This super simple test can measure your creativity

A new exercise developed and tested by an international team of scientists can accurately measure an individual’s creativity in as little as four minutes. Researchers from Harvard University, McGill University, and the University of Melbourne collaborated on this project.

Creativity, unlike IQ, is an exceedingly difficult quality to measure. While intelligence has been gauged for centuries via exams and academic assignments, creativity is a much more abstract concept. Indeed, creativity is very much the yin to textbook intelligence’s yang, but both halves are equally important to what makes each of us human.

“Creativity is fundamental to human life,” explains the new test’s creator Jay Olson, a recent PhD graduate from McGill University’s Department of Psychiatry and current Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University. “The more we understand its complexity, the better we can foster creativity in all its forms.”

Formally called the Divergent Association Task (DAT), the test is refreshingly simple. The exercise entails thinking of 10 words that are completely unrelated to one another within a four minute time frame. That’s all. From there, a computer algorithm is used to calculate the semantic distance between each word, which is just a scientific term for connection (or lack thereof) between two words. For example, the words “television” and “remote” have a very short semantic distance, while “book” and “car” have a much farther semantic distance to cover.

Now, there are a few rules to keep in mind as well. Words produced while completing the test should all be single word nouns thought of completely on one’s own. So, if someone were to glance at a nearby bottle of water and write down “bottle” as one of their words, that would be a violation of the test’s rules. Additionally, no proper nouns (specific places, things, etc) or specialized vocabulary (technical terms) should be used either.

Olson says he was inspired to create this test by an old childhood game he remembered that involved naming a series of unrelated words. After reflecting on it a bit, he speculated if a similarly set up task could easily and quickly gauge an individual’s divergent thinking skills. Divergent thinking is defined as the ability to come up with diverse solutions to open-ended problems. Importantly, it is also closely associated with many creative outlets like writing and drawing.

To test the effectiveness of DAT, Olson and his co-authors performed two experiments. The first experiment showed “moderate to strong correlations” between DAT and two other more established, albeit more time-consuming and complicated, creativity tests (the Alternative Uses Task and the Bridge-the-Associative Gap Task). In other words, subjects who did well on the DAT test also scored quite high on the other two creativity assessments. 

The second experiment was larger, featuring a total of 8,500 people hailing from 98 different countries. Notably, semantic distances among participants in this experiment fluctuated only slightly. This suggests that DAT, unlike earlier creativity tests, can be used to measure creativity across nations and cultures.

The second experiment also showed a positive correlation pertaining to the greater semantic distance between submitted words and solving a number of problems known to predict creativity. All in all, study authors state the second phase of the study shows that the DAT task and semantic distance correlate just as strongly with creativity as any other established creativity exam.

In conclusion, all of the research and data collected points to the DAT test as an objectively accurate means of quickly measuring divergent thinking skills and verbal creativity.

“Our task measures only a sliver of one type of creativity,” Olson comments. “But these findings enable creativity assessments across larger and more diverse samples with less bias, which will ultimately help us better understand this fundamental human ability.”

The full study can be found here, published in the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. If you’re interested in trying the DAT test, you can take the assessment here.