The effect of experiencing indecision on creativity in brainstorming

In recent years brainstorming method has been commonly used in many fields as a method that increases creative performance. The factors increasing or decreasing creative performance in this method are seen as attractive research topics by many researchers. On the other hand, in the literature no investigation has done about in what way creativity in brainstorming would change after the indecision was manipulated. The aim of this study was to examine the effect of indecision on creativity. In this research a group of university students were asked to choose more original sentences from the two different sentences in order to manipulate indecisiveness. The sentences that were in front of a number of students were similar to eachother in terms of originality. This group formed experiment group. The other ones in front of the other part of students were sentences that were quite obvious which one was more original. This group formed control group. It was assumed that the control group would make decisions without hesitation and that the experiment group would experience some degree of indecision process for making decision on which one was original relative to each other. Consistent with this expectation, the perception data showed that the participants in the indecision manipulation experienced a high level of indecision than those in the control one and the performance data showed that those in this condition also generated fewer ideas than those in the control one. In addition, the sentences were selected from either the same category of the problem or different categories of the problem. Findings showed no significant difference between these two conditions in terms of idea generation. The findings were discussed in light of the relevant literature. KeyWords: Brainstorming, Creativity, Indecision.