Adults may be more creative than children – but less confident about it

Adults are often thought to be less creative than children, as we swap painting for presentations and sandpits for spreadsheets. But in a new study, children actually performed worse on creativity tests than adults – yet made up for it in confidence.

“We found that adults are actually more creative thinkers,” says Mathias Benedek at the University of Graz in Austria. “But children enjoy creativity more and are much less worried about what others think about their ideas.”

these studies were often based on a single task, like imagining alternative uses for everyday objects, says Benedek. Taking a broader approach, he and his colleagues recruited 92 children (aged between 4 and 7) and 70 adults (aged 25, on average) to carry out three creative tasks.

First, they had to come up with as many alternative uses for a tin can as possible within 3 minutes. Then, they drew freely for 8 minutes, and in the final task, they had 8 minutes to draw an animal that doesn’t exist.

Five people who weren’t involved in the research were then trained to objectively judge creativity based on originality and whether the final result fulfilled the brief of the task.

In the first task, the adults scored 3.9 points, on average, out of 5, while the children scored 2.9 points. One of the adults imagined a tin can could be used as a “Halloween candy box when on (a) diet”, whereas some children imagined it as a rattle

Publication : New Scientist
 
Author : Carissa Wong