What Should People Be Told When They Take a Divergent Thinking Test? A Meta-Analytic Review of Explicit Instructions for Divergent Thinking

Divergent thinking (DT) tests are often used for creativity assessment. They differ from many other tests in that they are open-ended. A great deal of research has examined the influence of test instructions on the number and nature of responses to DT tests. Most instructions explicitly emphasize quantity (e.g., "give as many ideas as you can"). Others target additional features, such as creativity, originality, or idea quality. Do such alternative explicit instructions make any difference? The present meta-analysis examined studies that compared the explicit instructions emphasizing creativity, originality, and quality to quantity instructions. Using a 3-level multilevel approach, analyses with all 204 effect sizes from 31 studies indicated that creativity and quality instructions increased performance on DT when added to quantity instructions (gs = .243 and .271, respectively), more than quantity instructions alone. However, the originality instructions did not change DT performance (g = −.159). Thus, explicit instructions may increase or decrease DT performance, depending on which alternative explicit instructions are used and how they are presented. Practical implications of the findings are discussed, as are limitations of this research.