Wednesday, April 9, 2025

A Quick Measure Of Creativity

Tonight I took the Divergent Association Task, which measures verbal creativity and divergent thinking in four minutes or less.

The test was developed by Harvard University postdoctoral fellow Dr. Jay A. Olson. It involves listing 10 nouns that are as different from each other as possible. People who are more creative tend to think of words that have greater distances between them.

I tend to overthink things and couldn't believe that I could actually complete the test in less than four minutes, so I timed myself with a stopwatch. The elapsed time from starting to hitting the submit button was 2:15! Scoring was immediate, and based on a calculation of the semantic distance between the words. Most people score between 74 and 82. Mine was 78.

Five years ago today: Heat Ho Hums

20 comments:

  1. That was a weird little test. I got 84.62. I forgot to look to see how long it took me.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. It doesn't surprise me that you got an above-average score :-)

      Delete
  2. Good for you -Christine cmlk79.blogspot.com

    ReplyDelete
  3. I got 73.99 -Christine cmlk79.blogspot.com

    ReplyDelete
  4. Cool. Thanks for bringing attention to this. I scored 86.15.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Well done for your great score. God bless you always. (That's 10 words).

    ReplyDelete
  6. That sounds interesting, I don't like timed tests - they make me anxious. How silly is that?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I agree about the timed part, and don't think it's silly at all

      Delete
  7. Interesting....I'm scared to think of what my score might be!! Good for you, you did good.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Neat. I will definitely try it.

    ReplyDelete
  9. I scored 73.9, and I’m a little bothered by that… lol

    ReplyDelete