Evidence for a curvilinear relationship between complexity and originality

The present study tested the hypothesis of a curvilinear relationship between preference for complexity and each of two components of creativity—originality and fluency—for four complexity levels within the upper half of the complexity distribution The hypothesis was based on an interpretation of extremely high complexity levels as emphasizing rejection of conventionality more than fondness for novelty and tolerance of ambiguity The results not only supported the main hypothesis of a curvilinear relationship but also suggested that originality and fluency declined beyond the second level of complexity studied. Question is cast on the assumption that increasing complexity is necessarily productive of increasing creativity Lastly, the results were interpreted as also being consistent with Berlyne's (1967) hypothesis that moderate increases in arousal are most conducive to learning     

A set theoretic analysis of group interactions

Prior to the statistical treatment of experimentally derived data the experimenter must obtain the data. In many studies in psychology, the content of group interactions is obtained by a data coding scheme. Coding schemes are shown to possess hierarchical structures and can be characterized by a hierarchy of fields. Three examples of coding schemes as hierarchies of fields are given. Techniques for extracting numbers from the set are presented. Problems associated with the improper assignment of elements of a data coding scheme to a theoretical structure are examined. The main result is that there will be errors in assignment of data to theory unless the structure of the data coding scheme is identical with that structure which is relevant to the theory being tested. Whenever the structures are not equal, the results are hard to interpret. In fact, any size of assignment error can be obtained. Since these errors precede the usual statistical treatment of data, it would appear that reported empirical findings are only valid when there exists no assignment errors.This research was sponsored by N.S.F. Grant GS-1944.