Divergent thinking in act generation

Abstract

Act generation is a process used in decision making and problem solving to create possible actions that might solve a problem. An act generation experiment was conducted using undergraduates and advanced graduate students. Large performance differences were observed between the two groups in act generation performance and divergent thinking ability. Divergent thinking ability, as measured by Guilford's Alternate Uses test, was approximately twice as high for the graduate subjects as compared to the undergraduates, and similar differences were observed in act generation performance. The correlation between divergent thinking scores and two act generation performance measures were 0.43 and 0.49 for the combined groups. These results suggests that divergent thinking ability is an important predictor of act generation performance.