Assessing Creativity With Divergent Thinking Tasks: Exploring the Reliability and Validity of New Subjective Scoring Methods

By Paul J Silvia, B. Winterstein, John T. Willse, C. Barona, Joshua T. Cram, Karl I. Hess, Jenna L. Martinez, C. A. Richard. 2008

857 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Divergent thinking is central to the study of individual differences in creativity, but the traditional scoring systems (assigning points for infrequent responses and summing the points) face well-known problems. After critically reviewing past scoring methods, this article describes a new approach to assessing divergent thinking and appraises its reliability and validity. In our new Top 2 scoring method, participants complete a divergent thinking task and then circle the two responses that they think are their most creative responses. Raters then evaluate the responses on a 5-point scale. Regarding reliability, a generalizability analysis showed that subjective ratings of unusual-uses tasks and instances tasks yield dependable scores with only 2 or 3 raters. Regarding validity, a latent-variable study (n = 226) predicted divergent thinking from the Big Five factors and their higher-order traits (Plasticity and Stability). Over half of the variance in divergent thinking could be explained by dimensions of personality. The article presents instructions for measuring divergent thinking with the new method.

Subfields: Clinical Psychology, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/742fb67a72414ba0ab4cee4ec67c5e793a3e7e0b

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Citations in the corpus

Assessment of real-life creativity: The Inventory of Creative Activities and Achievements (ICAA). (2017, methodology): “This top-scoring method has been shown to yield lower confounding with fluency (Benedek, Mühlmann, Jauk, & Neubauer, 2013; Silvia et al., 2008) and hence captures unique, complementary variance of creative potential (Jauk et al.”
Ready, Set, Create: What Instructing People to "Be Creative" Reveals About the Meaning and Mechanisms of Divergent Thinking (2014, methodology): “…of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts © 2014 American Psychological Association 2014, Vol. 8, No. 2, 000 1931-3896/14/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/a0036549 1 Silvia et al., 2008), and formulas and algorithms (Bossomaier, Harré, Knittel, & Snyder, 2009; Prabhakaran, Green, & Gray, in press).”
Personality and creativity in realistic, investigative, artistic, social, and enterprising college majors (2013, neutral): “Artistic majors scored higher than non-artistic majors on measures of divergent thinking (Silvia et al., 2008), openness, extraversion, and arts knowledge and preference (Silvia & Nusbaum, 2012); no differences were found in other personality factors or fluid intelligence.”
Assessing Associative Distance Among Ideas Elicited by Tests of Divergent Thinking (2014, background): “No judges or subjective ratings were involved in determining scores, as is sometimes required in research on DT (Christensen et al., 1957; Silvia et al., 2008).”
Is creativity domain-specific? Latent class models of creative accomplishments and creative self-descriptions. (2009, neutral): “Second, we had the participants’ college majors, which had been classified into conventional majors (a score of 0) and arts majors (a score of 1). Classifying majors as creative versus noncreative is crude and controversial (see Baer, 2008), but it is a rough way of classifying people’s career goals”
A scattered CAT: A critical evaluation of the consensual assessment technique for creativity research. (2019, background): “As Silvia et al. (2008) point out, there is no definite guideline beyond vague intuition: “One is clearly not enough; 20 seems like overkill” (p. 81).”
The relation between semantic memory structure, associative abilities, and verbal and figural creativity (2020, methodology): “This approach has been widely used, particularly in creativity research with subjective creativity ratings (Silvia et al., 2008), to model error variance separately from true measurement variance, yielding a more robust and reliable assessment of underlying trait-level factors compared to averaging…”
How semantic memory structure and intelligence contribute to creative thought: a network science approach (2017, methodology): “The subjective top-scoring method was shown to avoid a necessary confound between DT creativity and DT fluency (Benedek et al., 2013; Silvia et al., 2008).”
On personality and piloerection: Individual differences in aesthetic chills and other unusual aesthetic experiences. (2011, result): “Around 11% of the sample had a creative college major, which is similar to a prior sample (around 9%; Silvia et al., 2008).”