What makes a person more creative than another? Creativity is difficult to define and perhaps even trickier to measure, but, in 2021, scientists think they came up with a remarkably simple way of assessing at least one aspect of it.
It's a test that you can take in a couple of minutes, and it works best when you don't know much about how it works.The method, called the Divergent Association Task , asks people to name 10 nouns that are as far apart in meaning as possible."Cat" and"book" would be more divergent than"cat" and"dog", for example.
"Several theories posit that creative people are able to generate more divergent ideas," the researchers wrote in their."If this is correct, simply naming unrelated words and then measuring the semantic distance between them could serve as an objective measure of divergent thinking." The creativity scores from DAT correlated as well with the other scores as they did with one another, implying it's about as useful at assessing creativity as more complicated tools. What's more, the data show that its effectiveness seems to apply across different demographics, making it suitable for large-scale surveys.