A tool shared online by Harvard University offers a measure of our creativity, or more precisely, our divergent thinking.
This online test focuses on verbal creativity, and takes less than four minutes to complete. So, are you ready to put your creativity to the test?
Harvard University psychologists have developed a test based on a single challenge to exercise your inventiveness.
The test, taken by more than 9,000 people from 98 countries, is available online here. The rule is simple, but it’s designed to stretch your mind: choose 10 words that are as different as possible from each other.
In less than four minutes, the time it takes to complete the questionnaire, the algorithm that calculates the results generates a score ranging from 0 to 200. Participants’ average score is 78.
Note that the test is only available in English. The specialists recommend that you take the test before learning more about the process it uses.
Measuring verbal creativity
The purpose of this test is to measure our divergent thinking via our verbal creativity. Indeed, the test’s divergent association task offers “a quick measure of verbal creativity and divergent thinking, the ability to generate diverse solutions to open-ended problems,” explain the researchers.
“People who are more creative tend to generate words that have greater distances between them.”
To measure the distance, or relatedness, between words, researchers rely on the Common Crawl, a corpus containing thousands of different words across billions of webpages. An algorithm calculates the distance between words. For example, while “dog” and “cat” are close together, “cat” and “book” are further apart.
“The total score is simply the average of these word distances: greater distances give a higher score.”
But what if you get a low score? Don’t panic, it doesn’t mean that you’re not creative.
“This task is a single measure of one aspect of verbal creativity and does not capture many types of real-world creative achievement,” explain the specialists.
“There are many different types and aspects of creativity that the task does not measure,” reassure the test’s creators.
“No single task can fully capture creativity, which is why in studies we often use several measures at once.” – AFP