Ever wondered how creative you are? An international cohort of researchers from McGill University, Harvard University, and the University of Melbourne can help you find out. They have come up with a test called The Divergent Association Task. It measures verbal creativity, and you can complete the quiz in under 4 minutes. Read on to find out how.
Here’s the backstory
This quiz is pretty simple and involves thinking of unrelated ideas. According to the test creators, more creative people tend to think of ideas with greater distances between them. Here are the rules to taking the quiz:
Use only single words.Only nouns (e.g., things, objects, concepts).No proper nouns (e.g., no specific people or places).No specialised vocabulary (e.g., no technical terms).Think of the words on your own (e.g., do not just look at objects in your surroundings).
It’s recommended that you take the test before learning too much about it to get a more accurate reading. You can take the test here and then continue for more details.
About the task
The test is a quick measure of creativity. It involves thinking of 10 words that are as different from each other as possible. The words elephant and tiger are similar, but the words elephant and suspicious are not. People that are on the more creative side can list words that have greater distances between them. Distances are computed using a database describing how often the words are used together in similar contexts. Divergent thinking is described as a thought process or method that can generate creative ideas by exploring many possible solutions. This type of thinking gives one the ability to generate diverse solutions to open-ended problems.
Getting the results
This task asks participants to name 10 unrelated words, but researchers only required a subset of these to provide a buffer for mistakes. This means if participants misspell a word or choose some that were absent from the model, it could still compute an overall score. It was found that most participants ended up providing at least seven valid words. So that number was used in all the samples to compute the DAT score. It was also found during the study that most participants finished the DAT within a minute and a half. According to researchers, people who come up with words with great semantic distance might be more creative. For example, if your words were “pink,” “red,” and “white,” you might score lower on the DAT. If, instead, you used the words “invention,” “brilliance,” and “fascination,” you might be considered more creative and will score higher on the DAT.
What happens if you get a low score?
According to the FAQ on the test site, a low score means you received a low score on this measure. There are many different types and aspects of creativity that the task does not measure. It is also noted that no task is perfectly reliable in assessing creativity.
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