Creative or not? Hierarchical diffusion modeling of the creative evaluation process

When producing creative ideas (i.e., ideas that are original and useful) for example in a divergent thinking task, two main processes occur: ideation, where people brainstorm ideas, and evaluation, where they decide if the ideas are creative or not. While much is known about the ideation phase, the cognitive processes involved in creativity evaluation are largely unclear. In this talk, I will present two studies where we used the drift diffusion model (DDM) to gain insight into the cognitive basis of creativity evaluation and to examine individual differences in what people find creative. We applied the DDM to data from the creative-or-not-task, a decision-making task, where people are presented with ideas of how to use an everyday object (e.g., use a book as a roof tile) and then decide whether these are creative or not. The different use stimuli vary on the two creativity dimensions ‘originality’ and ‘utility’. We found that stimulus originality was strongly related to participants’ drift rate, whereas stimulus utility was only somewhat associated with the drift rate. However, participants differed substantially in the extent to which they took originality and utility into account when evaluating creativity. I will talk about the implications our findings have for creativity assessment and for using mathematical models such as the DDM to examine creativity conceptions.

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