The Influence Of The Instruction Specificity On Individual Creative Performance

In creativity tests or experimental tasks,researchers found the participants were clearly required to make "creative" responses that could promote their creative performance.Based on previous research,we have found that the more effective instruction used to enhance individual creative performance,are often more specific,and are mainly reflected in both the target content and the operation method.This study explored through three experiments whether the specific level of the instruction affects and under which conditions the individual’s creative performance is affected:From the perspective of "what is creativity",Experiment 1 sets up four kinds of experimental conditions,to examine the influence of the specificity of target content on individual creative performance.The results showed that the scores of the novelty of the subjects in the high-level group were significantly higher than those of the other three groups;the feasibility score was significantly lower than that of the control group and the low-degree group.Participants in the medium-and-high-level group were significantly higher in the objective novelty score than in the low-specificity group and the control group,subjective novelty scores were significantly higher than in the control group,and feasibility scores were significantly lower than in the control group.In Experiment 2,from the perspective of “how to improve creativity”,four kinds of experimental conditions were set up to examine the effect of the specific degree of operation on individual creative performance.The results showed that the scores on the novelty of the subjects in the high-level group were significantly higher than those in the other three groups;the feasibility score was significantly lower than the lowdegree group and the control group.The scores in the novelty of participants in the medium and high-level group were significantly higher than those in the lowspecificity group and the control group,and the feasibility scores were significantly lower than those in the low-specificity group and the control group.Experiment 3 comprehensively examines the effects of instruction specificity of the target content and the instruction specificity of the operation method on the creative performance of the individual.The results show that the specificity of the target content and the specificity of the operation method are significant at the edge of the interaction of objective novelty.In general,under the conditions of this study,we come to the following conclusions:1.In the divergent thinking task,the more specific the description of the target content and operation method in the guide language,the more novel the use of the target object that the individual thinks and the poorer the feasibility.2.Description of operation methods When the description is more general,the more specific the target content is,the more beneficial it is to enhance the individual’s novelty performance;and when the description of the operation method is more specific,whether the target content is specific does not influence individual novelty performance.