Testing equal odds in creativity research.

Simonton’s equal odds baseline assumes that the number of creative hits is a positive linear function of the number of attempts (i.e., products). It has importance for productivity of innovators and scientists, small group brainstorming, and divergent thinking research. It has been proposed within a stochastic model for productions in the field of scientific creativity (e.g., publications of scientists). Tests of the equal odds baseline rely commonly on tests of the correlation between quantity and additive quality of output, which has been demonstrated to be inconclusive by Forthmann, Szardenings, and Holling (2018). In contrast, the current work uses a very strict version of equal odds (i.e., assuming constant hit ratios) as a starting point to examine the model at its roots. However, a deviation from such a stricter variant of the equal odds baseline is not only a dichotomous decision. The current work introduces meta-analytical techniques that provide useful statistics to quantify the amount of hit ratio variation attributable to individual differences in the equal odds baseline. This approach further allows to take varying levels of reliability in hit ratio as a function of total output into account. This is illustrated for cross-sectional and longitudinal equal odds with data sets from the fields of productivity of innovators and scientists, small group brainstorming, and divergent thinking research. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved)