Risk-Taking and Creativity: Convergent, but Not Divergent Thinking Is Better in Low-Risk Takers

Abstract

The relationship between risk-taking and creativity is critical to understand ing social harmony and innovation. While some studies have assessed the link between risk-taking and divergent thinking, the association between risk-taking and convergent thinking remains unclear. Two studies were conducted to systemically investigate whether risk-taking is linked to convergent thinking. In Study 1, a sample of 127 healthy participants performed a Chinese Remote Associate Test (RAT) and completed a risk-taking questionnaire. As predicted, risk-taking was negatively correlated with RAT performance, implying that risk-taking may have a negative association with convergent thinking. Study 2 was an online survey study that replicated Study 1, and extended the measures to include self-rated risk and a measure of divergent thinking (the Alternate Uses Task). The findings were fully replicated, showing that low risk-taking goes with better convergent thinking, while risk-taking was not significantly correlated with divergent thinking. Furthermore, the risk-taking/convergent-thinking relationship was best described by a linear regression model in both studies. Taken together, these results suggest that appropriate reductions in risk-taking can boost convergent thinking.

Empowering Leadership, Risk-Taking Behavior, and Employees’ Commitment to Organizational Change: The Mediated Moderating Role of Task Complexity

“…Therefore, it should be considered as an important psychological mechanism leading to commitment to organizational change [86]. These empirical findings are in line with previous research that finds evidence for the influence risk-taking behavior has on factors related to organizational change, such as creativity and innovation [87,88].…”

The impact of spontaneous and induced mood states on problem solving and memory

“…As mentioned previously, to prevent impasses, individuals generally prefer a relatively careful, safe, detail-orientated, analytical, and conservative thinking or processing style. In support of this assumption, a recent study has reported a positive association between risk-aversion/avoidance and the performance of (self-reported) insight problem-solving measured using the same CRA task (Shen, Hommel, Yuan, Liu, & Zhang, 2018).…”

Peer Review #2 of "The relationships between bilingual learning, willingness to study abroad and convergent creativity (v0.1)"

“…A typical RAT contains three unrelated words (e.g., rat/blue/cottage), and participants are asked to find a fourth word (e.g., cheese) that serves as an associative link to the stimulus test (Alici et al, 2019;Benedek & Neubauer, 2013). In this study, 53 Chinese RAT problems (Ding, et al, 2014;Shen et al, 2016a;Shen et al, 2019;Shen, Hommel, Yuan, Chang, & Zhang, 2018) were used as the experimental materials, including five problems (two difficult and three simple problems) used during the practice session. Forty-eight problems, including 24 difficult and 24 simple problems, were used in the formal experiment.…”

“…Third, this study showed that the intention to study abroad was related to performance in convergent creativity; in future research, the causes of this result could be explored by measuring other relevant variables, such as openness to experience. Furthermore, a considerable number of studies from diverse groups has validated the effectiveness of such a tool to measure the convergent creativity of Chinese people (Ding, et al, 2014;Shen et al, 2016a;Shen, et al, 2018;Shen et al, 2019;Wu, Chang, & Chen, 2017). With the deepening of research on creativity worldwide, an increasing number of people may be interested in the creativity of Chinese people, so this tool must be further promoted and verified.…”