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The Two Cultures Controversy:Getzels, Jackson and HudsonThe process of creative thinking is here conceived as involving two sequentialstages of processing information, divergent thinking followed by convergentthinking. The sequence may be repeated several times before a creative solutioh isachieved. The first, divergent stage, involves reformulating, elaborating and playingwith the problem as presented. This may include an effusion of imaginativevariations, akin to brainstorming, or the kind of free association favoured bypsychoanalysis to unblock thinking. Divergence, when unappreciated as a thoughtprocess, may take place subconsciously as the individual is trying to sleep or rest.Hence Jules Poincare reported 'that ideas rose in clouds' as he tried to sleep. Whenmorning came he knew his problem was solved.L No S0911er do creative persons sense that their divergent thoughts haveroauced su . . aterials to solve a articular roblem, than the rocess of

converging upon precisely the right answer will begin. Once t e rig t questiQ[1 hasbeen asked the answer may be a matter of logical, experimental, observational ormathematical skills. A good example of this is found in James D. Watson's book TheDouble Helix, where the process of casting about in search of the structure of thegenetic code turned into a race as the researchers realized the information fromwhich a correct deduction could be made was now available. It was a matter of whowould converge first upon the correct answer.

It says much about the reification of experimental psychology that convergenceand divergence have been 'discovered' as if they were separate objects floating in aminiature Newtonian universe of mind. Jacob Getzels and Philip Jackson conductedtheir research in the United States in the climate of the late fifties and early sixties.They were concerned that conventional tests of IQ and aptitude measured only thecapacity to converge on answers to problems formulated by authorities. Theyattempted to design instruments to assess the capacity to originate questions,issues, possibilities and ideas. They called this divergence. They were clearly on theside of their 'divergers' against the heavy bias of post-Sputnik America with itspolicy of mass producing a technical meritocracy. At about this time, in Britain,Michael Young was writing The Rise of the Meritocracy to protest against the samebias. Such writings were to prove prophetic, as 'the silent generation' becamenoisy and a decade of divergence broke upon universities throughout the West.

By the use of open-ended tests which elicited from subjects imaginative storiesto go with pictures, pictures to go with phrases, and multiple uses for such commonobjects as bricks and barrels, Jacob Getzels and Philip Jackson were able to establishthat divergent thinking was an ability in many students, ignored and sometimesactively discouraged by educational authorities. Although some studentscombined both capacities, the two ways of processing information were not highlycorrelated, and the statistical techniques used presupposed their independence.

If, for example, an intelligent, convergent child with little divergent skill wasshown a picture of a smiling man relaxing in an airliner, he or she would tell quite astereotyped story. The man is returning from a successful sales convention. Heplans to buy his wife a mink coat, and they will celebrate at the country club withmartinis, steak and ice-cream. A highly divergent child told a quite different story.The man is returning from Reno after divorcing his wife. They broke up because sheput on too much face-cream at night, which caused her head to slide across the. pillow and smack into his. Luckily he's just invented an anti-skid face-cream andsmiles at the prospect of making his fortune. While teachers applauded the firstchild's story, calling it positive and wholesome, they dismissed the second story astasteless and anti-social. Students could not be expected to remain quiescent, theresearchers warned, with their 'creativity' (asdivergence was called) stifled. In Great

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Divergence is the making in themind of many from one.Convergence is the making ofone from many. Mind isconceived as constantlybranching out (on left) beforenarrowing to a point of decision(right), and so on in cyclicalpattern. Creativity involves theentire cycle.

For example, creative personswill typically reformulate andelaborate the problem aspresented, teasing out alternatestrands and possibilities togenerate an 'excess' of materials,symbolized by 'a branching tree'.At the mid-point betweendivergence and convergence,they intuit that the necessaryingredients of a new synthesis arenow present. The diagramillustrates this by showing fivestrands originating from thebranchings in the tree. It is these(and there could be fewer ormore) which are used in acalculated convergence upon asolution to the problem.

