The Effects of Modeling and Instructions on Creative Responses

College students were randomly exposed to a divergent thinking symbolic model, a convergent model, no model, or instructions to respond creatively, and tested on four tasks of creativity, showing divergent responses to be more common and convergent responses less common.

Abstract

Summary College students were randomly exposed to a divergent thinking symbolic model, a convergent model, no model, or instructions to respond creatively, and were tested on four tasks of creativity. All tasks showed divergent responses to be more common and convergent responses less common in the following order: divergent model, instructions, no model, and convergent model. However, only four of the 10 dependent measures revealed these differences to be significant, suggesting the necessity for further research.