How about testing YOUR own creativity? In marketing, creative thinking may go a long way. For that reason, we have written about brainstorming techniques. As as well as breaking out of your comfort zone. Take the brief quiz. We did! And we came out as not being very creative. 🙁
Take the Four-Minute Quiz: Testing YOUR Own Creativity
Testing YOUR Own Creativity
To begin, the authors of the test recommend completing the quiz. Then, reading more about it.
The Divergent Association Task (DAT) measures verbal creativity in under 4 minutes. It involves thinking of unrelated ideas. People who are more creative tend to think of ideas with greater “distances” between them. We recommend that you take the test before you learn more about it. You can also read our open-access manuscript in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences or read a CNN article on the task.
Click the image to take the test.
About the Divergent Association Task Measure
According to the study authors — Professors, , , C, and
Many traditional measures of creativity require time-intensive and subjective scoring procedures. Their scores are relative to the specific sample, which makes multicultural or international assessments difficult. Our results show that a shorter and simpler task with automatic and objective scoring may be at least as reliable at measuring verbal creativity. This finding enables assessments across larger and more diverse samples with less bias.
Several theories posit that creative people will generate more divergent ideas. 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. To test this hypothesis, we asked 8,914 participants to name 10 words as different from each other as possible. Then, a computational algorithm estimated the average semantic distance between the words. Related words (e.g., cat and dog) have shorter distances than unrelated ones (e.g., cat and thimble). We predicted that people producing greater semantic distances would also score higher on traditional creativity measures.
In Study 1, we found moderate to strong correlations between semantic distance and two widely used creativity measures (the Alternative Uses Task and the Bridge-the-Associative-Gap Task). In Study 2, with participants from 98 countries, semantic distances varied only slightly by basic demographic variables. There was also a positive correlation between semantic distance and performance on a range of problems known to predict creativity. Overall, semantic distance correlated at least as strongly with established creativity measures as those measures did with each other. Naming unrelated words in what we call the Divergent Association Task can thus serve as a brief, reliable, and objective measure of divergent thinking.