More than the eye of the beholder: The interplay of person, task, and situation factors in evaluative judgements of creativity

Judging creativity accurately is difficult. Individuals who are involved in product creation tend to overestimate the creativity of their work; individuals not involved lack understanding of the creative process that led to the product under scrutiny. We studied creativity judgements in a tripartite person–task–situation framework. Under high, medium, or no structure conditions and different orders of evaluation, participants (N = 90) rated the creativity and purchase appeal of products created by themselves and others. Accuracy was defined as differences from consensus evaluations of participants not involved in production (N = 30). Moderator analyses suggest that externally set structure of the evaluation process (e.g., using a set of criteria) facilitates the quality of creativity judgement. In unstructured conditions, evaluating one's own product before evaluating a peer's leads to low accuracy, but higher levels of conscientiousness seem to mitigate potentially deleterious effects of lack of structure. Higher levels of openness facilitated accurate creativity judgements of peer-produced products, but not self-produced products. A person–task–situation approach is needed to fully unpack the complexity of processes underlying accurate evaluation of creativity

Assessment of processing capacity: Reasoning in Latin Square tasks in a population of managers.

Research over the last 10 years on Latin square tasks (LST) suggests a significant potential for their use in assessing fluid cognition. In the current work, we outline the LST and the more complex Greco-Latin square task (GLST). The objectives were (1) to validate the appropriateness of LST as measures of fluid cognition in business managers and (2) to demonstrate the separation of the LST into working memory and deductive reasoning components. Participants were 264 midlevel managers from four large international companies. Consistent with expectations, SEM analyses indicated that the GLST and the LST are highly correlated with fluid intelligence (Gf), and that working memory load could be differentiated from reasoning load in the LST and provided incremental predictive validity of Gf. Results are supportive of our expectations and provide evidence that LST are appropriate for psychological assessment as they are based on a strong theory of fluid cognition, have sound psychometric properties, and have substantial pragmatic utility in terms of the capacity for rapid item generation. </jats:p