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Beware self-rater bias. This is a bias in which we overrate ourselves. Ask people if they are creative and the majority will rate themselves as above average. The same goes if you ask people if they are good drivers or good in bed!
Fact is, if you want to measure something, you will want to have an objective way to measure this. A trait such as creativity seems like it is subjective — there are tests to measure creativity but they take time and few people do them. Similarly businesses often say they are looking for creative thinkers but rarely assess this. So wouldn’t it be great if we could find out in a few minutes or seconds if someone really is creative?
This is precisely what a bunch of researchers around Jay Olson from McGill University, Harvard University, and the University of Melbourne, did.
And the test is surprisingly simple.
Simply list ten words that are as different as possible from each other. This they named the Divergent Association Task (DAT) and the results shows it matches to much…
