The dual pathway to creativity model: Creative ideation as a function of flexibility and persistence

Abstract

The dual pathway to creativity model argues that creativity—the generation of original and appropriate ideas—is a function of cognitive flexibility and cognitive persistence, and that dispositional or situational variables may influence creativity either through their effects on flexibility, on persistence, or both. This model is tested in a number of studies in which participants performed creative ideation tasks. We review work showing that cognitive flexibility, operationalised as the number of content categories surveyed, directly relates to idea originality, but that originality can also be achieved by exploring a few content categories in great depth (i.e., persistence). We also show that a global processing mode is associated with cognitive flexibility, but only leads to high originality in tasks that capitalise on cognitive flexibility. We finally show that activating positive mood states enhance creativity because they stimulate flexibility, while activating negative mood states can enhance creativity because they stimulate persistence. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.

Keywords:

• Creativity
• Cognitive flexibility
• Cognitive persistence
• Ideation

Notes

Flexibility may also manifest itself in the use of broader mental categories. For example, one task to assess cognitive flexibility is Rosch's (1975) category inclusion task. In this task participants are asked to what degree specific exemplars (e.g., bus) fall into certain categories (e.g., vehicles). Higher flexibility manifests itself in higher ratings of less-prototypical exemplars (e.g., camel in the category vehicles), because they indicate the use of broad mental categories (see e.g., Isen & Daubman, 1984).

These studies were meant to examine different hypotheses, and therefore differed on these dimensions. For the present purposes we do not report the effects of these across-study differences, but they may be obtained from the first author.

There was a second manipulation in this study, which was “instruction” (generate ideas that are relevant to you as a student vs generate original ideas). This manipulation also had a main effect on originality, with higher average originality with originality instructions than with relevance instructions. However, this manipulation is less relevant to the current paper. It should be noted, however, that in the correlations we report, instruction was partialled out.

There was a third priming condition in this study, in which the category of hygiene was primed. However, many of the participants who had not been primed with hygiene did not generate a single hygiene idea. This made it impossible to compare the originality of hygiene ideas across conditions. We therefore omitted this condition in the current chapter.

PNS and PFI are both related to the construct of need for cognitive closure (Kruglanski & Webster, 1996; Webster & Kruglanski, 1994). High need for cognitive closure is associated with a tendency to reach quick conclusions (“seizing”) and to stick to a conclusion that was reached earlier (“freezing”). In general, need for cognitive closure would positively associate with PNS and negatively with PFI (i.e., those high in PFI would tend to think more before reaching a conclusion).