Divergent vs Convergent Thinking: Meaning, Examples and How They Are Tested

Divergent vs convergent thinking at a glance

Where the terms come from

In his 1950 presidential address to the American Psychological Association, published as “Creativity”, Guilford argued that psychology had neglected creative ability and that intelligence tests, built around single correct answers, could not capture it. In his Structure of Intellect model, set out in The Nature of Human Intelligence (1967), he listed “divergent production” and “convergent production” as two of the operations of the mind, alongside cognition, memory and evaluation. Popular summaries sometimes list “evaluation” as a fifth part of divergent thinking; in Guilford’s model it was a separate operation.

Examples of divergent thinking

Divergent tasks share one feature: there is no answer key. The classic ones are:

• Alternate uses. List as many uses as you can for a brick, a paperclip or a shoe in two or three minutes.
• Consequences. What would happen if people no longer needed to sleep?
• Instances. Name everything you can think of that is round, or that makes a noise.
• Product improvement. How could this toy be made more fun to play with?

Everyday versions are brainstorming names for a business, sketching several layouts before choosing one, or listing possible causes of a fault before testing any of them.

Examples of convergent thinking

• Remote associates. Sarnoff Mednick’s 1962 Remote Associates Test asks for the one word that links three others: cottage, Swiss, cake → cheese. It is a creativity test, but a convergent one — the answer is fixed.
• Reasoning puzzles. A number series, a matrix puzzle or a logic problem has one defensible answer.
• Diagnosis and checking. Working from symptoms to the most likely cause, or choosing the best of several drafted ideas.

How divergent thinking is scored

Answers on a divergent task are traditionally scored four ways:

• Fluency — how many relevant answers you give.
• Flexibility — how many different categories they fall into (a brick as a weapon, a doorstop and a paperweight counts as several categories; three kinds of doorstop as one).
• Originality — how rare each answer is compared with everyone else’s.
• Elaboration — how much detail you add.

The weakness of this system is well known in the field: someone who writes more answers also tends to collect more rare ones, so originality partly measures quantity. In 2008 Paul Silvia and colleagues proposed a “top two” method instead — people circle their two most creative answers and raters judge only those — and found that two or three raters gave dependable scores. Since then, computers have joined in: a 2021 study by Roger Beaty and Dan Johnson showed that “semantic distance” — how far, in meaning, an answer is from the prompt word — strongly predicted human creativity ratings, and released a free tool to compute it.

The best-known standardised battery is the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking, first published in 1966. Its fifty-year follow-up of children is covered in our guide to lateral thinking, which is the popular, untested cousin of divergent thinking.

Do creative ideas need both?

Yes — and this is the most practical point on the page. Arthur Cropley argued in 2006 that unfettered divergent thinking risks producing only “pseudocreativity”: novelty that does not work. Creative thinking, in his account, has two components — generating novelty and evaluating it — and knowledge, the stuff of convergent thinking, supplies both the ideas and the criteria for judging them. Too little convergent thinking is a problem; so, he added, is too much.

Brain research points the same way. A 2020 review in NeuroImage by Weitao Zhang, Zsuzsika Sjoerds and Bernhard Hommel compared studies of the Alternate Uses Task (mostly divergent) and the Remote Associates Test (mostly convergent). Their tentative framework: divergent thinking seems to benefit when the brain’s control is biased towards flexibility, and analytical convergent thinking when it is biased towards persistence — one control system shifting between two settings. The flexible setting resembles what psychologists call cognitive flexibility.

How divergent thinking relates to IQ

The largest pooled answer is a 2021 meta-analysis by Anne Gerwig and colleagues: 849 correlations from 112 studies covering 34,610 people.

• The average correlation between intelligence and divergent thinking was r = .25 — positive and real, but small enough that the two rank people quite differently.
• It rose to about .31–.37 when the task felt like a test, people were told to be creative, and answers were scored for originality.
• It made no difference whether intelligence was measured as general ability, as fluid or crystallised intelligence.

Whether the link fades above a certain IQ — the “threshold hypothesis” — is disputed; the competing studies are compared on our lateral thinking page. Convergent thinking, by contrast, is close to what an IQ test already measures: most items have one right answer.

Is divergent thinking declining?

One widely reported finding says yes, for children. Kyung Hee Kim analysed the norm samples of the Torrance tests — 272,599 people from kindergarten to adulthood across six norming rounds from 1966 to 2008 — and reported in 2011 that since 1990, even as IQ scores rose, creative thinking scores fell significantly, most sharply among children from kindergarten to third grade. The data come from one test family and its norm samples; treat it as a signal about that test rather than proof that a generation has become less creative.

How to practise divergent thinking

• Separate the two phases. Generate first, judge later. Writing ideas down without rejecting any keeps convergent thinking from cutting the list short.
• Push past the obvious answers. The first few answers on a uses task are usually the common ones; later answers tend to be more original — the “serial order effect” that Beaty and Johnson replicated with automated scoring.
• Change category on purpose. If every idea so far is a tool, ask what the object could be as food, toy, weapon or art.
• Then converge. Choose the two best ideas and check them against the facts — Cropley’s point that novelty has to work.

Whether such practice makes you more creative outside the exercise is a separate question; what the training studies found is summarised on our lateral thinking page. For the evaluating half, see our guide to critical thinking.

What an IQ test measures here

An IQ test, including ours, is a convergent test: each item has one correct answer, and the score reflects how many you reach. It does not measure divergent thinking, and a high or low IQ score says little about how many original ideas you can produce.

Trust and scope notes

This page summarises published research for general information. The figures are taken from the published abstracts of the studies listed below; Guilford’s 1950 address and 1967 book are described from their published titles and well-documented content. Nothing on this page assesses ADHD, autism or any other condition. The IQ Revealed test is an online reasoning test of 40 original items for adults aged 18 and over; it does not measure creativity and is not a clinical assessment.

IQ Revealed is not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to the publishers of the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking or the Remote Associates Test, or to the researchers, universities and journals named on this page.