Quick Word Test Newly Designed By Scientists Shows How Creative You Are
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Assessing creativity isn’t easy to do without bias, but a team of researchers might have just designed a test that determines this “objectively and automatically.”
The best part? As opposed to existing versions, this new evaluation only takes a couple of minutes. “Many people complete it in under two minutes,” Jay Olson, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University who developed the test, shared in a statement obtained by CNN.
The creativity test, officially coined the ‘Divergent Association Task’, involves participants coming up with 10 nouns that are as unassociated with each other as possible—and that’s pretty much it.
How it works is that the average “semantic distance” (AKA relatedness) of those words is calculated using the quiz’s algorithm to gauge creativity. For instance, the nouns “cat” and “dog” are shorter in distance than “cat” and “thimble.” The further the “distance” between the 10 words, the more creative a person is said to be.
This mainly examines a person’s divergent thinking, or their ability to tackle open-ended problems with a variety of solutions. As the test is so straightforward, Olson said answers can be “objectively and automatically scored,” leaving little room for subjective assessment.
To determine semantic distance, Olson and team relied on a database drawing relatedness between thousands of words and their applications across billions of webpages.
Nearly 9,000 participants between the ages seven to 70 took part in the experiment, and their results correlated with performance on two other creativity measures: the ‘Alternative Uses Task’, which challenges participants to find unusual uses for a common object, like a shoe; and the ‘Bridge-the-Associative-Gap Task’, which puts two words together and gets participants to find a link between them.
However, the test doesn’t reveal how creative a person could be on a wider scale, which would include convergent thinking, the ability to solve problems under limitations.
“The test measures divergent thinking and verbal creativity, which are important but limited aspects of overall creativity,” Olson noted. Nevertheless, it can “predict performance on various types of problem-solving, which suggests it is doing more than simply measuring vocabulary,” he elaborated.
Of the 8,914 participants involved in the study, those in their 20s seemed to perform better at divergent thinking than other age groups. In addition, women tended to have “slightly higher” scores, although the differences in demographics were marginal. The study’s findings were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS) scientific journal in June.
“Age, gender and location are not limiting factors: Almost anyone can be creative,” Olson concluded.
To take the assessment, head here.
[via CNN, cover image via Shutterstock]
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