Another look at creativity and intelligence: Exploring higher-order models and probable confounds.

By Paul J Silvia. 2008

225 citations recorded by the source corpus.

How strongly is creativity related to intelligence? Although a large body of work has found a small relationship between them, there are reasons to suspect that their relationship has been underestimated. Most studies have assessed creativity and intelligence with observed scores, not as latent variables, and few studies have examined higher-order latent intelligence factors. A sample of university students (n = 226) completed divergent thinking tasks and measures of fluid reasoning, verbal fluency, and strategy generation. Creativity was modestly related to the three lower-order cognitive factors, but it was substantially related (s = .43) to a higher-order intelligence factor composed of the lower-order factors. This effect declined (s = .26) when openness to experience, a likely confounding variable, was considered.

Subfields: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/59722f88929fe690f00e219ec047a73efee0dfa0

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In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

In Social Psychology

Citations in the corpus

Individual Differences in Ideational Behavior: Can the Big Five and Psychometric Intelligence Predict Creativity Scores? (2010, background): “However, recent research has suggested that the data do not support the threshold theory as weak linear relationships between DT and intelligence have been observed (Kim, 2005; Silvia, 2008).”
Intelligence and personality as predictors of divergent thinking: The role of general, fluid and crystallised intelligence (2009, background): “In a recent study Silvia (2008) found DT to be substantially related (ˇ = .43) to a higher-order intelligence factor.”
Intelligence and Creativity Are Pretty Similar After All (2015, methodology): “When the data are reanalyzed using structural equation models, the correlation between creativity and intelligence rises from r=0.09 to around r=0.20 (Silvia 2008b), thus illustrating how observed correlations can deflate relationships.”
Improvisation facilitates divergent thinking and creativity: Realizing a benefit of primary school arts education (2015, background): “Intelligence Assessment: Intelligence has been shown to predict some of the variance in divergent thinking scores (Kim, 2005; Silvia, 2008).”
Convergent Thinking Moderates the Relationship between Divergent Thinking and Scientific Creativity (2019, background): “For a long time, literature about creativity has stressed the role of divergent thinking in creative endeavor (Gabriela, 2016; see also Beaty, Smeekens, Silvia, Hodges, & Kane, 2013; Kim, 2008; Long, 2014), and even some studies equate divergent thinking to individual creativity (Baas, De Dreu, & Ni”
A snapshot of creativity: Evaluating a quick and simple method for assessing divergent thinking (2009, methodology): “In a reanalysis of Wallach and Kogan's data, Silvia (2008b) found a correlation of β = .89 between the latent fluency and uniqueness variables.”
Why do ideas get more creative across time? An executive interpretation of the serial order effect in divergent thinking tasks. (2012, methodology): “…that our past research has shown that the relationship between intelligence and creativity increases when researchers analyze latent variables ( Silvia, 2008b), assess higherorder factors of intelligence rather than lower-order abilities ( Nusbaum & Silvia, 2011a, Study 1; Silvia, 2008a), and…”
On personality and piloerection: Individual differences in aesthetic chills and other unusual aesthetic experiences. (2011, methodology): “The first three tasks have been used in our past work ( Silvia, 2008; Silvia & Sanders, 2010).”
Subjective scoring of divergent thinking: Examining the reliability of unusual uses, instances, and consequences tasks. (2011, background): “Not surprisingly, research shows that people's top-two judgments covary strongly with the raters’ judgments: people seem capable of discerning their better ideas from their worse ideas (Silvia, 2008b).”
Structure and flexibility: Investigating the relation between the structure of the mental lexicon, fluid intelligence, and creative achievement. (2016, methodology): “In a series of studies, Silvia et al. (Nusbaum & Silvia, 2011; Silvia, 2008; Silvia & Beaty, 2012) examined the relation between Gf and creativity via structural equation modeling (Ullman & Bentler, 2003).”
Is creativity without intelligence possible? A Necessary Condition Analysis (2016, result): “The relationship between intelligence and creativity is one of them, and previous studies (Jauk et al., 2013) and re-analyses (Silvia, 2008a, 2008b, 2015) showed that these two constructsmay be closer to eachother thanwaspreviously assumed.”
Are openness and intellect distinct aspects of openness to experience? A test of the O/I model. (2011, methodology): “The first three tasks have been successfully used in our past work (Silvia, 2008 and Silvia and Sanders, 2010).”