Psychologists call an idea or piece of work creative only when it passes two tests at once: it is original, new at least in its setting, and it is effective, useful for the purpose at hand. That two-part answer to the question what is creativity is the closest thing psychology has to an agreed definition. Measuring it is much harder. A 2017 systematic review of 152 papers on creativity measurement concluded that none of the common creativity tests can measure creativity on its own, and that each has real limitations.¹

What is creativity? Original work that also works

Psychologists generally agree that creativity means producing something novel and useful, according to a 2017 review of creativity measurement by Sameh Said-Metwaly and colleagues at the University of Leuven.¹

The two parts guard against two different mistakes. An idea that is new but does not work is merely odd: answering a customer complaint with a limerick is original, and almost certainly useless. An idea that works but is not new is routine: reusing last year’s project plan may be sensible, but nobody would call it creative.

Creativity researchers call this two-part formula the standard definition of creativity, after a 2012 paper of that name by Mark Runco and Garrett Jaeger.² Standard does not mean settled. Researchers still debate how exactly to define novelty and usefulness.¹

An illustrative case: a team keeps losing details when work passes between shifts, and someone suggests a short handover note pinned at the top of the shared channel. It is not new to the world, but it is new to this team, and it fixes the problem. By the standard definition, that counts.

UsefulNot usefulNew hereNot new

New here, Useful: Creativeoriginal and effective

New here, Not useful: Merely oddnew, but does not do the job

Not new, Useful: Routineworks, but nothing new

Not new, Not useful: Neitherold and unhelpful

The practical lesson: judge any idea, yours or a colleague’s, with two separate questions. Is it new here? Does it do the job? An idea can fail on either one, and each failure needs a different fix. An odd idea needs grounding in the real constraint; a routine one needs a fresh angle.

Four lenses: the person, the process, the product and the setting

Researchers look at creativity through four lenses: the creative person, the thinking process, the product that results and the “press”, meaning the environment around them. The scheme draws on work going back to a 1961 analysis by Rhodes, and it still organizes creativity measurement, the Leuven review reports.¹

Each lens answers a different question, which is why conversations about creativity often talk past each other. “Is she creative?” is about a person; “Is this design creative?” is about a product. Mix them up, and a debate about a weak design turns into a verdict on the designer.

Picture a campaign that falls flat. The people may be capable, but the process was rushed, or the setting rewards only safe choices, and each diagnosis points to a different remedy. So when creative work stalls, ask which of the four is the bottleneck before concluding that someone “just isn’t creative”. The process and the setting are the parts a team can usually change this week.

Creativity comes in four sizes, from a learner’s insight to Big-C

James Kaufman and Ronald Beghetto’s Four C model, published in 2009, sorts creativity by size. Mini-c is the creativity inherent in learning, little-c is the everyday creativity found in nearly all people, Pro-c is professional-level creative expertise, and Big-C is the eminent creativity of the great.³

Earlier research mostly split creativity into everyday and eminent; the model expands that split to make room for the creativity of learning and for professional-level expertise. The authors describe Pro-c as an effortful progression beyond little-c and discuss transitions between the levels, so the model reads as a path, not a set of boxes.³

1. mini-c: the creativity inherent in the learning process
2. little-c: everyday creativity, found in nearly all people
3. Pro-c: professional-level expertise in a creative area, reached through effortful progress beyond little-c
4. Big-C: eminent creativity, the kind reserved for the great

An illustrative path: a new analyst finally sees a clearer way to lay out her team’s data (mini-c). She then builds a report format her colleagues start copying (little-c). Years later she designs reporting tools for a living (Pro-c). Few ever reach eminence (Big-C).

The lesson is to compare yourself with the right level: against a famous invention, an everyday idea looks trivial, but the model counts little-c, and the creativity of learning, as creativity in their own right. For the learning side, our guide to how memory works when you learn something new covers what helps new knowledge stick.

Further reading

• 

  Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention

  by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

  Interviews with 91 eminent creators, read through the person, the field and the setting: the Big-C end of the Four C model.

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How psychologists measure creativity

Psychologists measure creativity in four main ways, the Leuven review found: idea-generation tests, questionnaires about a person’s traits and achievements, expert ratings of things people make and, least often, surveys of the setting. None is free of limitations, and none can measure creativity alone.¹

Idea-generation tests: how many uses for a brick?

The most common creativity tests measure what the psychologist J. P. Guilford called divergent production: a broad search for many possible answers rather than for the one right answer.¹ The best-known task asks people to list unusual uses for an everyday object; for a brick, one textbook answer is using it in a karate demonstration.⁴ Tests of this kind, including the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking, with manuals dating from 1966, are typically scored for how many answers there are, how rare they are compared with other people’s, how varied and how detailed.¹

These tests capture only part of creativity because of what they ask for. An idea-generation test samples one phase of creative work, coming up with ideas, and skips the others: understanding the problem, judging ideas and putting them into practice. The items are designed to be largely free of any subject matter, while creativity may depend heavily on the field. And the number of ideas and their rarity tend to move together, so a long list can look original partly because it is long.¹

Picture a colleague who fills a whiteboard with ideas in ten minutes but never picks one and sees it through: a high scorer on this kind of test, whose projects still stall at the point the test never reaches.

