28 July 2023 , 06:39
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Some of us are more creative than others, but it's definitely an attractive skill to have - especially in work situations. It's also a skill that's hard to define, and you might think, equally difficult to measure.
But helpfully, scientists have put together a surprisingly simple test that helps determine how creative we are - and it only takes a few minutes to complete.
The creativity quiz was published in the journal PNAS in June 2023 by Jay Olson, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University.
The test, which may sound simple, involves thinking of 10 nouns that are unrelated to each other and as far apart in meaning as possible - and the score you get determines how creative you are.
It's recommended to take the test before learning to much about it - so why not try it out now? You can find the Divergent Association Task here, and it will take between two to four minutes.
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According to the test website, people who are "more creative tend to think of words with greater 'distances' between them". For example, the words cat and dog are similar - so a creative person would be able to think of words that have greater distances between them, such as cat and book.
Jay said: "The task can be objectively and automatically scored, meaning that it does not need people to subjectively score the responses. It is also faster to complete than most other creativity measures; many people complete it in under two minutes."
It's worth mentioning that this test only focuses on one part of creativity called divergent thinking - which we use to create diverse solutions to open-ended problems. It doesn't look at convergent thinking, which involves solving problems considering other various constraints.
Jay said: "The test measures divergent thinking and verbal creativity, which are important but limited aspects of overall creativity. Our task won't predict your creative culinary skills, but it will predict performance on various types of problem-solving, which suggests it is doing more than simply measuring vocabulary.
"Still, we'll need future research to assess how our task relates to other verbal abilities or intelligence more broadly."
Even though the test is simple to complete, the scoring is complex, with the system computing an average "semantic distance", also known as relatedness, to the words you listed.
The researchers validated the task on around 9,000 participants from 98 countries, and found that those who score highly tend to "think of novel and more varies uses for common objects, find associations between related words, and solve more insight and analytical problems".