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Divergent Competitiveness

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1.50 CREATIVITY AND GENERAL MENTAL ABILITY Convergent thinking is defined as the ability to apply conventional and logical search, recognition, and decision-making strategies to stored information in order to produce an already known answer (Cropley, 2006). Divergent thinking, by contrast, is defined as the ability to produce new approaches and original ideas by forming unexpected combinations from available information and by applying such abilities as semantic flexibility, and fluency of association, ideation, and transformation (Guilford, 1959, as cited in Cropley, 2006, p. 1). Divergent thinking brings forth answers that may never have existed before and are often novel, unusual, or surprising (Cropley, 2006). Guilford (1967) introduced convergent and divergent thinking as part of a set of five operations that apply in his Structure of Intellect model (SOI model) on six products and four kinds of content, to produce 120 different factors of cognitive abilities. With the SOI model Guilford wanted to give the construct of intelligence a comprehensive model. After these new constructs were introduced and defined, tests for convergent and divergent thinking emerged. Despite the fact that Guilford reported …show more content…

Studies on the relationship between both constructs suggest that it is unlikely that individuals employ similar cognitive strategies when solving more convergent than more divergent thinking tasks (Jaušovec, 2000). However, to arrive at a quality formulation the creative process cannot do without the application of both, convergent and divergent thinking abilities (e.g., Kaufmann, 2003; Runco, 2003; Sternberg, 2005; Dietrich, 2007; Cropley and Cropley, 2008; Silvia et al., 2013; Jung,

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