How Personal Beliefs and Task Experiences Shape the Way We Judge Our Creativity

What is it about?

This study explores how people judge their own creativity and what helps them stay motivated when working on creative tasks. Creativity is not only about coming up with ideas. It also involves monitoring how well we are doing, deciding whether an idea is good, and predicting whether we can succeed. These abilities are known as metacognitive skills. The study examines how two personal factors influence these skills: creative self-efficacy (how confident people are in their creative abilities) and the value they place on creativity in their lives. A group of university students completed two creative tasks. Before each task, they reported how confident they felt about outperforming others. After each task, they indicated how difficult it felt, how interesting it was, and how original they believed their ideas were. They also completed questionnaires measuring their general confidence in being creative and how much they value creativity. The results show that people who believe strongly in their creative abilities tend to expect to do well and to judge their ideas as more original. This confidence affects their judgments directly, even after they have finished a task. In contrast, people who place a high value on creativity are more interested in the tasks. Their interest then shapes how confident they feel and how they judge their performance. Interest also stays stable. If people find the first task interesting, they are likely to enjoy the second one too. The study also finds that people rely on several cues when judging their creative performance. These include how well they actually performed, how difficult the task felt, and how interesting it was. Together, these findings show that creative confidence, personal values, and immediate task experiences all influence how people think about their creativity. Understanding these influences can help teachers, students, and organisations design environments that better support creative work.

Featured Image

Photo by Timothy Dachraoui on Unsplash

Photo by Timothy Dachraoui on Unsplash

Why is it important?

This work is important because it connects two research areas that are rarely studied together: metacognition in creativity and motivational factors such as self-beliefs and personal values. The study provides one of the first detailed examinations of how stable personal characteristics interact with moment-to-moment task experiences as people work through creative problems. It shows that creative self-efficacy does not only guide expectations before a task but also continues to shape self-evaluation afterwards. At the same time, valuing creativity strengthens interest, which is a powerful driver of long-term creative engagement. These findings can improve educational and workplace practices by highlighting that supporting creativity is not just about teaching skills. It also involves building environments that foster confidence and show the relevance and enjoyment of creative work. This has implications for designing creative curricula, interventions, and training programmes that aim to develop both metacognitive accuracy and sustained motivation.