Divergent Thinking and Creative Achievement-How Strong Is the Link? An Updated Meta-Analysis

Achieving creativity in the real-world depends on multiple individual and environmental factors. Among them, divergent thinking (DT) has long been considered a key ingredient of creativity and an essential criterion for predicting real-life creative outcomes. However, the link between DT and creative achievement (CA) has yielded heterogeneous results, as outlined by a prior meta-analysis on the DT-CA link published in 2008. Given several limitations of this meta-analysis and the large body of relevant studies that have been published since then, the present article aimed to offer an updated and methodologically rigorous meta-analytical examination of the DT-CA link. A total of 766 effect sizes from 70 studies encompassing 14,901 subjects were analyzed using a meta-analytic three-level model. The results showed that DT was positively, albeit weakly, linked to CA, with only 3% of shared variance. Moderator analyses indicated that this link was robust to variations in DT and CA measures used, gender, educational level, measurement interval between DT and CA, and country of study, but differed by DT task modality, CA domain, and intellectual giftedness. Specifically, the strength of the DT-CA link was significantly larger for (a) verbal DT tasks, (b) CA in the performance domain, and (c) gifted subjects. A significant interaction effect was also found between CA domain and intellectual giftedness, with the DT-CA link being strongest among gifted subjects in the performance domain. Implications of these results for the study and measurement of creativity are discussed.