Guilford’s Intellective Factors

4.6 Guilford’s Intellective Factors

One of the more important developments in the field of creativity has been Guilford's works on intellective factors. Work began out of both theoretical and statistical considerations that led him to be critical of traditional intelligence testing procedures. It would take us too far a field to consider all the issues involved; hence we shall limit ourselves to what he has to say directly about the relationships between intelligence testing and creativity.

In 1950 Guilford said, "we must look well beyond the boundaries of the I.Q if we are to fathom the domain of creativity" and he voiced the belief that the idea "that creative talent is to be accounted for in terms of high intelligence or I.Q ... is not only inadequate but has been largely responsible for lack of progress in the understanding of creative people."

To arrive at a conceptualization of the different possible factors involved in the structure of the intellect, Guilford used a technique called morphological analysis. This is a technique for stimulating creativity and therefore as an aside Guilford's work is a good illustration of this technique's use and value.

Guilford's morphological model consists of three dimensions or parameters operations, contents, and products. Each of these dimensions consists of several categories. Operations, which as its name indicates, is the operation performed on material, consists of the following categories: cognition, memory, divergent production, convergent production, and evaluation. Contents, or the medium in which the thought occurs, consists of four categories: figural, symbolic, semantic, and behavioral. And Products consists of the results of the combinations of both operations and products and includes six categories: units, classes, relations, systems, transformations, and implications. All of these are more fully defined in Table 4.1.

Table 4.1: Definitions of categories in GuilFord's structure of intellect

Operations

Major kinds of intellectual activities or processes; things that the organism does with the raw materials of information, information being defined as "that which the organism discriminates."

Cognition. Immediate discovery, awareness, rediscovery, or recognition of information in various forms; comprehension or understanding.

Memory. Retention or storage, with some degree of availability, of information in the same form in which it was committed to storage and in response to the same cues in connection with which it was learned.

Divergent Production. Generation of information from the given information, where the emphasis is upon variety and quantity of output from the same source. Likely to involve what has been called transfer. This operation is most clearly involved in aptitudes of creative potential.

Convergent Production. Generation of information from the given information, where the emphasis is upon achieving unique or conventionally accepted best outcomes. It is likely the given (cue) information fully determines the response.

Evaluation. Reaching decisions or making judgments concerning criterion satisfaction (correctness, suitability, adequacy, desirability, etc.) of information

Contents

Broad classes or types of information discriminable by the organism.

Figural. Information in concrete form, as perceived or as recalled possibly in the form of images. The term "figural" minimally implies figure‑ground perceptual organization. Visual spatial information is figural. Different sense modalities may be involved, e.g., visual kinesthetic.

Symbolic. Information in the form of denotative signs, having no significance in and of themselves, such as letters, numbers, values musical notations, codes, and words, when meanings and form are not considered.

Semantic. Information in the form of meanings to which words commonly become attached, hence most notable in verbal thinking and in verbal communication but not identical with words. Meaningful pictures also often convey semantic information.

Behavioural. Information, essentially nonverbal, involved in human interactions where the attitudes, needs, desires, moods, intentions, perceptions, thoughts, etc., of other people and of ourselves is involved.

Products

Forms that information takes in the organism's processing of it.

Units. Relatively segregated or circumscribed items of information having "thing" character. May be close to Gestalt psychology's "figure on a ground."

Classes. Conceptions underlying sets of items of information grouped by virtue of their common properties.

Relations. Connections between items of information based upon variables or points of contact that apply to them. Relational connections are more meaningful and definable than implications.

Systems. Organized or structured aggregates of items of information; complexes of interrelated or interacting parts.

Transformations. Changes of various kinds (redefinition, shifts, or modification) of existing information or in its function.

Implications. Extrapolations of information, in the form of expectancies, predictions, known or suspected antecedents, concomitants, or consequences. The connection between the given information and that extrapolated is more general and less definable than a relational connection.

Guilford regards the combination of any three categories from the three dimensions as consisting of a psychological factor. For example, cognition of figural systems is called spatial orientation; cognition of semantic implication is conceptual foresight; divergent production of symbolic units is called word fluency; and divergent production of semantic units is called ideational fluency, etc. For each of these factors tests have been developed.

Relating his own studies of intellect to creativity, Guilford says,

"Although the most obvious aspects of creative thinking appear to depend on the abilities to do divergent‑productive thinking and the abilities to effect transformations of information, with the abilities of fluency, flexibility, elaboration, and redefinition playing significant roles, with creative thinking put in its larger context of problem solving, we see that any or all kinds of abilities represented in the structure of intellect can play their useful roles, directly or indirectly."

To illustrate Guilford's factors and the tests used to get at them, let us consider the divergent production factors. A factor that Guilford calls word fluency (divergent symbolic units) consists of thinking up and writing out words containing a specified letter, e.g., the letter "g"; two of the tests for ideational fluency (divergent semantic units) are Plot Titles (nonclever) in which the subject is asked to list "possible titles for a given short story" and the score is the number of nonclever titles produced. And another is the Utility Test in which the subject is asked to list "uses he can think of for a common brick, or a wire coat hanger." The score is based on "the total number of relevant responses." When the uses for the common brick and lead pencil given by a person are scored for the number of shifts in classes in consecutive responses, it becomes a measure of semantic spontaneous flexibility.

Guilford's tests, especially those designed to measure divergent‑production factors, have been used, as indicated previously, in various ways by researchers investigating creativity. Some have used the tests to study differences between creative persons, selected in terms of some criterion and others who are less creative or who have not manifested any creativity. Other investigators have used Guilford's tests to differentiate between two groups of persons. One group scores significantly higher on these tests than does the other, and so the investigator has a psychometric criterion to differentiate between his groups. He then proceeds to study the groups with other psychological tests. Still another third group has used the tests to measure the effects of programs designed to stimulate creativity. And a fourth group has adapted or altered some of Guilford's original tests for specific purposes. These tests are referred to later as "Guilford‑like" tests. Many of Guilford's tests and the Guilford‑like tests are regarded as tests of creativity by some investigators, not because they have the evidence that the tests correlate with independent measures of manifest creativity, but because the tests appear to measure psychological functions that are assumed to be involved in the mental operations of creative persons during the creative process.