Part of the answer can be found in the idea of metacognition, the ability to monitor one's own learning, perform self-evaluation, and then make plans accordingly Someone who was high in metacognitive abilities would know his or her limitations, be able to seek help, and estimate success with reasonably high accuracy. Several researchers have argued that metacognition is connected to creative problem solving and that someone who is high in metacognitive ability should be a more creative problem solver.

Yet what goes up usually goes down - and whereas high metacognition will lead to better creative performance, low metacognition may lead to lower creative performance. Indeed, the researchers David Dunning and Justin Kruger argue that people who do poorly in intellectual (and social) realms may suffer from a "double whammy" - they are not only underperformers, but they also have lower metacognitive abilities and therefore are unable to recognize their poor performance.

Is there such a thing as metacreativity? Are some people highly aware of their own creative abilities (thereby meaning that others are quite unaware)? Past research indicates that if you ask someone to tell you how creativity she is, her answers will be related to other measures that ask to estimate her creativity (this relationship is not particularly astounding). Yet other studies have shown that self-reported creativity does not relate to self-reported creative activities or measures of verbal and pictorial creativity. One study by Thomas Priest found that students' self-assessment of the creativity of their musical compositions was not predictive of expert ratings of these same compositions.

Recently, some work out of my lab has found further evidence for this "American Idol Effect." Working with my then-student Michelle Evans (now Michelle Samuel and a college instructor) and my colleague John Baer at Rider University, we examined fourth-grade students' self reports of creativity in four domains: math, science, writing, and art. We then (cruelly) had them do actual creative tasks in math, science, writing, and art, and then (also cruelly) asked five classroom teachers to rate all of the creative works. The good news: the teachers agreed on what was creative and what was not. The bad news: students are impressively bad at evaluating their own creative talent.

Obviously, there's a lot more work to do. Fourth grade students are not supposed to be great judges yet. In future work, I'd love to see many more samples examined, many more domains studied, and both specific ("I did well at writing that poem") and global ("I am a mighty fine poet") self assessments.

In the meantime, I think this study is further support for a possible American Idol Effect - in other words, people aren't the best judges of their own creative abilities. Are people who are more creative better at judging their own creativity? I am curious to find out (and, I am sure, if this work has been done, someone will send me an angry e-mail).

In the meantime, people are still paying money to have William Hung come to their parties. And hey, he looks like a fun guy, and a genuinely sweet person.

But his decision to enter American Idol, although brave and confident, may not have been the best example of metacreativity.

The pants on the ground guy, however....

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