What a creative problem-solving test can tell you

Most online creative problem-solving tests are self-reports. They ask how you approach problems, and they describe your habits and attitudes toward new ideas. They do not measure creative ability the way a performance test such as the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT) does, so read your score as a picture of your approach, not a grade.

Two ways to measure creativity

Researchers measure creativity in two broad ways.

Performance tests give you a task and score what you produce. The classic is a divergent thinking task: list as many uses as you can for a brick, or finish an incomplete drawing. J. P. Guilford put divergent thinking on the research agenda in his 1950 address to the American Psychological Association. E. Paul Torrance built the TTCT on that idea, first published in 1966. Trained raters score the answers on dimensions such as fluency (how many ideas), flexibility (how many kinds of idea), originality (how unusual) and elaboration (how developed).

Self-report tests ask you to rate statements about yourself on an agree-to-disagree scale. They are quick, cheap and easy to score. They measure how you see your own thinking.

What performance tests capture

Performance tests have a real track record. Torrance followed children who took his tests into adulthood, and later analyses found that their scores related to creative achievements decades later. Plucker (1999) reanalyzed Torrance's longitudinal data and found that divergent thinking scores contributed more than three times as much as IQ to explaining adult creative achievement.

They are not perfect. Scores depend on the task, the instructions and the rater. Being good at listing uses for a brick is not the same as writing a good novel or finding a new market. Still, a performance test measures something you did, which a self-report cannot.

The limits of self-report

Self-report creativity scales have two built-in problems.

People are not great judges of their own creativity. Reiter-Palmon, Robinson-Morral, Kaufman and Santo (2012) tested four measures of self-perceived creativity and found they lined up with other self-reports but not with objective measures of creative performance. Scales that ask what you have actually made or done hold up better: Silvia, Wigert, Reiter-Palmon and Kaufman (2012) found four such scales performed well.

Almost everyone wants to be creative. It is a flattering trait. When a statement describes a creative habit, the pull to agree is strong, whether or not you do it.

Put together, a high self-report score tells you that you see yourself as creative and describe creative habits. It does not prove you produce original work.

What a self-report is good for

Self-reports have a narrower but real use. They capture your approach, which is often what you need to know when planning how you work.

• Comfort with ambiguity. Do you enjoy a problem with no obvious answer, or does it make you uneasy?
• Option generation. Do you list many options before choosing, or go with the first one that works?
• Persistence. Do you keep turning a problem over, or move on once it is good enough?
• Appetite for novelty. Do you seek new methods, or refine proven ones?

These habits overlap with openness to experience, the Big Five trait most consistently linked to creativity. Feist (1998) pooled studies of personality and creativity and found openness was the most consistent personality trait linked to creativity in both science and art.

For a founder or a manager, the practical value is in pairing. If your self-report shows you generate options freely but rarely finish, you need a partner who closes. If it shows you prefer proven methods, bring someone in when the problem is new.

Creativity at work looks different from creativity on a test

Most creative work in a business is not a flash of inspiration. It is a slower loop: noticing a problem other people have stopped seeing, generating options, testing the cheap ones, and dropping the ideas that fail. Different people are strong at different stages of that loop.

Some people are strong at the front end. They spot problems and throw out ideas all day, and they get bored once the testing starts. Others are strong at the back end. They take a rough idea and make it work, and they would never have come up with it themselves. Both are creative contributions, and a team that has only one kind stalls.

A self-report is well suited to showing which end of that loop you prefer. That is useful to know, and it does not rank you against anyone.

How to use your score well

• Read it next to your Big Five openness. If both are high, the picture is consistent. If they disagree, look closer at why.
• Check it against behavior. When did you last solve a problem in a way nobody around you suggested? A concrete example is worth more than the score.
• Try a performance task. Set a timer for three minutes and list uses for a paperclip. Count them, then count how many different kinds of use you found. It is not the TTCT, but it grounds the self-report in something you did.
• Use it for planning, not labels. "I prefer refining to inventing" is useful. "I am not creative" is a conclusion the test cannot support.

Where it sits in our assessment

Creative problem-solving is one of eight tests in our assessment. It is a self-report, not the validated TTCT, so it sits in our for-interest evidence tier, with VARK learning preference and the Ayurvedic dosha quiz. Read it next to your Big Five openness score, which sits in the validated tier. For the model behind that, read the Big Five personality test, explained. For another for-interest test and the research behind it, see are learning styles real?, and for keeping any score in proportion, how to read your results without fooling yourself.

See how you solve problems in context

Your problem-solving approach matters most next to everything else about how you work. Our assessment runs all eight tests in one sitting, takes about an hour, and compiles them into one report. Founder OS is live today at $9 and shows where your approach helps you and who to hire around you.