What makes one person more creative than another? Creativity is difficult to define, but perhaps even more difficult to measure. But scientists think they've found a very simple way to evaluate at least one aspect of it.
A new association task has been invented
The new test can be completed in a few minutes and works best when we don't know much about the analysis. It's worth considering Project page and its experience.
The new method, called the Divergent Association Task (DAT), asks people to name ten nouns with meanings as far apart as possible. For example, the words “cat” and “book” are different from the words “cat” and “dog.”A computer algorithm then measures this semantic distance—that is, how closely the two words relate to each other—between the nouns the person came up with. Based on an analysis of responses from 8,914 volunteers, the DAT proved to be at least as good as existing methods for predicting creativity.
Many theories claim that creative people can generate more diverse ideas The researchers said Science Alert Online scientific portal. If this is true, then simply naming unrelated words and then measuring the semantic distance between them could serve as an objective measure of divergent thinking.
the With people According to a study published in a scientific journal, the new method could compete with two existing measures of creativity, the alternative use tasks (where you have to invent as many ways as possible to use an object) and the associative bridge task (where you have to connect two words to a third).
Creativity scores on the contrastive association task were also correlated with the other scores and were also correlated with each other.
Experts say this suggests they are as useful for assessing creativity as more complex tools. What's more: Data suggests that its effectiveness applies to different demographic groups, making it suitable for large-scale surveys.
Creativity can be measured in many ways
The main advantage of the new DAT is that it is easy and quick to complete and does not require any human assessment, which may lead to bias. However, researchers stress that the test does not measure all aspects of creativity.
Our task measures only a small portion of one type of creativity Psychologist Jay Olson of Harvard University noted. “But these results allow us to assess creativity in larger, more diverse samples, but with less bias, which will ultimately help us better understand this basic human ability.”
According to Olson, the DAT tests divergent thinking and verbal creativity, but it won't show how creative we are in the kitchen, for example, while cooking, which uses a different set of skills. However, it does predict proficiency in some problem-solving tasks.Psychologists believe that more creative people have an easier time connecting distant items in their heads, and that's what they're testing here. A more comprehensive measurement should take into account achievements in creative fields, such as authorship and inventions.
It's a complex picture, but the DAT approach may make future studies of creativity a little easier.
