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An important corollary is that there is no point in trying to assess people ’ s abilities without first finding out what they care about.

So one cannot ( as some psychometricians try to do ) assess such things as “ creativity ” in any general sense.

One has always to ask “ creativity in relation to what ?” So McClelland ’ s measures, originally presented as means of assessing “ personality ”, are best understood as means of measuring competence in ways which break radically with traditional psychometric approaches.

( See Raven ( 2001 ) for a fuller discussion ).