Want to measure your “verbal creativity”? Got four minutes? You’re in luck.
The Divergent Association Task is a quick measure of verbal creativity and divergent thinking, the ability to generate diverse solutions to open-ended problems. The task involves thinking of 10 words that are as different from each other as possible. For example, the words cat and dog are similar, but the words cat and book are not. People who are more creative tend to generate words that have greater distances between them. These distances are inferred by examining how often the words are used together in similar contexts. Still, this task measures only a sliver of the complex process of creativity.
Yeah, I took the test:
Now, it should be noted that divergent thinking appears nowhere on the authoritative list of “100 Skills Every Man Should Know,” so I’m not sure any of this actually matters. But that’s not going to stop me from sending my score to CK and demanding a substantial raise.
