Effects Of Different Brainstorming On Creativity Of College Students

Brainstorming was originated and first used by Alex F. Osborn in 1939.Within recent years, it has achieved wide acceptance as a means of facilitating creative thinking. However, brainstorming groups have consistently produced fewer ideas than have the equivalent number of individuals working by themselves in previous research. These results have been attributed to production blocking, evaluation apprehension, and social loafing in groups. However,most of these experiments were held in the western countries, and only a few were in China.In this paper, we conducted three experiments to investigate the effects of different types of brainstorming on the number and the quality of unique ideas produced by decision-making groups.168 Soochow University undergraduates were involved in this study. Subjects in each condition were given a task to help a poor student to earn enough money for studying and living in the school. In Experiment 1, we examined the tenet of'not to criticize'. Type of session, variation of evaluation apprehension and identifiability was manipulated in Experiment 2. The effects of communication media was investigated in Experiment 3.The results showed:(1) The tenet of'not to criticize'has positive value for idea generation to Chinese undergraduates.(2) The number of effective ideas produced by nominal groups was much more than that of oral interaction groups.(3) Inducing evaluation apprehension reduced productivity.(4) The productivity of written brainstorming was much more than that of oral brainstorming.(5) Subjects in interaction groups feel much more satisfied than those in nominal groups.