Adults beat the children at creativity — they just don't believe it themselves

Ask a five-year-old to paint and she grabs the brush. Ask a grown-up and he hesitates — convinced his creativity dried up years ago. A new study says that belief is wrong. Researchers at the University of Graz in Austria, with colleagues in Belgium and at Yale, set 92 preschoolers aged four to seven against 70 adults, mostly in their twenties, in three challenges: dream up uses for a tin in three minutes, draw anything at all, and invent an imaginary animal in eight minutes. Independent judges rated the adults' work as more original, more useful and more creative overall — especially when goals and time limits were clear. What the adults lacked was not ability but nerve: they reported far less confidence and more anxiety than the children, who threw themselves in, treated mistakes as part of the game and enjoyed themselves more. The study, published in PLOS One, only compares two age groups at one moment, so it cannot map a whole lifetime — but its message, in senior author Dr Mathias Benedek's words, is simple: 'Adults don't lose their creativity, instead they lose the confidence to use it.'