Convergent and Divergent Thinking in the Context of Narrative Mysteries

Abstract

This project demonstrates how narrative mysteries provide a context in which readers engage in creative cognition. Drawing on the concepts of convergent and divergent thinking, we wrote stories that had either convergent or divergent outcomes. For example, one story had a character give his girlfriend a ring (a convergent outcome), whereas the contrasting version of the story had the character give his girlfriend a gun (a divergent outcome). In Experiment 1, participants took more time to read sentences depicting divergent outcomes. This result replicates past research documenting the impact of expectation violations. Experiment 2 used a speak-aloud paradigm to explore the content of readers' thoughts in the context of convergent and divergent outcomes. Analyses of participants' responses indicated that convergent outcomes prompted people to respond with more features of convergent thinking, whereas divergent outcomes prompted them to respond with more features of divergent thinking. These results support the claim that narrative experiences provide a context for creative cognition.

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to our research assistants, Kenneth Houghton, Joseph Kuruvilla, and Jeffrey Lin, who helped collect and painstakingly code the data for this project. In addition, we give special thanks to Suparna Rajaram, Antonio Freitas, Susan Scheckel, and Micah Mumper for their comments and suggestions while we were developing this project and writing up the manuscript. We also thank three anonymous reviewers who offered insightful feedback during preparation of this article.

Notes

¹ We thank an anonymous reviewer for this suggestion.