Open-Ended versus Fixed-Response Instructions in Divergent Thinking Tasks: A Psychometric Comparison

Divergent thinking (DT) tasks are widely used to assess creative cognitive potential. They typically ask participants to find several creative ideas, aiming to assess individual differences with respect to both the quality and quantity of ideational performance (i.e., DT creativity and DT fluency) from the same tasks. These traditional instructions, however, represent a dual task, as participants are left unclear about how to balance their efforts towards quantity and quality during idea generation, which may undermine the validity of both DT measures. More specific task instructions should allow participants to better regulate their performance (Lebuda et al., 2025). For example, “be creative” instructions were shown to increase the creative quality of responses (Acar et al., 2020; Forthmann et al., 2016; Nusbaum et al., 2014; Said-Metwaly et al., 2020). Yet, “be creative” instructions still remain vague regarding how many responses should be generated, even if scorings consider a prespecified number as in top-scoring or max-scoring approaches (Saretzki et al., 2025). It may therefore be advantageous to be straight about the number of responses used for assessing DT creativity such as by asking to generate three creative ideas in the given time. Such explicit instructions should reduce individual differences in how people spend their cognitive effort during idea generation and thereby enhance the instruction scoring fit.