Across eight studies, we tested whether people understand the time course of their own creativity. Prior literature finds that creativity tends to improve across an ideation session. Here we compared people’s beliefs against their actual creative performance. Consistent with prior research, we found that people’s creativity, on aggregate, remained constant or improved across an ideation session. However, people’s beliefs did not match this reality. We consistently found that people expected their creativity to decline over time. We refer to this misprediction as the creative cliff illusion. Study 1 found initial evidence of this effect across an ideation task. We found further evidence in a sample with high domain-relevant knowledge (study 2), when creativity judgments were elicited retrospectively (study 3), and across a multiday study (study 5). We theorized the effect occurs because people mistakenly associate creativity (the novelty and usefulness of an idea) with idea production (the ability to generate an idea). Study 4 found evidence consistent with this mechanism. The creative cliff illusion was attenuated among those with high levels of everyday creative experience (study 6) and after a knowledge intervention that increased awareness of the effect (study 7). Demonstrating the impact of creativity beliefs on downstream performance, study 8 found that declining creativity beliefs negatively influenced task persistence and creative performance, suggesting that people underinvest in ideation. This research contributes to work on prediction in the creative domain and demonstrates the importance of understanding creativity beliefs for predicting creative performance.

在八项研究中，我们测试了人们是否理解自己的创造力的时程。先前的文献发现，创意在整个构想过程中趋于提高。在这里，我们将人们的信念与他们的实际创造力进行了比较。与先前的研究一致，我们发现人们的创造力总体上保持恒定，或在构想过程中有所提高。但是，人们的信仰与现实不符。我们一直发现人们期望自己的创造力随着时间而下降。我们将这种错误预测称为创造性悬崖错觉。研究1发现了在整个构思任务中这种效果的初步证据。我们在具有高领域相关知识的样本（研究2）中发现了进一步的证据（回顾性研究（研究3）和多天研究（研究5））。我们认为产生这种效果是因为人们错误地将创造力（创意的新颖性和实用性）与创意产生（产生创意的能力）联系起来。研究4发现与该机制一致的证据。在日常创作经验较高的人群（研究6）中，以及在进行知识干预以提高对效果的认识之后（研究7），创造性悬崖错觉已减弱。研究8展示了创造力信念对下游绩效的影响，发现下降的创造力信念会对任务的持久性和创造力绩效产生负面影响，表明人们对观念的投资不足。这项研究有助于在创意领域进行预测，并证明了理解创意信念对预测创意绩效的重要性。