Unfortunately our society isdivided by crude stereotypes ofthe Two Cultures: the humanitiesare idealized as divergent, thesciences as convergent. Theprofusions of literati and artistictemperaments in general aredubbed 'creative', but this is anaffliction of amateurs whichconfuses the twigs and branchesof clever talk with majorintellectual and scientificsyntheses. The present gapbetween the Two Cultures robsboth halves of significance.

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Britain Liam Hudson employed the open-ended tests of Getzels and Jackson in amajor study of English schoolboys. He found that high divergers were mostlyspecialized in the arts and humanities while convergers were in the sciences.

What the open-ended tests versus the IQ tests were actually measuring was thegap between The Two Cultures to which C. P.Snow had drawn attention. Studentsscoring well on tests of divergence usually specialized in English, history, arts ormodern languages. They tended to score significantly lower, if not low, on IQ tests,on which they were careless and inaccurate, but with greater strength on the verbalparts. Their general knowledge was high. Their interests were cultural, literary anddramatic. Students scoring well on tests of convergence usually specialized inmathematics, physics and chemistry, but also in classics where considerablediscipline was required. They tended to score high in IQ tests, in which they wereaccurate and fast, but with weakness in the verbal sections (except the classicists).Their general knowledge was relatively low. Their interests were practical,mechanical and technical with some emphasis on the outdoors.

The personality characteristics of the two groups followed from their dominantstyles of thinking. Convergers were more deferential to authority, less trusting oftheir feelings and impulses, less independent in their personal opinions, rather lowin self-esteem and more mannered and self-controlled. All such traits are consistentwith finding pre-existent technical solutions to problems set by authorities. Incontrast, the divergers were more rebellious towards authorities, more trusting oftheir feelings, more independent of attitude, higher in self-esteem and morespontaneous in their self-expression. All such traits are consistent with the task ofdefining or redefining issues and problems, often in competition with authorities.We may note here that it was from the divergent disciplines, history, philosophy,languages, English and the softer social sciences that the impetus for studentradicalism came in the United States, Britain, France and Germany. The sixties sawsomething akin to a 'divergers revolt' fed by affluence, modernism and masscommunications, of which the philosophies of progressive education were oneexpression and the counter-culture another.

Hudson did not, in these later years, replicate the finding that divergers were anunderprivileged minority. Indeed the higher status schools tended to favour thediverger 'born to rule' by defining moral and other issues,while the more middle-class schools tended to produce a converger class. Hudson also disagreed with themoral tenor of the American research, specifically that divergence was somehownearer to growth, humanism and creativity. There was much wit and cleverness inthe responses of divergers to open-ended tests. But scintillating conversation hardlyadds up to creativity, save in a limited form. The high divergers were no more 'wholepersons' than the high convergers, even if they were superficially more attractive aspersonalities. Indeed the closer Hudson looked at the divergent-convergentdistinction the more superficial it began to appear. These disparate skills were closerto a public role than a private reality. Many convergers had very large vocabulariesand when asked to imitate an arts graduate or instructor did so with torrents ofscatalogical associations. Many divergers were quite capable of careful anddetailed work, but were impatient of the time and effort required, especially whenthey could articulate so easily. Hudson also found that while many individualconvergers could accept the 'science stereotype' when applied to their colleaguesthey would resist it as applying to themselves, and the same was true of divergers.Each claimed to be a secret converger or diverger.

An examination of the neurotic defences and personal limitations of those ineach major category revealed that both divergers and convergers tended to over-

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'The Cult of the Fact'Liam Hudson

'Lettered gentility ... is achievedat King's [College, CambridgeUniversity], at the cost of a certaintheatricality. It is hard, at times, torecall that the pictures are real,the port is real, that the candles inthe candlesticks are real candlesand not electric lights pretendingto be candles; above all, that thepeople are creatures of flesh andbone. In my two years there as aFellow, I found that a sense ofillusion was rapidly becoming mystandard experiental mode. Theair of charade was all-pervasive:the sons of suburbia, like myself,parodied the lettered gentry; andthe lettered gentry parodied thesons of suburbia parodyingthemselves .... Brilliant youngscientists who knew nothing oflife or art gave ham performancesof the role, "brilliant youngscientist who knows nothing oflife or art". Vain art historians gavevirtuoso performances of "arthistorians being distastefully vain".And the institution itself roserepeatedly to heights of dramaticabsurdity.'

