Discernment and creativity: How well can people identify their most creative ideas?

By Paul J Silvia. 2008

187 citations recorded by the source corpus.

How well can people judge the creativity of their ideas? The distinction between generating ideas and evaluating ideas appears in many theories of creativity, but the massive literature on generation has overshadowed the question of evaluation. After critically reviewing the notion of accuracy in creativity judgments, this article explores whether (1) people in general are discerning and (2) whether some people are more discerning than others. University students (n 226) completed four divergent thinking tasks and then decided which responses were their most creative. Judges then rated the creativity of all of the responses. Multilevel latent-variable models found that people’s choices strongly agreed with judges’ ratings of the responses; overall, people were discerning in their decisions. But some people were more discerning than others: people high in openness to experience, in particular, had stronger agreement between their decisions and the judges’ ratings. Creative people are thus doubly skilled: they are better at generating good ideas and at picking their best ideas.

Subfields: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/cdf3eb0503756813790a58644d688ec106dfc93a

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Citations in the corpus

Creative metacognition and self-ratings of creative performance: A 4-C perspective (2016, background): “Silvia (2008) asked participants to choose which responses to a divergent thinking task they felt were their most creative.”
Furious activity vs. understanding: How much expertise is needed to evaluate creative work? (2013, background): “Silvia (2006) compared novices to quasi-experts (people with some background and training in the arts). He found that quasi-experts were better able to understand complex pictures and, thus, also found them more interesting (Mills, 2001, found comparable results). Locher, Smith, and Smith (2001) com”
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).”
Personality and ability predictors of the ''Consequences" Test of divergent thinking in a large non-student sample (2009, background): “Silvia (2008) suggested that Plasticity is more strongly related to creativity than Stability.”
The Two Dimensions of Motivation and a Reciprocal Model of the Creative Process (2013, background): “Perspective-taking may help with the process of evaluating and selecting the best ideas among those generated (Silvia, 2008), and by providing a standard for deciding which ideas are useful (Grant & Berry, 2011).”
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.”
Generative artificial intelligence, human creativity, and art (2024, result): “This aligns with prior research which suggest that creative individuals are particularly adept at discerning which ideas are most meaningful (20), reflecting a refined sensitivity to the artistic coherence of artifacts (21).”
In Praise of Clark Kent: Creative Metacognition and the Importance of Teaching Kids When (Not) to Be Creative (2013, background): “Silvia (2008) asked people to pick their best responses to a similar divergent thinking task and then examined whether they were more likely to choose responses that outside raters considered creative.”
Beyond New and Appropriate: Who Decides What Is Creative? (2012, background): “As a result, some researchers have been tempted to use nonexperts as judges of creativity—novices, such as college students with no other qualifications than a desire to earn research participation credit in Introductory Psychology (e.g., Baer, 1996; Chen, Himsel, Kasof, Greenberger, & Dmitreiva, 20”
The shifting sands of creative thinking: Connections to dual-process theory (2014, methodology): “…scoring of these tests focused on fluency—how many creative ideas are generated—whilst neglecting assessment of the extent to which the responses were of value, even though scoring of divergent thinking tests can be readily adapted to include measurement of the value of ideas (see Silvia, 2008).”