An exploratory investigation of divergent thinking through protocol analysis

Abstract

Verbal protocols were recorded while 21 MBA students at India's leading management school sought to solve a complex divergent thinking task. The content analysis of these protocols yielded five major categories and 23 subcategories of divergent thinking. The five major categories were problem structuring, searching, feeling, ideating, and evaluating. Ideating turned out to be the most commonly utilized category. The resort to ideating, that is, articulating solutions, was negatively correlated with feeling and problem structuring and positively correlated with evaluating. There were marked differences in the way the subjects tackled the divergent thinking task. Three cognitive styles were uncovered through cluster analysis: the intuitive ideator style, the anxious analyst style, and the random scanner style. Transitions among categories were examined, and yielded several recursive divergent thinking paths. Contrary to several extant models of creative problem solving, there was no marked evidence for sequentiality among the categories of divergent thinking. Most solutions to the divergent thinking problem were of the “objective”; type, that is, they actually existed in nature. A minority were “creative,”; that is, synthesized through an act of imagination. There was relatively greater tendency for objective solutions to be preceded by the use of searching, evaluating, and analytical mechanisms, and relatively greater tendency for creative solutions to be preceded by ideating (especially listing and elaboration), feeling, and redefinition mechanisms. Implications of the findings for models of divergent thinking are discussed.

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