Nature of Creative Thinking

Creative thinking is set apart from other kinds of thinking by the fact that it produces novel and original ideas or solutions. It is often understood loosely as just a new way of thinking, but besides novelty, originality is an equally important characteristic — a new model of a household appliance, tape recorder, car, scooter or television set released each year is not automatically creative unless a genuinely unique feature has actually been added to it. Creative thinking is often marked by what Bruner called 'effective surprise' — when a genuinely creative idea or product is encountered, the typical reaction is one of instant surprise or being startled.

Equally important is appropriateness to context. Simply being different for its own sake, being non-conformist, indulging in purposeless fantasy, or coming up with a bizarre idea is sometimes mistaken for creative thinking, but researchers broadly agree that thinking is creative only when it is reality-oriented, appropriate, constructive, and socially desirable.

J.P. Guilford, a pioneer of creativity research, distinguished convergent thinking (used for problems with only one correct answer, where the mind converges on that single solution — finding the next number in the series 3, 6, 9 is a convergent task, since only 12 is correct) from divergent thinking (open-ended thinking, where many different answers are possible depending on a person's own experience — questions like 'What are the various uses of cloth?' or 'What will happen if examinations are abolished in schools?' require divergent thinking). Divergent thinking abilities include: fluency, the ability to produce many ideas for a given task (the more uses a person lists for a paper cup, the higher their fluency); flexibility, which indicates variety in thinking — different uses of an object, or different interpretations of a picture or story; originality, the ability to produce rare or unusual ideas, by seeing new relationships, combining old ideas with new ones, or looking at things from different perspectives (fluency and flexibility are necessary conditions for originality — the more and more varied the ideas produced, the greater the likelihood some turn out original); and elaboration, the ability to go into detail and work out the implications of new ideas. Both convergent and divergent thinking matter for …