Podcast S7E159: Margaret Webb - Divergent Association Task

In today’s episode of the Idea to Value podcast, we speak with Dr Margaret Webb from the University of Melbourne. Together with her co-author Dr Simon Cropper and Jay Olson, they created and released the Divergent Association Task, a new method to estimate the divergent creative potential of someone based simply on them entering a few words into an online form.

This test has since exploded, with millions of people taking the test online, making it the largest research data source for creativity research currently active.

In this episode, we speak about the foundation of the research, what the results show us, and what other creativity research Dr Webb is working on.

Topics covered in this episode:

00:01:15 – Dr Webb’s start in research about Mindsight, seeing patterns where none exist
00:02:45 – What the Divergent Association Task is and how it started
00:05:03 – The challenges with the current manual methods of measuring creativity with divergent thinking tests, and how the results of the DAT correlate very strongly with other creativity tests
00:10:30 – The DAT works by analysing how closely certain sets of words co-occur across the internet, and why listing unrelated words is so incredibly hard for the human brain
00:13:30 – Dr Webb’s other research on creativity into Aha Moments, and types of personality like positive schizotipy

Links mentioned in this episode:

DAT test: https://www.datcreativity.com
Dr Webb’s faculty page: https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/individuals/dr-margaret-webb
Dr Webb on Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=A2H4TdkAAAAJ
Dr Webb on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/margaret-webb-22520565/

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Nick Skillicorn

Chief Editor, Founder & CEO at Improvides Innovation Consulting

Creativity & Innovation expert: I help individuals and companies build their creativity and innovation capabilities, so you can develop the next breakthrough idea which customers love. Chief Editor of Ideatovalue.com and Founder / CEO of Improvides Innovation Consulting. Coach / Speaker / Author / TEDx Speaker / Voted as one of the most influential innovation bloggers.