A Method for Measuring Bicollinear Thinking Ability Focusing on Psychological Differentiation between Concepts
Sosuke Shiga (AY 2014)
Bicontinuous reasoning is the ability to find a connection between two seemingly unrelated things (Koestler, 1964). For example, Olfa's folding blade cutter was created by synthesizing the seemingly unrelated concepts of "broken glass" and "chocolate bars" (Okada, 2005). Thus, there are many situations in modern society where entrepreneurs, researchers, and others are required to solve innovative problems using bicollinear thinking skills. A previous study (Jabri, 1988) (Ko et al., 2002) that retrospectively measured bicollinear thinking ability was based on self-assessment of the ability. In addition, when bicollinear thinking ability was considered as a part of creativity, there were tests that measured creativity focusing on associations (Kume, 1988), but they were not measures that focused on bicollinear thinking ability. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to create an objective measure of bicollinear thinking ability and use it as an index for evaluating a person's ability to think and solve problems.
In this study, a scale to measure bicollinear thinking ability was developed based on an article that investigated the relationship between concepts (Shoben et al., 1997). The procedure for creating the scale is as follows. First, about 1,400 words of basic vocabulary learned in elementary school were applied to the Japanese WordNet, and the distance between all word pairs in the Japanese WordNet was measured. Then, about 100 questions were extracted from pairs of words that were far apart to pairs of words that were close to each other. Finally, we attempted to measure bilinear thinking ability by asking the experimental participants to psychologically discriminate among these word pairs from the three aspects of "nature," "context," and "causality," based on previous research. The reliability of the scale created in this study was verified by examining its correlation with the scores of the Bicollinear Thinking Ability Questionnaire created by Jabri. The participants in this experiment were a total of 30 students from the School of Knowledge Information and Library Science and the School of Social Engineering at the University of Tsukuba.
The results of the experiment tended to support the hypothesis that "there is a correlation between the total score of psychological differentiation of the created scale and the score of Jabri's Bicollinear Thinking Ability Questionnaire. The results also tended to support the hypothesis that "there is a correlation between the total scores of the properties of the created scales and the scores of Jabri's Bicollinear Thinking Ability Questionnaire. The data also supported the hypothesis that "there is a difference between the mean scores of the traits of the self-rated high and low Jabri's Bicollinear Thinking Ability groups.
In this study, we proposed a new scale to measure bicollinear thinking ability that does not depend on self-rating, can be used by the general public, and is highly reusable. The results also suggest that nature is the most useful factor in the high and low bicollinear thinking ability groups. In the future, we would like to increase the validity of the scale by surveying researchers and others who are expected to have high bicollinear thinking ability. In addition to psychological differentiation, various other factors are thought to be involved in bicollinear thinking ability, and it is necessary to clarify which factors are involved and how they are involved.
(Translated by DeepL)