How creative am I?: Examining judgments and predictors of creative performance

Abstract

Creativity is a highly valued construct in both educational and occupational contexts. Yet, little is known about the accuracy of individuals’ metacognitive judgments of their own creative performance. Moreover, the relative contribution of individual predictors of creative performance, such as gender, are still open for question. To some degree, this lack of understanding may stem from the challenge of collecting large data samples where creativity and metacognition can be measured and scored through rigorous approaches. The current study assessed college students’ (N = 350) creativity on the Similarities Test, the Remote Associates Test, and the Product Improvement Task from the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking while having the students provide percentile rank judgments of their performance. In addition, data on personality and self-report grade point average were collected. Four major findings emerged. First, students were generally overconfident in their judgments of creative performance, however overconfidence was somewhat muted compared to findings from other domains. Second, response bias for judgments accounted for the majority of variance in predicting creative performance when simultaneously considering personality and grade point average, with greater performance associated with increased underconfidence. Third, females showed significantly higher performance for measures of fluency and originality on the Similarities Test and were less overconfident than their male counterparts on all three tests. Finally, openness emerged as the single personality variable that predicted creative performance, a finding that supported prior research. Implications related to the role of metacognitive judgments in creative performance is discussed.