Understanding the confounding effect of fluency in divergent thinking scores: Revisiting average scores to quantify artifactual correlation.

Abstract

Divergent thinking tasks are the cornerstone of creative thinking assessment. Besides fluency, the number of generated ideas, several other scores have been used to measure different aspects of idea generation in divergent thinking tasks. However, between all such scores high correlations are quite common. These correlations, in particular high correlations of any score with fluency, were interpreted as evidence for unidimensionality of divergent thinking, or as evidence for equal odds. On the other hand, it has been argued that common scores do not properly adjust for fluency. Moreover, it has been assumed that high correlations are artifactual, that is, caused by same task method-bias. In this article, the confounding of additive scorings by fluency is quantitavely and theoretically analyzed. We show that the raw correlations between fluency and qualitiy alone cannot distinguish between different concurring theories about idea generation. We propose a formal definition of purely artifactual correlation that is oriented toward the generation process and allows to test for these conflicting theories. The performance of the test is carefully evaluated by a thorough simulation study and its application exemplified by a reevaluation of past results. We conclude with recommendations for the design and analysis of future studies.

Everyday bodily movement is associated with creativity independently from active positive affect: a Bayesian mediation analysis approach

“…Since the measure of total creative performance has been criticized due to its high correlation with the fluency of ideas 57 – 59 , we also investigated, which aspects of creativity (originality, fluency) were linked with bodily movement. The regression analysis showed that both originality ( sr = 0.23, p = 0.038) and fluency ( sr = 0.25, p = 0.024) were positively and independently from each other associated with physical activity.…”

“…Since studies reported a high correlation between this additive scoring procedure of creative performance and the fluency of ideas 57,58,71 Similar to the procedure of the AU task, the originality of each picture was evaluated by three independent raters on a four-point scale ranging from 1 to 4 (ICC (2, k) = 0.79) 72 . The raters were instructed to rate the originality of the idea only, and not the drawing skills or the title of the drawing.…”

2 B kreativ’ or not to be creative: Textisms and texters’ creativity

“…Indeed, usually, divergent-exploratory thinking tasks are scored for fluency, flexibility and originality (Reiter-Palmon et al, 2019) and these scores are interrelated (Forthmann et al, 2018a(Forthmann et al, , 2018bNusbaum & Silvia, 2011). In this study, our divergent thinking tasks were scored according to the EPoC Manual (Lubart et al, 2011) only with fluency (number of different ideas) and the level of flexibility of the participants has not been measured yet, nor was the originality.…”

“…There are several possible explanations for the results of the present study. First, the texters who used textisms breaking with the code would also have had a relatively low level of flexibility, which is linked to a low level of creativity (Forthmann et al, 2018a(Forthmann et al, , 2018bNusbaum & Silvia, 2011), particularly in divergent thinking (Barbot et al, 2011(Barbot et al, , 2016Barbot, Besançon, & Lubart, 2015;Wang, 2012). In contrast, it would follow TEXTISMS AND TEXTERS' CREATIVITY 20 20 that the texters who did not use textisms breaking with the code would have been more flexible, despite possessing a high level of creativity.…”

“…Divergentexploratory thinking is often considered as an initial phase of the creative process (Csikszentmihalyi, 2006;Runco, 2008). It is characterized by a high level of flexibility TEXTISMS AND TEXTERS' CREATIVITY 9 9 (Forthmann, Regehr, Seidel, Holling, Çelik, Storme, & Lubart, 2018a;Forthmann, Szardenings, & Holling, 2018b;Nusbaum & Silvia, 2011), a selective encoding capacity, an openness to novelty, and the willingness to observe problems from different angles. For a review on the development of Torrance's tests of creative thinking see Torrance (2004).…”