Relational reasoning and divergent thinking: An examination of the threshold hypothesis with quantile regression

Understanding ideational fluency as a survival process

BACKGROUND

When students generate ideas, important inter-individual variance exists both in the quantity and the quality of ideas they are able to produce (e.g., perfectionists who have few highly creative ideas or mass producers who produce a lot of uncreative ideas). In educational psychology research on creativity, the relation between the quantity and quality of ideas has not been well understood, limiting progress in this area.

AIMS

We conceptualized Ideational Fluency as a phenomenon that requires participants to 'survive' to produce more ideas, and where dropping out of the ideational process was analogous to 'dying'. Using this novel paradigm, we aimed to test the relations among Fluency (as a dependent variable); and creative Expertise, Originality and self-reported Personality attributes (as independent variables).

SAMPLE AND METHOD

Participants were drawn from three groups: those with demonstrated expertise in stage or screen acting (n = 104); undergraduates being trained in the same domain (n = 100), and adults with no acting training or experience (n = 92). Participants responded to the Alternate Uses Task; Non-parametric and semi-parametric survival models were fit to their Ideational Fluency; and average and maximum Originality scores, as well as self-reported Personality attributes, were used as covariates.

RESULTS

Across all participants, the Ideational Fluency survival function showed an S-shape, but the Expertise grouping interacted with that pattern. The survival rate of professional actors decreased more rapidly during the first few ideas, but after the 5th idea, professional actors displayed a clear advantage in survival rate. Participants who were less original on average but who showed a high maximum Originality, as well as those participants who reported more Assertiveness and less Industriousness, also survived further into the Ideational process.

CONCLUSIONS

Contrary to our hypothesis, professional actors' advantage in Fluency did not manifest in the survival model until after the 5th idea generated. A quantity-quality trade-off was observed with average Originality being associated with shorter survival, but that trade-off was not observed with maximum Originality, which was associated with longer survival.

Are value–behavior relations stronger than previously thought? It depends on value importance

Research has found that value–behavior relations are usually weak to moderate. But is this really the case? This paper proposes that the relations of personal values to behavior are stronger at higher levels of value importance and weaker at lower levels. In a large, heterogeneous sample, we tested this proposition by estimating quantile correlations between values and self-reported everyday behavior, at different locations along the distribution of value importance. We found the proposed pattern both for self-reports of everyday behaviors chosen intentionally to be value-expressive and everyday behaviors subject to strong situational constraints (e.g., spending allocation to clothing and footwear). Our findings suggest that value–behavior relations may be stronger than previously recognized, depending on value importance. People who attribute high importance to a value will not only engage in value-expressive behaviors more frequently, but as we move up the value importance distribution, the relations strengthen. In contrast, people who attribute low importance to a value not only engage in value-expressive behaviors less frequently, but as we move down the value importance distribution, the relations weaken. These findings provide important insight into the nature of values.

A Reappraisal of the Threshold Hypothesis of Creativity and Intelligence

Intelligence has been declared as a necessary but not sufficient condition for creativity, which was subsequently (erroneously) translated into the so-called threshold hypothesis. This hypothesis predicts a change in the correlation between creativity and intelligence at around 1.33 standard deviations above the population mean. A closer inspection of previous inconclusive results suggests that the heterogeneity is mostly due to the use of suboptimal data analytical procedures. Herein, we applied and compared three methods that allowed us to handle intelligence as a continuous variable. In more detail, we examined the threshold of the creativity-intelligence relation with (a) scatterplots and heteroscedasticity analysis, (b) segmented regression analysis, and (c) local structural equation models in two multivariate studies (N1 = 456; N2 = 438). We found no evidence for the threshold hypothesis of creativity across different analytical procedures in both studies. Given the problematic history of the threshold hypothesis and its unequivocal rejection with appropriate multivariate methods, we recommend the total abandonment of the threshold.

The psychology of professional and student actors: Creativity, personality, and motivation

As a profession, acting is marked by a high-level of economic and social riskiness concomitantly with the possibility for artistic satisfaction and/or public admiration. Current understanding of the psychological attributes that distinguish professional actors is incomplete. Here, we compare samples of professional actors (n = 104), undergraduate student actors (n = 100), and non-acting adults (n = 92) on 26 psychological dimensions and use machine-learning methods to classify participants based on these attributes. Nearly all of the attributes measured here displayed significant univariate mean differences across the three groups, with the strongest effect sizes being on Creative Activities, Openness, and Extraversion. A cross-validated Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator (LASSO) classification model was capable of identifying actors (either professional or student) from non-actors with a 92% accuracy and was able to sort professional from student actors with a 96% accuracy when age was included in the model, and a 68% accuracy with only psychological attributes included. In these LASSO models, actors in general were distinguished by high levels of Openness, Assertiveness, and Elaboration, but professional actors were specifically marked by high levels of Originality, Volatility, and Literary Activities.

Scrutinizing the basis of originality in divergent thinking tests: On the measurement precision of response propensity estimates

BACKGROUND

The originality of divergent thinking (DT) production is one of the most critical indicators of creative potential. It is commonly scored using the statistical infrequency of responses relative to all responses provided in a given sample.

AIMS

Response frequency estimates vary in terms of measurement precision. This issue has been widely overlooked and is addressed in the current study.

SAMPLE AND METHOD

Secondary data analysis of 202 participants was performed. A total of 900 uniquely identified responses were generated on three DT tasks and subjected to a 1-parameter logistic model with a response as the unit of measurement which allowed for the calculation of response-level conditional reliability (and marginal reliability as an overall summary of measurement precision).

RESULTS

Marginal reliability of response propensity estimates ranged from .62 to .67 across the DT tasks. Unique responses in the sample (the basis for the classic uniqueness scoring) displayed the lowest conditional reliability (across tasks: ≈ .50). Reliability increased nonlinearly as a function of both the frequency of occurrence predicted by the model (conditional reliability) and sample size (conditional and marginal reliability).

CONCLUSIONS

This study indicates that the common practice of frequency-based originality scoring with typical sample sizes (e.g., N = 100 to N = 200) yields unacceptable levels of measurement precision (i.e., in particular for highly original responses). We further offer recommendations to mitigate the lack of measurement precision of frequency-based originality scores for DT research.