IQ Test for Creatives

For decades researchers have argued about a "threshold hypothesis": that intelligence helps creativity up to about IQ 120, and beyond that other factors take over.

A 2013 study by Emanuel Jauk and colleagues tested nearly 300 adults and found evidence of a threshold for creative potential, with the level depending on how strictly creativity was defined, and a different pattern for real-world creative achievement. Above the threshold, openness to experience mattered more than extra IQ points.

IQ tests reward convergent thinking: finding the one right answer. Creativity leans on divergent thinking: generating many possible answers. This test measures the first, not the second.

• Resist reinterpreting a pattern creatively. Each question has one intended rule.
• Visual attention to detail helps, especially on the pattern and spatial sets.

A modest score says nothing about your creative ability, and a high one does not make you creative. Treat it as a measure of one visual-logical skill.

Creativity researchers use divergent thinking tasks. The best known is J. P. Guilford's Alternative Uses Task: list as many uses as you can for a brick. The Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking, first published in 1966, score answers for fluency, originality and elaboration.

Those tests have no single right answer, which is exactly what this test does not allow. The two kinds of test tap different skills, and doing well on one says only a little about the other.