Implications of Foreign Language Use for Creative Self-evaluation Bias and Creative Performance

Abstract

Creative self-evaluations are important determinants of future creativity. Despite extensive research that identifies antecedents of individual creativity, little is known about what determines individuals’ biases in self-assessing their own creative performance. In particular, we do not know how contextual factors may influence individual creative self-evaluations. As workplaces become increasingly multilingual in the wake of globalisation, the language in which work is being performed has become one of these factors. In an experiment with working professionals (N = 86), we assessed actual creative performance using established creativity (specifically, idea generation) tasks. Participants worked on these tasks in either their native or a foreign language and were asked to self-evaluate their creative performance afterwards. Results show that creative self-evaluations generally deviate from actual performance, such that high (low) performers tend to underestimate (overestimate) their creative performance. While actual creative performance is lower when using a foreign language, the creative self-evaluation bias tends to be higher in a foreign compared to a native language setting. Further, we find tentative evidence that individuals who work in a foreign language and who are highly proficient in this language may be less biased in their creative self-evaluations. Unlike proficiency, foreign language anxiety does not appear to affect this bias.