Someone is more creative than someone else. Scientists think they came up with a simple way of assessing creativity in the year 2021.
It's a test that you can take in a few minutes, and it works best if you don't know a lot about how it works.
Go to the project page and give it a try, then come back and read all about it.
People are asked to name 10 different nouns that are far apart in meaning. The difference between "cat" and "book" would be more pronounced.
The semantic distance is how much of the two words have to do with each other. The current methods for predicting creativity in a person are not as good as the current methods for predicting DAT.
According to several theories, creative people are able to generate more different ideas. If this is true, naming unrelated words and measuring the semantic distance between them could be used as an objective measure of diverging thinking.
The Alternative Uses Task and the Bridge-the-Associative Gap Task are two measures of creativity that DAT went up against.
The creativity scores from DAT correlated with the other scores as well as they did with one another, suggesting it's about as useful at assessing creativity as more complex tools. The data shows that it is suitable for large-scale surveys because of its effectiveness.
The new DAT test is simple and quick to complete, and doesn't require any kind of human assessment, which could lead to bias. The researchers want to point out that it doesn't measure all aspects of creativity.
A psychologist from Harvard University said in a statement that the task only measures a small portion of creativity.
"But these findings enable creativity assessments across larger and more diverse samples, which will help us better understand this fundamental human ability."
According to CNN, the test doesn't show how creative you might be when cooking in the kitchen, but it can tell you if you're good at certain problems.
According to psychologists, more creative people are able to link remote elements together in their minds more easily. There are achievements in creative fields such as music composition and inventions that need to be taken into account.
It's not easy to carry out future studies into creativity, but the DAT approach might make it simpler.
It is fundamental to human life that creativity is important. We can foster creativity in all its forms if we understand its complexity.
The research was published in a journal.
The first version of this article was published in July of 2011.
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