Thinking differently for social success: divergent thinking predicts persuasion, humour, and charisma

Abstract

Humans are hyper-social beings. Our social nature imposes pressure on the ability to successfully navigate the social world. The high stakes of surviving, reproducing, and succeeding in the context of social groups placed strong evolutionary selection on cognitions that undergird social abilities. Human cognition offers a considerable array of general and specialised capacities that facilitate social performance. To date, much of the research on social functioning has focused on specialized social cognitions. Less attention, however, has been paid to the full range of domain-general cognitions that play a meaningful role in the social domain. The current thesis addresses this shortcoming in the literature by exploring the role of one general cognitive ability, divergent thinking ability, across five pervasive and highly valued social abilities and outcomes.Chapter 1 integrates disparate research to build a holistic view of social performance. I draw on evolutionary theory, psychometrics, cognitive psychology, and social psychology to underscore the importance of general cognitive processes in the social domain. I first highlight the forces that shaped the emergence of hyper-sociality and enhanced cognition in the Homo genus. I then explore the research on human social intelligence and a range of domain-specialised social cognition and knowledge factors that have become synonymous with social intelligence. Finally, I introduce and build a case for a particular domain-general cognitive ability–divergent thinking ability–across a variety of domains that are related to social success. Specifically, I test for the associations between divergent thinking and persuasion, humour, charisma, romantic desirability, and general social skill.Chapter 2 finds consistent evidence that divergent thinking positively predicts persuasion ability, independent of intelligence, personality dimensions, and other control measures. On the other hand, evidence for the effect of divergent thinking on romantic desirability was mixed. That is, while the positive bivariate correlations with romantic desirability in Study 1a replicated in Study 1b, the effects from the multiple regression analyses did not. Overall, drawing from adult samples recruited through M-Turk, these studies offer preliminary evidence for the benefits of divergent thinking in creating more persuasive arguments.Chapter 3 extends the investigation of social abilities to humour. In a sample of adolescents, better divergent thinkers generated more humorous responses, as measured by the generation of funny cartoon captions. This effect emerged independent of general reasoning ability and grade point average, which were used as measures of intelligence. Overall, Chapter 3 highlights another social ability where divergent thinking ability appears to offer a contribution.Chapters 2 and 3 provided evidence that divergent thinking informs persuasive and humorous written responses. Nonetheless, these studies relied upon written responses to assess social abilities, which may not reflect actual social functioning. To remedy this shortcoming, Chapter 4 extends the scope of the dissertation by using peer-rated evaluations of charisma and, secondarily, social skill. Chapter 4 also examined a comprehensive measure of general intelligence by having participants complete a full IQ assessment. Divergent thinking predicted peer-rated charisma, independent of intelligence and personality dimensions (of which extraversion was the strongest predictor of peer-rated charisma). Contrary to predictions, divergent thinking did not predict social skills.In sum, the current dissertation found evidence for the role of divergent thinking in predicting persuasion, humour, and charisma. The precise mechanisms through which divergent thinking facilitates these social abilities remains an open question. Nevertheless, this thesis offers promising evidence for a role of divergent thinking in the social domain. The ability to think divergently appears to enhance our capacity to be persuasive, funny, and charismatic.