The Effect Of Rank-Ordering Strategy On Creative Idea Selection Performance

When people have to choose a creative solution from several ideas to tackle a problem, they tend to select mainstream ideas at the expense of creative ideas. In the current research, we examined the effect of rank-ordering strategy on creative idea selection performance by comparing three different rank-ordering strategies: choosing (i.e., rank-ordering ideas by stepwise selecting the most creative idea), elimination (i.e., rank-ordering ideas by stepwise removing the least creative idea), and paired comparison (i.e., rank-ordering ideas by making a series of choices from pairs of ideas). In four experiments, participants rank-ordered 10 ideas in creativity by using one of the three strategies, and the creativity of the most creative idea was compared between the conditions. Moreover, a meta-analysis was conducted on the data of these four studies. Our findings suggest that rank-ordering strategy does not influence creative idea selection performance and Bayesian analyses provide evidence supporting the null hypothesis.