ABSTRACT

Is my idea creative enough to be worth pursuing? This question directs our investment of effort in many real-life areas such as establishing and investing in innovative companies and choosing our next research agenda. Yet, people are inaccurate in judging their own knowledge, and much less is known about the self-assessment of creativity. One way to evaluate ones’ creativity is by judging the originality of their ideas – how common are they among potential idea generators. Initial evidence suggests that originality judgments and achievements are separated processes, and that people tend to under-estimate their own originality relative to their peers. So far, only little is known about the heuristic cues that lead to such mismatch; a gap we intent to address in this study. We used tools from computational linguistics to examine metacognitive cues for originality judgments. To the best of our knowledge, this is done for the first time in the metacognitive research and was achieved via two experiments. In Experiment 1, we re-analyzed data from a previous study that examined originality judgments (Sidi, Torgovitsky, Soibelman, Miron-Spektor, & Ackerman, 2020). We examined the extent that semantic distance contributed additional explanatory value for predicting originality judgments, above and beyond other cues. In Experiment 2, we delved into the role of semantic cues on the discrepancy between originality judgments and originality of ideas. By manipulating the instructions of the task, we exposed differential effects on judgment and on originality. This study contributes to both metacognitive and creativity theory and pave the way for practical recommendations.