Theoretical Models of the Cognitive, Social, and Motivational Processes in Group Idea Generation

There are a broad range of models of group creativity that have focused on the cognitive, social, and motivational factors involved in group creativity. In this chapter, we will summarize the major models and their implications. The cognitive information processing model of Brown and Paulus (2002) was the first to deal with the complexity of the cognitive and social factors involved in group creativity. We present different variants of this model designed to deal with different aspects of the group creativity process and related experimental data and computational models. Subsequent models that focused on social influence processes and their integration with cognitive processes and some of the major models by other scholars are also presented.