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 – but 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.”

There’s a popular belief that children are more creative than adults, says Benedek, which may come from children having more time and opportunities to engage in creative activities. Yet prior studies suggest that creativity actually increases with age.

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

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

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

In the tin-can task, the adults’ scored about 4 points, on average, out of 5, while the children scored about 3 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.

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In the second and third tasks, the adults’ scored about 0.5 and 2 points higher, respectively, than the children.

The findings underscore how creativity draws on combining ideas from prior experience, says Wendy Ross at King’s College London. For instance, adults are probably aware of more animals than children, so have a greater variety of creatures to draw from when producing a fantasy animal.

After completing the tasks, the participants were asked questions like “how well do you think you performed the task”, “how much were you worried/anxious to not perform well on the task?” and “how much fun was the task?”.

The researchers found that the children were substantially more confident in what they produced, scoring their performances at around 4 to 5 points for the free-drawing and animal tasks, compared with the adults’ 3-point scoring.

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The children also reported lower anxiety compared with the adults. “If the purpose of creativity is to have enjoyment in it, to play, and to be unfettered humans, then children are doing better at that,” says Ross.

But the two groups got a similar level of pleasure from the animal-drawing task. Adults may have liked that task’s specific instruction, which might have meant they worried less about being judged for their idea, says Benedek.

Regardless of the quality of the end result, people should try and be more creative for their wellbeing, says Ross. Engaging with the arts has been linked to reduced mental health problems and greater social skills. “Creativity, especially when done with other people is really beneficial to your mental wellbeing – and you don’t have to score five out of five on a ranking scale,” says Ross.

PLOS One DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0346553