Understanding ideational fluency as a survival process

When students generate ideas, important inter-individual variance exists both in the quantity and the quality of ideas they are able to produce (e.g., perfectionists who have few highly creative ideas or mass producers who produce a lot of uncreative ideas). In educational psychology research on creativity, the relation between the quantity and quality of ideas has not been well understood, limiting progress in this area.

We conceptualized Ideational Fluency as a phenomenon that requires participants to 'survive' to produce more ideas, and where dropping out of the ideational process was analogous to 'dying'. Using this novel paradigm, we aimed to test the relations among Fluency (as a dependent variable); and creative Expertise, Originality and self-reported Personality attributes (as independent variables).

Participants were drawn from three groups: those with demonstrated expertise in stage or screen acting (n = 104); undergraduates being trained in the same domain (n = 100), and adults with no acting training or experience (n = 92). Participants responded to the Alternate Uses Task; Non-parametric and semi-parametric survival models were fit to their Ideational Fluency; and average and maximum Originality scores, as well as self-reported Personality attributes, were used as covariates.

Across all participants, the Ideational Fluency survival function showed an S-shape, but the Expertise grouping interacted with that pattern. The survival rate of professional actors decreased more rapidly during the first few ideas, but after the 5th idea, professional actors displayed a clear advantage in survival rate. Participants who were less original on average but who showed a high maximum Originality, as well as those participants who reported more Assertiveness and less Industriousness, also survived further into the Ideational process.

Contrary to our hypothesis, professional actors' advantage in Fluency did not manifest in the survival model until after the 5th idea generated. A quantity-quality trade-off was observed with average Originality being associated with shorter survival, but that trade-off was not observed with maximum Originality, which was associated with longer survival.