Divergent Association Task

DAT · Creativity Test

The Divergent Association Task (DAT) is a short test of verbal creativity and divergent thinking. You are asked to think of 10 words that are as different from each other in meaning as possible. Your score is based on the semantic distance between the words you choose. Higher scores generally reflect a greater ability to generate diverse and unrelated ideas.

The DAT measures only one aspect of creativity and should not be treated as a complete measure of creative ability.

The task has been validated on roughly 9,000 participants across 98 countries (Olson et al., 2021, PNAS). People who score higher on the task tend to:

• think of more novel and varied uses for common objects (Alternative Uses Task)
• find associations between related words more easily (e.g., giraffe and scarf; Bridge-the-Associative-Gap Task)
• solve more insight and analytical problems

Other research has found that people who score higher on the task also:

• notice more patterns in images (Bellemare-Pepin et al., 2022)
• generate more novel metaphors (Pont-Niclòs et al., 2024)
• score higher on other divergent and convergent thinking tasks (Ding et al., 2024)
• show more creative everyday behaviour (Ishiguro et al., 2025)
• benefit less from AI assistance when writing creative stories (Doshi et al., 2024) or generating ideas (Memmert, Mies, & Bittner, 2024)

Olson, J. A., Nahas, J., Chmoulevitch, D., Cropper, S. J., & Webb, M. E. (2021). Naming unrelated words predicts creativity. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 118(25), e2022340118. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2022340118