Building the creative self: The sources of creative self-concept scale

• SoCSC is a valid, reliable tool for assessing how creative self-concept is built. • Social persuasion is the strongest individual predictor of creative self-concept. • Sources account for up to 69% of variance in creative self-concept. • Sources together form a general factor of general experiences with creativity. • Mastery experience functions as a reference facet that anchors the shared experiential basis of creative self-beliefs. Understanding how people form beliefs about their own creativity – referred to as the creative self-concept (CSC) – requires examining the informational sources that shape these self-assessments. In this paper, we introduce and validate the Sources of Creative Self-Concept Scale (SoCSC), a questionnaire adapted from self-efficacy research, designed to assess four theorized sources of CSC: mastery experience, vicarious experience, social persuasion, and physiological and emotional states. A sample of 558 adults completed measures of CSC (both global and trait-like) and the SoCSC. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses supported a four-factor structure corresponding to the proposed sources. All sources were significantly associated with CSC, with social persuasion emerging as the strongest individual predictor. Exploratory structural equation modeling further indicated that a general factor capturing shared variance across sources accounted for the majority of the variance in CSC, whereas source-specific contributions were comparatively limited. Our findings suggest that CSC is shaped by interrelated experiential and social influences rather than by isolated sources, with mastery experience providing a central experiential anchor for other sources of creative self-beliefs. Additionally, CSC sources appear to differ in their functional roles and prominence across gender. Women report significantly higher endorsement on the social persuasion subscale than men. The results are discussed in the context of Bandura’s self-efficacy theory.