Creative ideas are highly valued, and various techniques have been designed to maximize the generation of creative ideas. However, for actual implementation of creative ideas, the most creative ideas must be recognized and selected from a pool of ideas. Although idea generation and idea selection are tightly linked in creativity theories, research on idea selection lags far behind research on idea generation. The current research investigates the role of processing mode in creative idea selection. In two experiments, participants were either instructed to intuitively or deliberatively select the most creative ideas from a pool of 18 ideas that systematically vary on creativity and its sub-dimensions originality and usefulness. Participants in the intuitive condition selected ideas that were more creative, more original, and equally useful than the ideas selected by participants in the deliberative condition. Moreover, whereas selection performance of participants in the deliberative condition was not better than chance level, participants in the intuitive condition selected ideas that were more creative, more original, and more useful than the average of all available ideas.

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Creative idea selection—the selection of the most creative idea(s) from available ideas—is an important yet understudied topic. Creative idea selection can be performed by the idea generator (i.e., intrapersonal selection) or by another person (i.e., interpersonal selection). In the current research, we examined whether these two types of selection lead to different levels of performance. Participants generated six creative ideas to solve a societal problem. Thereafter, two selection tasks—intrapersonal selection and interpersonal selection—were performed. During intrapersonal selection, the idea generator selected the most creative idea from his/her own ideas; during interpersonal selection, another person made the selection from the same ideas. We found no effect of intrapersonal and interpersonal selection on creative idea selection performance: People selected ideas of identical creativity, irrespective of whether that idea was from themselves or from others. Moreover, we replicated the earlier finding that people perform suboptimally at creative idea selection, failing to select ideas that were more creative than an average idea, for both intrapersonal and interpersonal selection.