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. See the full episode at 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: Dr Webb's faculty page: Dr Webb on Google Scholar: Dr Webb on Linkedin: Bonus: This episode was made possible by our premium innovation and creativity training. Take your innovation and creativity capabilities to the next level by investing in yourself now, at *

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Podcast S7E159: Margaret Webb - Divergent Association Task is an episode from Idea to Value - Creativity and Innovation with Nick Skillicorn by Nick Skillicorn.

This episode is 23:08 long.

This episode was published on Apr 28, 2022.

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