How Do Famous Artist Write about Their Metacognition, Self-Regulation, and Creative Problem-Solving?
Abstract
Creative metacognition (Kaufman & Beghetto, 2013), creative self-regulation (Zielinska et al., 2022), and creative problem-solving (Mumford et al., 1991; Mumford & Martin, 2019) are three key concepts stemming from three different psychological approaches. However, all three involve planning, monitoring, regulation and self-evaluation in creative process.
Therefore, the goal of the present study was to describe and compare how these three models are exhibited in the cases of five professional artists as depicted in their autobiographical writings. The authors were selected based on maximum-variation sampling to cover different artistic fields (they were Stephen King, Salvador Dalí, Patti Smith, Terry Gilliam and Arnold Schwarzenegger).
Theory-driven thematic analysis was able to identify individual components of all three models in all five autobiographies, i.e., all artists employed their metacognitive and self-regulatory skills in their creative process. However, individual artists exhibited different facets more often, or they gave a higher emphasis on some of them.
For example, Stephen King relied predominantly on his metacognitive knowledge to inform his idea generation, selection and content editing, whilst Patti Smith gathered information from her instantaneous experiences that were immediately translated into her idea generation. Salvador Dalí mostly focused on precise execution of his procedural knowledge, whilst Terry Gilliam strategically used his divergent thinking to create a tremendous amount of highly original ideas.
Furthermore, the present study identified several aspects that were not included in the models, such as psychologically safe environment, the role of extrinsic and intrinsic motivation, and the perceived value of creativity.