mxx1's avatar

Divergency

I have a hypothesis that we are all born convergent thinkers and that some of us train ourselves to be divergent.

This argues against the conventional developmental psychology view, which generally suggests the opposite – that children start with more divergent, imaginative thinking and are gradually shaped toward convergent thinking through education and socialization.

My view is that humans come out of the womb as tightly convergent, pattern-matching little machines. They try to make sense of the world, not reinvent it. The job is survival, not originality. I suspect that a small handful of people see a benefit in divergency and work on it subconsciously while they are kids, and into their 20s. By the time they are 30, while not impossible, convergency becomes exponentially harder to shift.

This creates a self-reinforcing loop: a kid notices that divergent thinking pays off somehow (gets them attention, solves problems others miss, makes connections that feel rewarding), so they keep exercising it. Like strengthening a muscle during a developmental window. Those who don’t see that benefit stick with the convergent default.

The neural pathways are deeply entrenched by the age of 30, and there’s less novelty and exploration in most people’s lives. The real advantage goes to people who accidentally or intuitively figured out divergent thinking was valuable early enough that they got thousands of hours of practice during the high-plasticity years. By 30, it’s so automatic they don’t even realize they’re doing it differently.

This would explain why divergent thinking seems almost like a personality trait in adults – it’s not innate, it’s just so thoroughly trained during the formative window that it looks innate.

This framing also explains why:

  1. “Be more creative” workshops for mid-career professionals and books on lateral thinking never work. You can’t brute-force a psychology that you never reinforced in the first place.
  2. You can watch young kids default to convergence in real time – give a five-year-old a puzzle with a single obvious pattern and they’ll hammer that pattern endlessly even when it stops working.
  3. Divergent thinking requires inhibitory control, not freedom. To generate genuinely alternative paths, you have to suppress the dominant one. That skill isn’t strong in young children and is only observably expressed in adults.
  4. Divergent adults cluster in unusual childhood environments; odd family structures, multiple cultural domains, boredom, excessive reading, niche obsessions, or being left alone a lot. In other words, environments that force or reward internal exploration and divergency. None of that is “innate ability”.
  5. Convergent thinking is the evolutionary baseline. Species survive by copying what worked last time and following the heuristics. Humans are just fancy primates, after all.
  6. Divergence is strongly correlated with domain depth. People with deep domain mastery generate better divergent ideas, not because mastery magically unlocks creativity, but because they’ve rehearsed the structure of the space so thoroughly that they can recognise when a weird move might be meaningful. That kind of fluency only comes from practice. Again: training, not temperament.
  7. Cultural myths mask the mechanism. We like the “born creative” myth because it absolves everyone else from having to try. It also makes the creative minority seem mystical. But the myth only exists because the training that caused the skill is buried in early development where nobody wants to notice it happening.