Decision Making and Risk Taking: The Role of Creativity and Divergent Thinking

This book investigates the relationships between decision making (DM), risk taking (RT), and creativity, focusing on divergent thinking (DT). Since risk is an integral part of decision making and often this construct is related to creativity, it was chosen to investigate the relationship between these three variables. Most research focused on age-related changes in DM across the lifespan has found that decision-making skills tend to decline with age, but the results are controversial. In addition, some authors suggested that there are differences in decision-making styles and risk taking due to cultural background. Finding a relationship between how people make decisions and the role of creative thinking (specifically divergent thinking) in this process could open up the possibility of designing interventions to help people maintain autonomy and independence in their daily DM and risk management behaviors. The first two chapters of this dissertation explain the definition and theories of decision making, risk taking and creativity. In addition to a systematic review of the literature presented in chapter three, which investigates how the relationship between creativity and risk has been studied, three experimental studies. From the studies, it can be concluded that there is a relationship between creativity (divergent thinking) and the decision-making process. Specifically, divergent thinking skills are related to functional DM strategies and risk-taking profiles defined in the literature as more functional. This may suggest that strengthening divergent thinking may improve risk management and decision-making skills, especially metacognitive ones.