How many uses can you find for an ordinary brick? A builder will say: for building walls. A child will add more: a doorstop, a step to reach a high shelf, even a pretend telephone. Which answer is correct? All of them — and that is exactly what interested the American psychologist Joy Paul Guilford. School tasks usually have one right answer, but life keeps asking questions that have many.
From choosing pilots to studying creativity
Guilford worked with factor analysis, a statistical method that looks for what different tests have in common. Even before the war he showed that a single overall score can hide a person's strengths.
During the Second World War he led a psychological research unit of the US Army Air Forces that selected pilots and other aircrew. Flying takes more than general cleverness, and his team identified about 25 separate abilities: keeping one's bearings in space and mentally turning an object, for example, proved to be two different skills. After the war he continued this research for more than twenty years and added creative thinking to his list.
In 1950, as president of the American Psychological Association, he gave an address urging psychologists to take creativity seriously. That speech is usually seen as the starting point of modern creativity research.
The structure of intellect and two kinds of thinking
Guilford proposed that any mental task can be described by three questions: what are we thinking about (content), what are we doing with it (operation), and what kind of result do we get (product). Contents are images, symbols, meanings and behaviour; operations are understanding, memory, convergent thinking, divergent thinking and evaluation; products range from simple units to classes, relations, systems, transformations and implications. Multiplied together, they form a three-dimensional model shaped like a cube: 120 abilities in his 1967 book, later 150 (1977) and 180 (1988).
Two of the operations became famous. Convergent thinking leads to one correct answer: 7 × 8 = 56. Divergent thinking spreads out in many directions: “Think of as many titles for this story as you can.” Four qualities describe it:
- fluency — how many ideas you produce (for example, name as many round things as you can in two minutes);
- flexibility — how many kinds of ideas: a brick as building material, as a weight and as a toy are three categories, not three versions of one idea; matchstick puzzles, which make you drop the usual approach, test it too;
- originality — how rare and unexpected an idea is;
- elaboration — how fully an idea is developed and filled with detail.
How a new idea is born
As early as 1926 the English scholar Graham Wallas described four stages of creative work: preparation (gathering information, trying, getting stuck), incubation (stepping away while the mind quietly keeps working), illumination (the sudden “I've got it!”) and verification (checking whether the idea really works).
In psychology, creativity does not mean genius alone. Creative thinking means producing something that is new to oneself: a girl who invents her own way of adding numbers is thinking creatively, even if mathematicians have known that way for centuries. Such thinking is common; contributions that are new to all humanity are far rarer. Researchers also describe traits that often accompany creativity: persistence, independent judgement, enjoyment of ideas and readiness to take sensible risks. Interestingly, the most creative people are not always the highest scorers on intelligence tests.
What remains of the model today
Critics pointed to several weaknesses. The model contains too many separate abilities to be practical. Much of the evidence came from Guilford's own laboratory, mostly from capable students doing paper-and-pencil tests, and other researchers often failed to find the same factors. Nor was there much evidence that these abilities predicted success in study or work. Today the model is mainly of historical interest: most researchers prefer a hierarchy with a general factor g at the top and broad abilities beneath it. Yet the distinction between convergent and divergent thinking has survived and is still used in research and in classrooms.
In practice: exercises for home and class
At home:
- The brick game: take an everyday object — a cup, a scarf, a cardboard box — and list as many uses as you can in three minutes. Then count the ideas, group them and give special praise to the rarest ones.
- Story titles: after reading a tale, everyone invents a funny, a serious and an unexpected title.
- Ten circles: turn ten drawn circles into ten different things, then add as many details as you can to one of them.
- Matchstick puzzles: solve them together, then ask your child to invent one for you.
In the classroom:
- First collect ideas without criticism, and only then choose the best together.
- Mix questions that have one answer with questions that have many.
- Give hard problems time to “ripen” and come back to them the next day.
- Praise unusual ideas and effort, and never laugh at an unexpected answer.
Creativity is not a rare gift for a chosen few. It grows with practice, with time and in a setting where mistakes are not frightening.