Thinking, Intelligence and Creativity Questions and Answers

Answer: B

The traits more associated with creativity are (2) and (3).

Research on creative people finds that a moderate to high level of intelligence is needed (the threshold idea: above an IQ of about 120 intelligence adds little more), together with curiosity and openness to experience (2). Creative people also tend to be independent and non-conforming and to persist in the face of difficulty (3).

Low intelligence is not associated with creativity, so statement (1) is wrong, and every option that includes it is incorrect.

Answer: A

Creativity is otherwise known as imaginative thinking.

Creative thinking produces new and original ideas by combining and transforming existing knowledge in imagination, which is why textbooks describe it as imaginative thinking. It is closely linked to divergent thinking, which generates many possible answers.

Insightful thinking is the sudden grasp of a solution described by Kohler, a feature of problem solving rather than another name for creativity. Autistic thinking is fantasy driven by one's wishes, cut off from reality. Convergent thinking narrows down to a single correct answer, the opposite of creative divergence.

Answer: B

Choosing the first acceptable alternative is called satisficing.

Herbert Simon coined the term, a blend of 'satisfy' and 'suffice', for the strategy of searching until one finds an option that meets a minimum standard and then stopping, rather than comparing all options to find the best. With limited time and information (bounded rationality), satisficing is often the sensible approach.

A judgement call is any decision made on personal judgement. 'Choosing among alternatives' describes decision making in general. Solution-focused coping is a stress-management concept, not a decision heuristic.

Answer: C

Guilford's tests are typically characterized by very brief time periods.

J.P. Guilford's tests of divergent production, such as Alternate Uses (list as many uses as you can for a brick) and Consequences, are speeded: they allow only a few minutes for each task, and scores count how many responses (fluency), how many categories (flexibility) and how unusual (originality) the answers are within that time.

Their instructions are standard, not 'highly creative'. They are designed to allow many acceptable answers, not one correct answer per item. And they rest on an explicit theoretical framework, Guilford's Structure of Intellect model.

Answer: D

In an 'if P then Q' statement, Q is the consequent.

A conditional statement has two parts. The 'if' part, P, is the antecedent: the condition. The 'then' part, Q, is the consequent: what follows if the condition holds. In 'If it rains, the ground gets wet', 'it rains' is the antecedent and 'the ground gets wet' the consequent.

'A conditional' names the whole if-then statement, not one of its terms. 'The antecedent' is P, not Q. 'A connective' is the logical operator linking the parts, here 'if...then'.

Answer: C

Torrance test scores and intelligence scores show a pattern of low correlations.

The Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking measure divergent thinking: fluency, flexibility, originality and elaboration. Studies comparing them with IQ tests usually find modest correlations, commonly around 0.2 to 0.3, which supports the view that creativity and intelligence are related but distinct abilities (with a threshold of moderate intelligence often proposed).

A very high correlation would mean the tests measure the same thing. There is no consistent finding that the relationship is substantial only in children or significant only in the elderly.

Answer: B

The Torrance Tests are scored for Fluency, Flexibility, Originality, Elaboration.

E. P. Torrance built his tests on Guilford's divergent thinking factors. Fluency is the number of relevant ideas, flexibility the number of different categories they fall into, originality their statistical rarity, and elaboration the amount of detail added to an idea. (Later figural scoring dropped flexibility and added abstractness of titles and resistance to premature closure.)

Differentness, articulacy, novelty, rarity and domain-specificity are not the four scoring dimensions of the tests, so each other option replaces at least one real dimension with an invented one.

Answer: D

The categories are (1), (2) and (3) only.

In grouping the subtests of the Minnesota Tests of Creative Thinking, Torrance used three categories: verbal tasks using verbal stimuli (such as unusual uses and impossibilities), verbal tasks using non-verbal stimuli (such as Ask-and-Guess from a picture), and non-verbal tasks (such as completing incomplete figures or circles). These later became the verbal and figural forms of the Torrance Tests.

Statement (4), 'non-verbal tasks using non-verbal stimuli', is not a separate category: all the non-verbal tasks already fall under (3). Any option that includes (4) or leaves out (1) is therefore wrong.

Answer: A

The components are domain skills, creativity processes, intrinsic task motivation and social environment.

Teresa Amabile's componential theory of creativity names three components within the individual: domain-relevant skills (knowledge and technical skill in the field), creativity-relevant processes (cognitive style and working habits that favour new ideas), and intrinsic task motivation. A fourth component outside the individual is the social environment, which can support or undermine the other three.

The second option leaves out the creativity-relevant processes and motivation. The third replaces them with 'curiosity processes' and a 'psychological environment', which are not Amabile's terms, and the fourth replaces domain skills with plain 'knowledge'.

Answer: C

On the official key the answer is Sternberg and Lubart's investment theory.

Sternberg and O'Hara describe five possible relations between creativity and intelligence: creativity as a part of intelligence, intelligence as a part of creativity, overlapping sets, coincident sets and disjoint sets. In Sternberg and Lubart's investment theory, creativity is 'buying low and selling high' in the world of ideas and draws on six resources, intellectual abilities among them, so intelligence is one ingredient that creativity requires. That is the sense in which creativity is the larger thing that intelligence feeds.

Guilford's Structure of Intellect model places creative (divergent) production inside intelligence, and Gardner's theory treats creativity as a domain-specific use of the multiple intelligences, so neither makes intelligence a component of creativity.

What could not be confirmed: the phrase 'precondition to intelligence' is not standard wording in any source consulted, and Cox's theory of creativity and intelligence could not be identified. The answer rests on the investment theory being the one listed in which intelligence is a resource of creativity.