What makes one person more creative than another? Creativity is difficult to define, perhaps even more difficult to measure; But scientists believe they have found an extremely simple way to measure at least one aspect of creativity.

This is a test you can take yourself in a few minutes and works best when you don’t know much about how the analysis works. Go to the project page to try it out, then go back and read all about it. A new method called the Divergent Association Task (DAT) asks people to name 10 nouns that have as many meanings as possible. For example, “Cat” and “book” will be different than “cat” and “dog”.

A computer algorithm then measures this semantic distance (how close two words are to each other) between the names the person finds. According to an analysis of the responses of 8,914 volunteers, DAT is at least as good as existing methods for predicting human creativity.

“Many theories suggest that creative people are able to generate a greater variety of ideas,” the researchers wrote in their paper published in June 2021. he wrote. “If this is true, then naming unrelated words and then measuring the semantic distance between them could serve as an objective indicator of divergent thinking.”

The Alternative Use task (in which you think of many ways an object can be used) and the Closing the Relational Gap task (in which you try to match two words with a third word) are two existing measures of creativity using the DAT. resist.

Creativity scores from the DAT were correlated both with other scores and with each other; this suggests that it is as useful as more complex tools in assessing creativity. Most importantly, evidence shows that its effectiveness holds across different demographic groups, making it suitable for large-scale studies.

The main advantages of the new DAT test are that it is simple and fast to administer and does not require any human scoring, which could introduce bias. However, the researchers want to point out that they do not measure every aspect of creativity.

“Our task measures only a portion of creativity,” said Harvard University psychologist Jay Olson.

“But these findings allow us to assess creativity with less bias in larger, more diverse samples, which will ultimately help us better understand this basic human capacity.”

As Olson told CNN, DAT examines divergent thinking and verbal creativity; It doesn’t tell you how creative you can be in cooking, for example in the kitchen using different skills, but it can predict certain problems. solving abilities.

Psychologists believe that more creative people are able to connect distant elements more easily in their minds, and this is tested here. A more comprehensive measure would also take into account achievements in creative fields such as music production and invention. It’s a complex picture, but the DAT approach may make future research on creativity a little easier.

“Creativity is the foundation of human life,” Olson said. “The more we understand its complexity, the better we can cultivate creativity in all its forms.” The study was published on: PNAS.