Scientists have created a quick and easy test for creativity that takes only four minutes, and you can give it a shot right now.
Why do some people seem to have greater imagination than others? In 2021, scientists believe they have developed a fairly straightforward technique for analyzing at least one component of creativity, despite the fact that it is both difficult to define and even more difficult to measure.
It’s a quick test, and the results are more accurate if you don’t know too much about the process.
Go try it out at the project website and then come back here to learn more about it.
The Divergent Association Task (DAT) is a procedure in which participants are asked to come up with a list of 10 nouns that are as dissimilar from one another in meaning as possible. If we compare “cat” and “book” to “cat” and “dog,” we see that they are more dissimilar.
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The program calculates the “semantic distance” between the nouns the user has come up with, or how much conceptual overlap there is between them. Analysis of 8,914 participant responses indicates that DAT is as excellent as, if not better than, other approaches for predicting a person’s level of creative thinking.
“Several theories claim that creative persons are able to create more varied thoughts,” the authors of the 2021 study noted. If this holds true, the semantic distance between seemingly unrelated words could be used as a quantitative indicator of how different people’s minds tend to work.
DAT competed with two other existing measures of creativity: the Alternative Applications Task (which asks participants to come up with as many uses as they can for an object) and the Bridge-the-Associative Gap Task (which asks participants to link two words with a third word).
Since the DAT scores for creativity correlated equally well with the other scores as they did with one another, this suggests that the DAT is just as useful in assessing creativity as more complex methods. In addition, the findings suggest that its efficacy holds across a variety of demographics, making it an excellent choice for large-scale surveys.
The new DAT exam has many advantages over previous versions, the most notable of which is its ease of use, its speed, and the fact that it does not require human scoring, which could introduce bias. The researchers emphasize, however, that it does not capture all facets of creative thinking.
According to psychologist Jay Olson of Harvard University, “our assignment measures only a slice of one sort of creativity,” in a statement from the year 2021.
These results, however, pave the way for more accurate evaluations of creativity across bigger and more diverse groups, which will aid in our overall comprehension of this essential human skill.
According to the scientist, Olson’s explanation to CNN, the DAT test probes candidates’ abilities to think outside the box and express their ideas in a grammatically correct manner. While this may not be indicative of their culinary creativity (which requires a different set of skills), it can be used to gauge their potential success in a number of problem-solving contexts.
In this experiment, we examine the hypothesis put out by psychologists that creative persons have a superior capacity to make mental connections between seemingly unrelated concepts. A more all-encompassing scale would have to factor in things like musical composition and originality.
The DAT method may simplify future research on creativity, but it still paints a complicated picture.
The scientist Olson said in an interview, “Creativity is important to human life.” The more we learn about the many facets of creativity, the more we can do to encourage it.
