What Kind of Creative Are You?
Creativity is not one thing, and most people who say they have none are looking in the wrong place
Ask people whether they are creative and most say no, because they are picturing painting or music. When researchers asked instead about specific kinds of creativity, they found five separate domains that barely correlate - someone can be inventive in a workshop and hopeless with a brush, or brilliant at solving an argument and unable to write a line. The person who says they are not creative is usually strong in a domain that nobody ever called creative.
Before you start There are no right answers. Pick what is usually true for you, not what sounds best.
Fifteen questions across five domains. Answer about what you actually do well, not about what you admire.
What it measures
The five domains from the original scale: everyday (people and problems), scholarly (ideas and argument), performance (writing, music, the stage), scientific (mechanisms and how things work) and artistic (the visual). They are measured separately because they behave separately.
Based on: Kaufman Domains of Creativity Scale (Kaufman, 2012)
Possible results
Everyday
People, problems, and getting out of a tight spot.
Ideas
Arguments, explanations, connecting things that were apart.
Performance
Words, music, and the thing that happens in front of people.
Mechanisms
How things work, and making them work differently.
Visual
Shape, colour, and what looks right.
Common questions
I have always thought I was not creative. Is that wrong?
Probably, and for a specific reason: the word has been captured by one of its five domains. When people say creative they mean performance and visual art, and if those are not yours, the conclusion follows. But the research finds the domains barely correlate, and the everyday and mechanical ones - solving a problem with people, fixing a thing with the wrong parts - are creativity in exactly the same sense. Most people who say they have none score high on one of those two and have simply never been told it counts.
Can creativity be developed?
Within a domain, considerably - most of what looks like talent in any of the five is hours plus feedback, and the research on expertise is unambiguous about that. Across domains, much less: getting better at the visual does not make you better at mechanisms, because they draw on different knowledge. So the practical advice is to build where you already are rather than where the word points. The domain you are highest on is the one where the next hour of practice is worth most.
Sources
- Kaufman, J. C. (2012). Counting the muses: Development of the Kaufman Domains of Creativity Scale (K-DOCS). Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts.
An honest note This is a short adaptation of a fifty-item scale, so each domain here rests on three questions. The five-domain structure has been reproduced in several countries and a meta-analysis of its factor structure supports it, which is more than most creativity measures can say. The central limit is built into the method: this is self-reported creativity, and self-reports of creativity correlate only modestly with what people actually produce - people are reliably poor judges of their own originality in both directions. It is also worth knowing that the domains can shift in composition across cultures, and that a low score in a domain says nothing about ability, only about where you currently spend your creative attention.
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