Are you creative? This question is difficult to answer objectively, but now researchers say that asking people to name random words and assessing how different they are could be a new way to measure this ability.
at Harvard University and his colleagues call this word puzzle the Divergent Association Task (DAT) because it measures divergent thinking, a component of creativity involving generating diverse solutions to open-ended problems.
Traditionally, researchers have used two main approaches to assess creativity. One is a questionnaire that quantifies someone鈥檚 achievements in a range of activities such as cooking, writing, painting and performance. The other is to set a task that directly assesses creative thinking capabilities, but these are often laborious and subjective, for example asking people to list novel uses of a common household object.
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To test DAT as an alternative, the team asked 8914 people from 98 countries to list 10 nouns with the goal of choosing words with meanings as different from each other as possible. The researchers used a machine-learning algorithm to calculate the average semantic distance between the words, based on how often they are used in similar contexts across billions of websites 鈥� for example, 鈥渃at鈥� and 鈥渄og鈥� are more closely related than 鈥渃at鈥� and 鈥渂ook鈥�.
The team also asked the participants to take traditional creativity measuring tests, and found that people who scored higher on the DAT also scored higher on these tests. The DAT was up to 12 times better at explaining the variation in scores between other creativity tests, suggesting it is a valid measure of creativity. Olson hopes the DAT will serve as a simpler and faster task to complete and score, allowing researchers to measure creativity in large numbers of people more easily.
at Pennsylvania State University agrees the DAT makes it a lot easier to measure creativity. 鈥淲hat is creative? And who gets to decide? People play an important role in evaluating creativity,鈥� he says. 鈥淗umans are pretty good judges of creativity, but they frequently disagree. Using machine-learning algorithms, like the one in this paper, allows researchers, teachers and industry types to quickly and reliably measure a cognitive skill important for creativity.鈥�
鈥淭his paper also raises vexing questions about whether creativity is unique to humans,鈥� says Beaty, suggesting that if algorithms can assess creativity, they could also be creative themselves 鈥� though he says this is unlikely to happen soon. 鈥淚n my view, we are still a long way off from relinquishing creativity to machines. In the meantime, it鈥檚 nice to have their help.鈥�
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