Varieties of divergent thinking: A network analysis of Guilford, Merriefield and Cox (1961)

Abstract

Grounded in the historical development of Guilford's Structure of Intellect model (SOI), this study examines the structure of divergent thinking (DT) and its relationship with other cognitive abilities using psychometric network analysis. It reanalyzes data from an unpublished report by Guilford, Merriefield and Cox (1961), encompassing 27 DT tasks (i.e., different operationalizations of DT which varied according to their content and product dimensions) and six cognitive ability tasks administered to 661 adolescents: verbal comprehension, verbal reasoning, word meaning, paragraph meaning, numerical ability, and processing speed. Results showed that (a) the association in performance between different DT tasks varies greatly, albeit, small to moderate in size; (b) DT tasks were more strongly interrelated when they belonged to the same SOI facet or shared the same content domain (rather than product dimension), (c) a similar pattern emerged in the relationships between DT and other cognitive abilities, with stronger links observed when tasks shared the same content domain, and despite (d) no clear clusters of closely related tasks identified in the network; Finally (e), among all 27 DT operationalizations, the Alternate Uses Task (AUT) — a prevalent DT task used in creativity and intelligence research —emerged as the most central task. Together, this study provides a “fresh” look to the enduring issue of the dimensionality of DT, the importance of content alignment in interpreting associations across DT and other cognitive ability measures, and in turn, the usefulness of the SOI model of intelligence.