The impact of creativity training on creative performance: A meta-analytic review and critical evaluation of 5 decades of creativity training studies.

Creativity is widely considered a skill essential to succeeding in the modern world. Numerous creativity training programs have been developed, and several meta-analyses have attempted to summarize the effectiveness of these programs and identify the features influencing their impact. Unfortunately, previous meta-analyses share a number of limitations, most notably overlooking the potentially strong impact of publication bias and the influence of study quality on effect sizes.

Hedges, mottes, and baileys: Causally ambiguous statistical language can increase perceived study quality and policy relevance.

There is a norm in psychology to use causally ambiguous statistical language, rather than straightforward causal language, when describing methods and results of nonexperimental studies. However, causally ambiguous language may inhibit a critical examination of the study's causal assumptions and lead to a greater acceptance of policy recommendations that rely on causal interpretations of nonexperimental findings. In a preregistered experiment, 142 psychology faculty, postdocs, and doctoral students (54% female), ages 22-67 (M = 33.

In search of the elusive initial model.

A key assumption of Mental Model theory (Johnson-Laird & Byrne, 1991, 2002) is that reasoners should use a minimal representation of the premises, called the initial model, in order to reduce the cognitive load involved in the processing of more than one model. However, there is no direct evidence for this postulate. In the following studies, we modified the ability of participants to process conditional (if-then) inferences in more complex ways by varying the degree of arbitrariness of the conditionals and by restricting the time allotted.

More evidence for a dual-process model of conditional reasoning.

Many studies have shown that the deductive inferences that people make have global properties that reflect the statistical information implicit in the premises. This suggests that such reasoning can be explained by a single, underlying probabilistic model. In contrast, the dual process model of conditional reasoning (Verschueren, Schaeken, & d'Ydewalle, 2005b) proposes that people can use either a logical, counterexample-based strategy or a probabilistic one.

Conditional reasoning with false premises facilitates the transition between familiar and abstract reasoning.

Abstract reasoning is critical for science and mathematics, but is very difficult. In 3 studies, the hypothesis that alternatives generation required for conditional reasoning with false premises facilitates abstract reasoning is examined. Study 1 (n = 372) found that reasoning with false premises improved abstract reasoning in 12- to 15-year-olds.

Conditional reasoning, frequency of counterexamples, and the effect of response modality.

Geiger and Oberauer (2007) found that when asked to reason with conditionals, people are very sensitive to information about the relative frequency of exceptions to conditional rules and quite insensitive to the relative number of disabling conditions. They asked participants to rate their degree of certainty in a conclusion. In the following studies, we investigated the possibility that this kind of response encourages a more probabilistic mode of processing compared with the usual dichotomous response.

An inverse belief-bias effect: more evidence for the role of inhibitory processes in logical reasoning.

Two studies examined the hypothesis that accepting false premises as true in order to make the modus ponens (MP) inference requires inhibition of contradictory knowledge. Study 1 presented both MP and affirmation of the consequent (AC) inferences using either false, but plausible premises or completely unbelievable premises, with standard logical constructions using either an evaluation or a production paradigm. The rate of acceptance of the MP inferences was significantly greater with unbelievable premises than with plausible premises, in both evaluation and production, while no such effect was observed with the AC inferences.