Naming unrelated words reliably predicts creativity

Several theories posit that creative people are able to generate more divergent ideas. If this is correct, the simple act of naming unrelated words and then measuring the semantic distance between them could serve as an objective measure of creativity. To test this hypothesis, we asked 8,892 participants to name 10 words that are as different from each other as possible. A computational algorithm then estimated the average semantic distance between the words; related words (e.g., “cat” and “dog”) have shorter distances than unrelated ones (e.g., “cat” and “thimble”). We predicted that people producing greater semantic distances would also score higher on traditional creativity measures. In Study 1, there were moderate to strong correlations between semantic distance and two other creativity measures (the Alternative Uses Task and the Bridge-the-Associative-Gap Task). In Study 2, with participants from 98 countries, semantic distances varied only slightly by demographic variables which suggests that the measure can be used without modification across diverse populations. There was also a positive correlation between semantic distance and performance on problem solving tasks known to predict creativity. Overall, semantic distance correlated at least as strongly with established creativity measures as those measures did with each other. Naming unrelated words in what we call the Divergent Association Task can thus serve as a brief, reliable, and objective measure of creativity.