How Choices Between Flexibility And Persistence During Idea Search Processes Contribute To Creativity

Abstract

Creative problem solving is a dynamic process during which individuals need to constantly navigate toward their goal through an ill-defined solution path. Theoretical and empirical endeavors suggest that individuals need both flexible and persistent approaches to succeed in creative tasks, yet little work has given attention to how to measure flexibility and persistence during the ideational search process. Three studies were devoted to this question.(a) The first study presents new process-based measures of flexibility and persistence and validates how well they can predict creative performance in several typical laboratory-based creativity tasks and in an ecologically valid complex design task. (b) The second study introduces an instructional intervention to examine the effects on creative performance when participants are given external prompts to shift more frequently or to dwell longer. The findings suggest that – after controlling for pre-existing dispositional differences in divergent-thinking ability across conditions – participants who had the autonomy to choose when to shift (flexible approach) or to dwell (persistent approach) performed better, or similarly to, participants who were externally prompted to shift more frequently or to dwell longer. (c) Building on the emerging literature on the context adaptivity account of metacontrol biases towards either flexibility or persistence, Study 3 tested how varying task contexts shape an individual's tendencies toward flexibility versus persistence. It revealed both interindividual metacontrol biases and intraindividual variation in response to changing task-related constraints. Together, this work enriches our understanding of how an individual's choices between flexibility and persistence during the creative problem-solving process, and their subsequent performance, are guided both by individual differences and environmental factors such as task contexts and task goals.