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Misleading title.

"For example, a participant was shown three words (e.g., dress, dial, flower), with the requirement being to find a single associated word (in this case "sun") that can be combined to make a common word or phrase (i.e., sundress, sundial and sunflower)."

This seems more like a pattern recognition puzzle. Not the flow state of "creativity".

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Yeah, I find their methodology unconvincing. This is a common problem in research, where some proxy test is presented and simply declared to be a way of measuring creativity, intelligence, empathy, honesty, criminal tendencies, ability to postpone rewards, etc. Eventually each of these methods falls apart due to lack of evidence and is abandoned, but it can take decades. There are still licensed professionals using Rorschach tests to measure personality traits, including creativity, criminal tendencies, and personality disorders, despite there being no evidence that the "test" works to do that. Or consider the use of the lie detector test. Or the ADE 651 "bomb detector". All with about as much evidence behind them as dowsing.

They do address this in the paper: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/acp.3532. It seems this type of test is fairly common.

I guess there are a lot of different kinds of creativity. This seems to target something I'd think of specifically as "lateral thinking." I agree it doesn't seem like a very satisfying test, though.

Regardless of the test, the title is misleading.

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