Free Will to Imagine: Creative Agency as a Metacognitive Feeling
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Study design: Observational Study
Abstract: People routinely feel creative ownership over mental processes that are demonstrably shaped by forces outside themselves. We introduce creative agency—the sense of authorship and free will one experiences during creative cognition—as an undertheorized metacognitive feeling and develop a measure of it in the domain of music-evoked imagination. In an initial study (N = 247) and pre-registered replication (N = 219) with Prolific participants, we identify a reliable structure consisting of six distinct but related factors of creative agency and free will in imagination with good psychometric properties. Across studies, creative agency beliefs are robustly associated with absorption in music, musical reward sensitivity, and musical sophistication, suggesting that creative agency is integral to aesthetic experience rather than merely to creative production. These findings establish creative agency as a multidimensional construct characterized by stable individual differences, with implications for understanding aesthetic engagement, metacognition, creativity, and the subjective experience of authorship.
Institution: Princeton University
Language: English
Subfield: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7167208744