Developing college students’ creative problem-solving ability: The roles of empathy, prosocial motivation, and cultural differences

Nurturing students’ creative problem-solving (CPS) skills is key to helping them develop important abilities such as critical thinking and adaptability in order to effectively navigate current society. The study aims to identify college students’ capacity to understand empathy, prosocial motivation, and cultural differences, and how these traits relate to CPS. The study recruited 309 college students from three American universities to participate in an online survey. The results confirmed that prosocial motivation was significantly predicted in all dimensions of CPS: fluency, flexibility, originality, and usefulness. Among the four CPS dimensions, usefulness was negatively related to cognitive empathy and positively predicted collectivism. Cognitive empathy was interrelated with both individualism and collectivism, whereas affective empathy was associated with collectivism. Additionally, students with multicultural experiences tended to consider others more often and to generate more useful solutions. These findings help educators better understand the important roles played by empathy, prosocial motivation, and cultural differences in influencing CPS in higher education.