想得多是想得好的前提嗎？探討發散性思考能力在創意問題解決的角色

Is the More the Better? The Role of Divergent Thinking in Creative Problem Solving

發散性思考與創意問題解決能力是創造力歷程研究中兩個主要的研究重點，但由於所用的測驗或問題情境不同而未曾有研究探討其間關係。本研究回顧此兩大研究取向，並指出發現作業（246作業）具頓悟問題特色，並以個體在假設產出階段的表現作為創意指標，探究上述兩種能力間的關係。實驗一檢驗以發現作業中假設產出特色作為創造力指標的適當性，結果獲得支持，根據創造力連結理論（Mednick, 1962）所定義的高創造力者比低創造力者在發現作業中顯著產生較多的新角度假設；且新角度假設數和能否成功解決問題顯著相關。實驗二則顯示發散性思考能力的高低和新角度假設的產生，以及與能否成功解決創意問題並無相關，甚至和連結理論所預測的遠距聯想能力呈顯著負相關。文中深入討論發散性思考能力是解決創意問題的前提（亦即想得多是想得好的前提）或是兩者屬於不同創造力。

It is often thought that divergent thinking is the base for solving problem creatively, for the more ideas an individual generates, the more likely he will hit the answer. This idea however has never been tested empirically, partly due to a lack of measurable index regarding the creativity of hypothesis generation. The current research therefore aimed at 1) defining an index featuring creativity in hypothesis generation; 2) investigating the relation between divergent thinking and creativity in problem solving, which has been reframed as a process of generating and revising hypotheses to reach a goal by many researchers. The authors argued that the “2 4 6 problem”, a rule discovery task which had long been regarded as a task involving inductive reasoning, could be regarded as an insight problem from the perspective of hypothesis generation, and therefore suitable for representing creativity in problem solving. Since many subjects who failed to discover the correct rule in “2 4 6 problem” were due to lack of perspective shifting while generating hypothesis, the authors therefore proposed that how different a new hypothesis is from the previous ones could serve as an useful index for creativity in problem solving. New-perspective hypotheses only referred to those hypotheses that located in different branches at the most and the second most abstract levels of the tree diagram composed of all the hypotheses generated in the “2 4 6 problem” by all the 81subjects in the current research. Experiment 1 aimed at justifying the new index by establishing its relation with the association theory of creativity (Mednick, 1962). A Lexical Decision Task (LDT) was designed to measure the different abilities of remote association, indicated by the differences in priming effect between strong- and weak-associated word pairs. The results of 81 subjects from National Taiwan University showed that remote association ability significantly correlated with the generation of new-perspective hypotheses in “2 4 6 problem”, which then predicted the solving of the problem. Experiment 2 then investigated whether the ability of divergent thinking would predict the creativity in hypothesis generation represented by the new-established index as well as the success in problem solving. The same group of subjects performed a Chinese version of Divergent Thinking Test (Wu, 1998) a week from Experiment 1. The results showed the scores of divergent thinking test predicted neither the creativity in hypothesis generation nor the success rate of solving the “2 4 6 problem”. Implications for distinguishing creativity required by art creation and scientific discovery as well as for enhancing creativity were discussed.