, we estimated the contributions of the lower-order factors and the higher-order Gr factor—modeled using higher-order and bifactor models—to both the quality and quantity of responses to the divergent thinking tasks.
Section snippets
The creativity-and-intelligence debate
Creativity research has had an ambivalent relationship with the construct of intelligence. Guilford, in a program of work that launched modern creativity research, extensively studied how both convergent and divergent modes of thought fit into his Structure of Intellect Model (Guilford, 1967), which contained many novel tasks for measuring creativity. Later creativity researchers, however, contended that creativity and intelligence are essentially unrelated (Getzels & Jackson, 1962). Wallach
Divergent thinking and Gr
The confounding of fluency and creativity is interesting for several reasons. For one, it sheds new light on the modest relationships between divergent thinking and intelligence (Kim, 2005, Wallach and Kogan, 1965). Divergent thinking tests are probably the most widely used tools for measuring creativity, and an extensive literature provides evidence for their validity (Kaufman et al., 2008, Ma, 2009, Plucker, 1999, Silvia et al., 2008). Nevertheless, in his review of the originality/creativity
The present research
The present research examined the contribution of the second-level Gr factor and several of its first-level factors in divergent thinking. A central aim was to explore the relationship of Gr and divergent thinking using scoring methods that distinguish between the quality and quantity of divergent thinking responses. In our recent work on creativity assessment, we have found strong evidence for the reliability and validity of subjective scoring methods (Silvia, 2011, Silvia et al., 2009a,
Participants
A total of 147 people enrolled in psychology courses at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro volunteered to participate and received credit toward a research participation option. Because of the project's substantial language component, we excluded a priori participants who didn't speak English as a native language (n = 13); three additional participants were excluded for extensive missing data or for misunderstanding the instructions. This left a final sample of 131 people. The sample
Analysis plan and model specification
All models were estimated with maximum likelihood with robust standard errors, using Mplus 7. There was relatively little missing data: covariance coverage was at least 94% and was typically greater than 99%. All indicators were centered at the sample's grand mean (Kline, 2011). The models were evaluated for outlying and influential cases using Mahalanobis's distance, Cook's distance, and individual contributions to the log-likelihood.3
Creativity and the CHC model
The present research explored how divergent thinking fits within the second-level factor of broad retrieval ability (Gr). Divergent thinking tasks involve open-ended idea production, like most verbal fluency tasks, but they are scored for the creativity of the ideas. Because common scoring methods essentially equate idea quality and quantity (Silvia et al., 2008), much research on divergent thinking is largely or solely measuring quantity of idea production. As a result, the relationship
Conclusion
The present research examined the role of the CHC Gr factor in divergent thinking. Because past assessment methods have confounded creative quality and quantity—or assessed only quantity—the role of Gr in divergent thinking may have been exaggerated. When new assessment and scoring methods are used—ones that emphasize to participants that they should try to be creative and that use subjective scoring to dissociate creativity and fluency—a significant role for the second-level Gr factor appears
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We are grateful to Kathryn Aliff, Gabrielle Dailey, Parnia Haj-Mohamadi, Pegah Haj-Mohamadi, Mary Amanda Harmon, Casey Kelly, Jennifer Schenker, Molly Schloss, Tess Warren, and Alireza Zibaie for assisting with data collection and scoring.