Whether scores predict real achievement is disputed: Torrance’s own long-term follow-ups found they predicted adult creative achievement better than intelligence scores did, but other studies failed to find evidence that they predict it.¹ A 2008 meta-analysis by Kyung Hee Kim put the average correlation between these test scores and creative achievement at about 0.2: a real but modest link, useful for comparing groups and weak for judging any one person.⁵

Expert ratings: the consensual assessment technique

Teresa Amabile’s consensual assessment technique, introduced in 1982, takes the opposite route: people make something real, such as a poem, a collage or a story, and experts in the field rate each piece independently against the others. If the judges agree closely enough, their ratings are averaged into a creativity score. The method mirrors how work is judged in real life, which the review suggests is perhaps why it has been called the gold standard; its costs are finding the right judges, the judges’ own leanings, and the time and money involved.¹

It works like a design award or a portfolio review, with the same catch: the result depends on who sits on the panel.

Such ratings can follow the standard definition closely. In a 2024 online experiment with 293 writers, Anil Doshi and Oliver Hauser had readers score short stories on separate novelty and usefulness scales. Writers randomly given access to story ideas from GPT-4 produced stories that were rated more creative, especially among less creative writers, but those stories were more similar to one another.⁶ It is one study; our guide to what AI assistants do well and badly at work covers the wider evidence. If you use AI for ideas, check whether your version would stand out from what others using the same tool would get.

The study

Moderate evidence

Where creativity measurement stands: a systematic review of 152 papers

Sameh Said-Metwaly, Eva Kyndt and Wim Van den Noortgate screened more than 2,000 papers and analyzed 152 on measuring creativity. They concluded that no instrument can measure creativity alone, and that common problems include a narrow scope, conflicting evidence of validity and neglect of the setting.¹

So a creativity score measures one slice of creativity. The review’s main caveat is that it is narrative and covers English-language papers up to 2016, so tools developed since then are not in it.

Think of a typing-speed test: it measures something real, but nobody would judge a writer on it alone.

Right brain, high IQ, sudden inspiration: where the popular picture goes wrong

Three widely held beliefs about creativity fare poorly in reviews of the research: brain studies do not place it in the right hemisphere, intelligence is only modestly linked to it, and the benefit of stepping away from a problem was larger after longer work on it.

“Creative people are right-brained”

A 2010 review by Arne Dietrich and Riam Kanso of 72 brain-recording and imaging experiments concluded that creative thinking does not appear to depend critically on any single mental process or brain region, and is not especially associated with the right hemisphere. Results differed by task: studies of generating many ideas and of making art gave inconsistent pictures, studies of sudden insight more consistent ones, and the reviewers argue that creativity has to be split into such types before brain studies can say much about it.⁷

Myth

Creativity lives in the right side of the brain.

Fact

A 2010 review of 72 brain experiments concluded creative thinking did not appear to depend on any single brain region and was not especially linked to the right hemisphere.

The practical point is to drop the label. Someone who opens a brainstorm with “I’m a numbers person, not a creative one” has turned a habit into an identity, and the right-brain story behind it finds no support in the brain evidence. Beliefs about fixed ability have their own research, covered in our guide to how fixed and growth mindsets work.

“You need a high IQ to be creative”

Intelligence and creativity are linked, but only modestly. A 2021 meta-analysis of 112 studies by Anne Gerwig and colleagues put the overall correlation between intelligence and idea-generation scores at about 0.25.² In plain terms, intelligence tells you a little about someone’s scores, and most of the differences between people’s scores lie elsewhere.

The popular version goes further. The threshold hypothesis holds that the link between intelligence and creativity fades once IQ passes a line, most often put at 120.² Tests of it disagree: a 2013 study found a threshold for idea-test scores but none for creative achievement.⁴ A 2020 study by Selina Weiss and colleagues found no threshold at all and recommended dropping the idea.⁸

In a meeting, that loose link means the cleverest person in the room is not reliably the one with the most ideas, and an average test result rules nobody out. If you have written yourself off as “not smart enough to be creative”, the research gives that belief little support.

“Good ideas arrive out of nowhere”

Stepping away from a problem does help on average, and the benefit was larger after longer work on it. Ut Na Sio and Thomas Ormerod’s 2009 meta-analysis of 117 incubation studies found a positive effect of breaks on problem solving overall. The benefit was larger on tasks that call for many ideas and in studies with longer work on the problem before the break, and smaller when the break was filled with demanding work.⁹

Why would a break help? The authors found support for several explanations, including that time away lets misleading first approaches fade, but each seemed to fit only certain kinds of problems.⁹ The studies were mostly short lab tasks with small groups of participants, so the effect is clearest for puzzles and idea lists, not for months-long projects.

1. 1Work on it properlylonger preparation, larger effect across studies
2. 2Step awayto something undemanding
3. 3Come backand try again

For word-based insight puzzles, doing something undemanding during the break beat resting.⁹ The classic shower moment, an undemanding break after real work, fits that pattern.

What the research means for everyday creative work

The research on definition and measurement points to a practical approach for any specific problem: define what “useful” means, give each phase of the work its own time, and judge ideas on both counts.

Researchers have proposed that creative work runs through four phases: understanding the problem, producing ideas, judging them and putting the best into practice.¹ A meeting that jumps straight to brainstorming skips the first; one that ends with a list of ideas and no owner skips the last.

WiserHours

Judging an idea on both counts

• Say what useful means for this problem
• Ask whether the idea is new here
• Ask whether it does the job
• Give problem-finding, ideas, judging and doing their own time
• Take a break after real effort, not before
• Check the setting: does it reward safe choices only?

Find this checklist online:
https://wiserhours.com/creativity/what-is-creativity/#checklist-what-is-creativity-everyday

The bottom line

The most useful thing psychology’s definition of creativity gives you is a pair of questions: is this new here, and does it do the job? Work that passes both counts as creative, from a learner’s insight to eminent, Big-C work. Creativity tests each capture a slice, usually idea generation, so a single score says little about any one person. Judge ideas on both counts, and give a hard problem real effort before you step away from it.