The Neglect of Idea Diversity in Creative Idea Generation and Evaluation

While idea diversity has long been considered a critical facet of creativity, little is known about how strongly people consider it during idea generation and evaluation. A semantic distance-based assessment of idea novelty and diversity was introduced to answer this question and circumvent issues of subjectivity and labor intensiveness in human coding. In response to a given noun (e.g., ship), participants were asked to generate creative words (e.g., bottle, pirate). We manipulated participants' awareness and explicit focus on idea diversity during idea generation (Experiments 1 and 2) and idea evaluation (Experiments 3 and 4). Results indicated a substantial underutilization of idea diversity during idea generation and evaluation. Overcoming idea diversity neglect during idea generation required explicit instruction to generate ideas from divergent contexts. In contrast, idea diversity neglect was easily overcome during idea evaluation by drawing participants' attention to it before idea evaluation. We propose a new approach to assessment where groups of ideas are assessed throughout the creative process instead of solely focusing on single ideas.