Does Intelligence Strengthen Creative Metacognition?

Creative metacognition (CMC) is an understudied component of creative growth. It refers to people's ability to monitor and evaluate their creative functioning. In this study we focus on an important element of CMC, creative metacognitive accuracy: people's ability to recognize and properly assess the creativity of their ideas when solving divergent thinking tasks. More specifically, we explored how creative ability and intelligence interact to explain people's self-ratings of their newly generated ideas' creativity. A large sample of adults (n = 500) completed 3 divergent thinking tasks and immediately after provided general ratings of their responses' creativity. External judges independently rated creativity of all generated responses. Expert-rated creativity was positively linked to participants' creativity self-ratings, yet negatively related to participants' intelligence. More important, creativity and intelligence interacted with each other: self-ratings of creativity corresponded with experts' assessment among more intelligent people, whereas people with lower intelligence overestimated the creativity of their ideas, especially when these ideas were less creative. Thus, a clear effect of metacognitive accuracy was observed among participants with higher intelligence. We discuss the results in the light of potential mechanisms that analytical and creative skills may play for CMC.