想象一下,这是1850年,查尔斯·狄更斯在寻找工作。他还不是一位闻名天下的作家。他的雇主让他坐下并给他一份测试题让他作答。那位可能的雇主告诉狄更斯,他的答案会揭示他是否真正富有创造力。这种情景似乎荒诞可笑,但实际上并非无稽之谈。在近50年的时间里,心理学家们一直在用测试来看人们究竟有多大的创造力。创造力测试这一形式颇为流行,但却是自相矛盾的。它之所以流行是因为各个公司愈来愈想知道他们聘用的是富有创造力的人:他们在变幻莫测的生意场上能够不断创新。而说测试本身自相矛盾是因为富有创造性就是要推出新颖、独特并且常常是颇具挑战性的想法、见解,而测试所问的却往往是些相当平庸的问题。在心理测试中表现创造力与在现实生活中富有创造力还是有所不同的,并非意味着能够写出或画出不朽之作。在此你需要知道求同型思维不同于求异型思维。求同型思维者擅长回答那些有准确答案的问题,而求异型思维者也许在回答那些问题上并不能得高分,但却是思路活跃、主意叠出。 Imagine this is 1850, Charles Dickens is looking for a job. He is not yet a famous writer. His employer asked him to sit down and give him a test question for him to answer. The potential employer told Dickens that his answer would reveal if he was truly creative. This scenario seems absurd, but it is not a nonsense. For nearly 50 years, psychologists have been using tests to see how much creativity people have. This form of creativity testing is quite popular, but it is self-contradictory. It is popular because companies are increasingly interested in knowing that they are hiring creative people: they can continue to innovate in the unpredictable business field. And the test itself is contradictory because it is creative to launch new, unique and often challenging ideas and opinions, and the questions that are asked are often rather mediocre. The difference between expressing creativity in a psychological test and being creative in real life does not mean that you can write or draw immortal works. Here you need to know that seeking similar thinking is different from asking for different thinking. Identical thinkers are good at answering questions that have an accurate answer, and demanding thinkers may not be able to get high scores on those questions, but they are active in thinking and have ideas.