Did NASA publish any study claiming 98% of children are geniuses and only 2% of adults are?
Executive summary
The viral claim that “NASA published a study finding 98% of five‑year‑olds are creative geniuses and only 2% of adults are” is a distortion: the numbers trace to a creativity test administered by George Land and Beth Jarman that was commissioned for NASA purposes, but there is no NASA‑authored peer‑reviewed paper that published that headline statistic as a NASA study [1] [2]. The Land/Jarman testing results — widely quoted as 98% at age five, 30% at ten, 12% at fifteen and ~2% in adults — have been repeatedly circulated and amplified by educators and popular writers, even as critics note gaps in original documentation and differing retellings [3] [4].
1. What actually happened: Land and Jarman’s test, and NASA’s role
Multiple secondary accounts say George Land and Beth Jarman developed a divergent‑thinking test initially to help NASA identify imaginative problem‑solvers and that they administered it to about 1,600 children, reporting very high “creative genius” scores at age five that fell with age and into adulthood [1] [2] [3]. Those same accounts describe NASA’s commissioning of the test and its use to screen creative potential for engineering tasks [1] [5]. However, these sources are summaries and popular retellings rather than archival NASA publications, and they repeatedly present the Land & Jarman results as “NASA‑commissioned” rather than as a NASA research paper [1] [2].
2. The numbers everyone repeats — where they come from and how consistent they are
The now‑famous percentages — 98% of 4–5‑year‑olds scoring at “genius” levels, dropping to roughly 30% at age ten, about 12% at 15, and ~2% among adults — appear across many blogs, education sites and business articles that cite Land’s work or his talks as their source [6] [3] [7]. These figures have become a memetic shorthand for the idea that schooling erodes divergent creativity, and decades of reprints have preserved the numbers even when original methodological detail is omitted [6] [8].
3. Why skepticism is warranted: lack of a clear NASA publication and methodological questions
Investigative commenters and analysts have pointed out that the viral framing as a “NASA study” is misleading because there is little to no publicly available NASA journal publication that reports the full methods, raw data, or peer review behind those percentages; some critics explicitly note that original sources do not name NASA in all versions and that the age‑by‑age percentages vary across retellings [4]. That gap matters: without an accessible primary report, it is difficult to evaluate how “genius” was defined, how the test was normed, or how samples were selected — issues repeatedly raised by skeptics exploring the claim [4].
4. How the claim has been used and why it spread
The Land/Jarman narrative feeds a powerful story for reformers: innate childhood creativity is squandered by schooling, and the catchy 98→2 statistic is rhetorically useful for advocates of alternative education, creativity training, or workplace innovation programs; many education blogs, TED talks and corporate creativity trainers have amplified the claim for that reason [7] [9]. That amplification creates a feedback loop: repeated citation of the headline figures without primary documentation normalizes the “NASA study” phrasing even when the original evidence is indirect or incomplete [5] [8].
5. Bottom line — direct answer to the question asked
No clear, independently verifiable NASA‑published study exists that exactly states “98% of children are geniuses and only 2% of adults are,” and the most reliable reading of available reporting is that George Land and Beth Jarman’s creativity test — done for NASA’s purposes — produced the numbers later popularized in education and media pieces, not a NASA‑branded peer‑reviewed paper with full methodological transparency [1] [4] [3]. Reporters, educators and advocates continue to use the catchy percentages, but the provenance and methodological details are thin in the public record, so the claim should be treated as a widely repeated summary of Land’s work rather than a documented NASA publication [4] [2].