Psychology Commons^™

On The Dependability And Feasibility Of Layperson Ratings Of Divergent Thinking, Richard W. Hass, Marisa Rivera, Paul J. Silvia

College of Humanities and Sciences Faculty Papers

A new system for subjective rating of responses to divergent thinking tasks was tested using raters recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk. The rationale for the study was to determine if such raters could provide reliable (aka generalizable) ratings from the perspective of generalizability theory. To promote reliability across the Alternative Uses and Consequence task prompts often used by researchers as measures of Divergent Thinking, two parallel scales were developed to facilitate feasibility and validity of ratings performed by laypeople. Generalizability and dependability studies were conducted separately for two scoring systems: the average-rating system and the snapshot system. Results showed that …