Determinants of creative metacognitive monitoring: creativity, personality, and task-related predictors of self-assessed ideas and creative performance

Abstract The assessment of one’s own cognitive processes during creative endeavors, known as creative metacognitive monitoring (CMC-M), can manifest in various ways. These include global evaluations of task-related operations and performance (i.e., monitoring at performance level), as well as local evaluations of generated ideas (i.e., monitoring at response level). So far, investigations into CMC-M have predominantly concentrated on how accurately people assess their performance or ideas but less is known about what determines the level of self-assessments (including over- and underestimation). The main goal of this study thus was to examine what factors predict post-task CMC-M (level and bias of creativity judgements) while (1) distinguishing between judgements at performance and response levels, and (2) considering a broad range of theoretically justified predictors. These included creative ability (divergent thinking), real-life creativity (creative activities and achievements), core personality traits (intellect, openness, narcissism), surface personality characteristics (creative self-efficacy, creative personal identity, creative self-concept), and task-related factors (motivation and prior task experience). In an online study ( N = 425), we found that the considered factors (except prior experience with the task) significantly determined CMC-M, with differing effects on performance and response levels. We discuss these findings in the context of a recently proposed systematic framework of creative metacognition.