Or, as the Nobel laureate Linus Pauling put it, “The best way to get good ideas, is to get lots of ideas and throw the bad ones away” (as cited in McPherson Shilling & Fuller, 1997, p. 112). On the other hand, the ability to generate not only common but also original ideas should result in higher total number

of available ideas. Besides the different contributions of inhibition and intelligence on fluency and originality of ideas, these divergent thinking measures also showed a discriminable correlation pattern with respect to other measures of creativity. Ideational fluency was significantly related to dissociative ability and the creative personality scale, whereas ideational check details originality was significantly related to the self-reported ideational behavior

and to creative accomplishments. Taken together this suggests that these two divergent thinking measures show discriminant validity, which corroborates the usefulness of obtaining two non-confounded indicators of quantitative and qualitative aspects of ideational ability. As a limitation of this study, it should be noted that only one specific inhibition task (i.e., a random sequence generation task) was used. This task is valid with respect to other measures of inhibition (Miyake GSK J4 order et al., 2000), but the findings might not generalize to all conceptualizations of cognitive inhibition. This may be especially true, when referring to a wider definition of cognitive inhibition which also includes the suppression of interfering stimuli and distractors (e.g., Friedman & Miyake, 2004). The variety of conceptualizations of inhibition may also be one reason for the number of apparently inconsistent

findings in the literature. Future studies, therefore, should address the question whether different inhibition-related functions differentially contribute to creative thought. As another limitation, the internal consistency of the originality scores was found to be rather low. Employing a scoring of originality which is not confounded with fluency is useful in order to obtain a measure with discriminant validity, but it may why also result in lower reliability. As a consequence, it should be noted that manifest first-order correlations with originality probably are underestimated, and that the estimated latent parameters related to originality have to be interpreted with some caution. This study adds to the growing evidence on the relation between inhibition and creativity. It supports the emerging notion that creativity draws on executive processes, and it provides a model of how inhibition and intelligence are involved in the creative idea generation. Inhibition primarily facilitates the fluent generation of ideation, while intelligence has positive effects on the quality of ideas. This work was supported by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF; P19842).