Divergent Thinking
Divergent thinking is the cognitive mode of generating many possible solutions, ideas, or responses before narrowing toward one. It is the "opening up" half of the creative process, as opposed to convergent thinking, which closes down and selects. The term comes from psychologist J.P. Guilford, who introduced it in his 1950 APA presidential address on the psychology of creativity.
How It Gets Measured
The standard test is the alternate-uses task: name as many uses as you can for a common object, like a brick. Originality, fluency (number of ideas), and flexibility (range of categories) are all scored. A person who can only think of building things scores low; a person who gets to paperweight, doorstop, weapon, heat sink, and bookend scores higher.
The problem, widely acknowledged, is that alternate-uses scores don't correlate strongly with real-world creative achievement. Doing well on the brick test doesn't predict ability to compose music, design products, or devise scientific experiments. Measuring the full complexity of creative output with a single divergent-thinking exercise uses, as one researcher puts it, too broad a brush.
Its Role in the Creative Process
Despite measurement problems, divergent thinking describes a real phase of creative work: the deliberate suspension of evaluation while possibilities are generated. Most creative problems benefit from more ideas before judgment — solutions generated early and held too tightly narrow the space before the best option has surfaced. This is the logic behind brainstorming, the alternate-uses test, and most divergent ideation exercises.
The sequence matters. Divergent thinking generates the raw material; convergent thinking — analytical evaluation and refinement — shapes it into something useful. Trying to do both simultaneously tends to collapse the process: evaluating too early kills options that would have led somewhere if followed further.
Robinson's formulation of creativity as "the process of having original ideas that have value" implicitly depends on divergent thinking for the "original" part and convergent thinking for the "value" part. Neither is sufficient alone.
The Measurement Gap
The gap between lab measures and real-world creativity points to something the alternate-uses test cannot capture: insight-based creativity, domain-specific knowledge, sustained motivation, and the tolerance of wrongness that Robinson argues is prerequisite to originality. Real-world divergent thinking operates inside deep knowledge of a domain — the jazz musician improvising, not the novice randomly pressing keys.