MAP REFERENCESDivergence-convergence;see:differentiation-integration, 11,13, 22, 59-60;individualism-cooperation,11-13,16,43,51,60;loyalty-dissent, 16, 43, 58-60;student revolt, 42-4.

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use their strong suits to escape being found out. Convergers learned to evade manyissues by placing them 'outside science'. If a problem could not be formulatedprecisely enough to permit a technical solution it was no problem! They tended totake refuge from people in things. Divergers would often side-step unpleasant facts,by using their capacities for conceptual leaping to reach safer ground. Byconcentrating on problem presentation, the solution could be indefinitelypostponed. They tended to take refuge from things in people.

In the last two decades the divergent-convergent distinction has become acrude and quarrelsome political stereotype used to symbolize contrasting forms ofmoral virtue. The Vietnam War, espoused by.the Best and the Brightest, theveritable whizz-kids of scientism, showed us all the murderous consequences of'crack-pot realism', the totally unimaginative and inhuman advance of technologi-cal 'convergence'. The electronic battlefields, the computerized body-counts, theprofessional detachment of bombardiers devastated South-east Asia as menlocked their brains into different mental compartments from their emotions.

Somuch for the convergers, but what of the protest by divergers, the hawkers ofconscience on street corners? Students claiming to personify 'compassion','humanism', 'peace' and 'progess' made of their university buildings an open-endedtest. That the students had something real to protest about is undeniable, theproblem is rather, that the demonstrators could only demonstrate. Highly skilled inthe articulation of crucial issues,they were mostly without the interest, aptitude orpatience to solve the problems they defined. Theirs was to wonder why, the dOing)and the dying were for convergersl Those who rallied at Woodstock, postured inHaight-Ashbury and shouted in the streets of Paris 'I am a Marxist of the Crouchovariety!' made it clear that self-expression had become an end in itself, Protest wasan art form. You diverged, to diverge, to diverge. The problem was essentially thesplit between the two modes. Powerless conscience lashed verbally atconscienceless power, doves and hawks furiously reproaching each other'sincompleteness. Other consequences of splitting divergence from convergenceare economic. It is not, then, surprising, that a decade of protest seems to haveyielded to one of threatened decline. 'What is a machine tool?' C. P.Snow asked ata literary cocktail party, 'and they looked shifty'. He was willing to bet that not 10%of those receiving first-class honours in humanities from Cambridge could say howa button was manufactured. For the pure arts and sciences are increasinglyabstract; you diverge or converge in a 'free realm' above the industrial plasma ofthe country. Those professions which fall between these abstract purities:engineering, business management and the social sciences are increasinglydespised as 'mongrel disciplines', which must carryon commerce (literally)between the two citadels of culture. This is mostly an Anglo-American malaise,although the French too have intellectuals largely ignorant of science. Cermans andScandinavians tend to contrast Wissenshaft ('knowledgemanship') with Technic (themaking and running of things) and they treat the latter with great respect.

That genuine creativity, as opposed to clever repartee, needs divergence andconvergence can be inferred from the research of Calvin Taylor. Creativity, heshowed, was a reconciliation of 'opposite' endowments, as broadly diffusedattention was brought to a sharp synthesis, remote things were associated, richnesswas pruned to parsimony, risking led to gaining, flexibility was joined to masteryand an insatiability for intellectual ordering rose phoenix-like from seeming chaos.Neither whole persons nor whole cultures can afford the present moral charades,which sever the totality of human endowments into posturing parts, cardboardcut-outs for instant recognition on television.

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