It is not always better to have more ideas: Serial order and the trade-off between fluency and elaboration in divergent thinking tasks.

Divergent thinking tasks, which require participants to generate as many creative ideas as possible, elicit a serial order effect: ideas generated later tend to be more original. This suggests that generating more ideas is beneficial. However, past research regarding the serial order effect has largely overlooked the interplay between serial order and fluency: is it always true that more ideas means higher originality? In this study, 595 participants completed four divergent thinking tasks; originality and degree of elaboration were scored for each idea, and multilevel analyses were used to model both originality and elaboration as a function of serial order and total fluency. Later ideas were found to be more original, replicating the serial order effect, but there was an antagonistic effect of sequence length: the ideas of participants with lower fluency tended to be both more original and more elaborate, regardless of serial position. In sum, generating more ideas actually came with lower originality for each idea, despite a serial order effect. These results highlight the role of time and effort for elaboration of an original idea, and also lead to recommending alternate scoring methods in divergent thinking tasks, such as "best-two ideas" or "count of good ideas".