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Kids Aren’t More Creative Than Adults, Just More ConfidentHealth
A new study finds adults score higher on creativity tests than young children, but children enjoy creating far more and worry far less about being judged.
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Children are widely thought to be naturally more creative than adults. A new study suggests that belief is wrong, or at least far too simple. Adults performed better on creativity tests, the researchers found, while children simply approached the tasks with more confidence and joy.
The study, published on 21 October 2026 in the journal PLOS One, was carried out by researchers at the University of Graz in Austria, led by Janika Saretzki with senior author Mathias Benedek. It brought together 92 preschool children aged between four and seven and 70 adults, mostly in their twenties, with an average age of 25, and gave both groups the same three creative tasks.
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First, everyone had three minutes to think of as many creative uses as possible for a simple tin can. Then they had about eight minutes to draw freely with coloured pens on blank paper. Finally, they were given eight more minutes to invent and draw a fantasy animal that does not exist. Afterwards, each person reflected on how confident, anxious and motivated they had felt, and how much they had enjoyed the activities.
Trained raters judged the finished work without knowing whether a child or an adult had made it. Across all three tasks, the adults were rated as more novel, more effective and more creative overall than the preschoolers. In the tin can task, adults scored 3.9 out of 5 on average, against 2.9 for the children. One adult suggested using a tin can as a Halloween candy box while on a diet, while some children suggested using it as a rattle.
Where the children clearly came out ahead was in how they felt about creating. They scored their own work at 4.8 and 4.6 out of 5 for confidence on the two drawing tasks, compared with 2.8 and 3.3 for the adults. The children also reported more motivation, less anxiety and greater enjoyment than the grown-ups, and they said they took part in creative activity about once a day, against about once a week for the adults.
There was a striking twist in the results. More than three quarters of the adults in the study believed that preschool children were more creative than they were. The researchers suggest this comes from mistaking children’s enthusiasm and confidence for greater ability. As Benedek put it, adults care more about how others might judge their ideas, while children simply get on with making things.
The researchers were careful about the limits of their work. The study compared only two age groups at a single point in time, so it cannot show how creativity changes across a whole lifetime. Even so, the authors say the popular idea that children are more creative than adults turns out to be overly simplistic: adults came up with more original and effective ideas, but preschoolers were more confident, more motivated and enjoyed the creative tasks more. The findings were reported by CNN on 11 November 2026.
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