Reference
J. P. Guilford
The divergent and convergent distinction comes from his Structure of Intellect model, and his 1950 paper put creativity on psychology's research agenda.
Joy Paul Guilford was president of the American Psychological Association in 1950, the year he published a paper called "Creativity" in the American Psychologist. His Structure of Intellect model, proposed in the mid 1950s, sorted abilities by operation, content and product, and among its operations were divergent production, generating many possible answers, and convergent production, deducing a single one.
The model itself fared badly. It counted 150 or 180 abilities depending on how the categories were split, and John Carroll called it "a somewhat eccentric aberration" in the history of intelligence models. The two terms outlasted it, and his categories of fluency, flexibility, originality and elaboration became the basis of the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking.
Referenced work
- Creativity (American Psychologist, 1950, vol. 5, pp. 444-454) reference
- The Nature of Human Intelligence (Book, 1967) reference
Elsewhere
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