Experimental Study On The Influence Of Priming Type On Divergent Thinking Of Middle School Students

Divergent thinking is an important part of creativity.Because of the clear definition and easy measurement,researchers often evaluate creativity by measuring divergent thinking.This paper introduces the definition and three dimensions of divergent thinking,and introduced the situational(state)factors affecting divergent thinking.Based on previous studies,it is found that human intervention,such as priming,can stimulate individual creativity in a short period of time.This study employed the priming paradigm to design three experiments to investigate whether the initiation of Multiple-Identities in a real classroom can increase creative performance.In study 1,81 junior high school students(7^thgrade)were divided into Multiple-Identities priming condition and control condition.The results showed that the Multiple-Identities priming condition scored significantly higher in fluency,flexibility and uniqueness than the control condition.This result provides evidence for the effectiveness of priming.On the basis of study 1,study 2 carry out two experiments in order to explore the influence of priming type on individual divergent thinking.In Exp.2a,77 junior high school students(7^thgrade)were divided into Multiple-Identities priming condition and Multiple-Physical-Traits priming condition.The results showed that the Multiple-Physical-Traits priming condition scored significantly higher in fluency than the Multiple-Identities priming condition,but there was no significant difference in flexibility nor uniqueness between the two groups.This contradicts previous research that the Multiple-Identities priming condition has significantly higher scores on the creativity test than the Multiple-Physical-Traits priming condition.On the basis of Exp.2a,Exp.2b changed the manipulation approach to enhance the priming effect,and used subjective evaluation method to score the uniqueness to make up for the shortcomings of traditional approach,in an attempt to further verify whether the priming effect can improve divergent thinking.In Exp.2a,84 junior high school students(7^thgrade)were divided into Multiple-Identities priming condition and Multiple-Physical-Traits priming condition,and a computer scoring system was used to find that there was still no significant different performance between the Multiple-Physical-Traits priming condition and the Multiple-Identities priming condition.There was no significant difference in the score of uniqueness between the two groups with the subjective scoring approach instead of the traditional scoring approach.The present study provided evidence for the effectiveness of social priming.However,there was no significant difference between primings with different contents,which was inconsistent with previous findings.This study adds to our understanding of replicability in psychological research.Again,this is a reminder that when we apply some psychological findings to practice,we should be more skeptical and with double checking.