چشم خلاقیت: تاثیر مقایسه اجتماعی و خلاقیت فردی بر عملکرد و توجه به ایده های دیگران در طول طوفان مغزی الکترونیکی

Abstract The present research aimed to examine how social comparison and individual differences in creativity might influence creative performance and attention paid to ideas generated by a partner during an electronic brainstorming session. After completing a creativity scale, forty-one psychology undergraduates generated ideas by computer with a remote partner/confederate presented as a student in either Arts (upward comparison) or Sciences (downward comparison) and who was instructed to give a list of pretested ideas. During the idea-generation task, the eye movements of each participant were tracked to measure the attention they paid to the ideas of their partner. As predicted, results showed that the quality (but not the quantity) of ideas was greater in upward than downward comparison, but only for high creative participants. Similar patterns were found for attention allocated to the partner’s ideas. We discuss the role of motivational and attentional processes for electronic brainstorming research.

1. Introduction Creativity is crucial in current real-world settings, as innovation is one of the survival conditions for organizations in a competitive and technological environment (Oldham & Da Silva, 2015). A greater number of creative ideas may emerge from people working together (Glăveanu, 2011), such as scientists who have to solve complex problems (Dunbar, 1995 and Michinov, 2012a), managers who have to generate new ideas to improve organization behaviors (West & Anderson, 1996), designers who have to imagine new products (Sutton & Hargadon, 1996), and so forth. In groups where individuals have to collaborate to be creative, comparison with other group members appears to be a crucial factor which may influence their own creativity (Paulus & Dzindolet, 2008) and the attention they pay to the ideas of their collaborators during a creative task (Paulus & Brown, 2007). To date, the impact of social comparison on creative performance and attention to others’ ideas during a computer-mediated idea-generation task has not been extensively examined while controlling for participants’ own creativity. In the scientific literature, creativity is commonly defined as the production of ideas, products, and solutions to problems that are both novel (original) and appropriate (feasible, useful) (Amabile, 1996, Paulus and Nijstad, 2003 and Sternberg and Lubart, 1999). To stimulate creativity, a group idea-generation technique was developed and popularized under the name of brainstorming (Osborn, 1957). This technique has been extended to electronic brainstorming, in which group members simultaneously produce as many ideas as possible on computers in a short period of time (Cooper et al., 1998, Dennis and Williams, 2003, DeRosa et al., 2007, Michinov, 2012a and Paulus et al., 2013). The goal of (electronic) brainstorming is to generate a list of ideas, applying four rules (Osborn, 1957): (a) focus on quantity, (b) withhold criticism, (c) welcome unusual ideas, and (d) combine and improve one’s own ideas and those of other participants (piggybacking). The latter rule consists of extending the line of thought suggested by someone else in the group, building on the ideas of others, improving, combining and integrating one’s own ideas and those produced by others ( Javadi et al., 2013 and Kohn et al., 2011). To be efficient, combination and integration processes require individuals to pay attention to others’ ideas. However, one of the problems of electronic brainstorming is that individuals focus on generating their own ideas instead of looking at the ideas produced by others ( Dennis et al., 2005). Although the extent to which group members allocate their attention to the ideas of others is considered to be an important factor in the creative performance of groups ( Ferreira et al., 2011, Paulus and Brown, 2007, Paulus and Yang, 2000 and Paulus et al., 2013), the manner of achieving this has not been thoroughly and explicitly examined in the brainstorming literature. Because allocating attention to the ideas of others is not spontaneous in electronic brainstorming, participants need to be given specific instructions ( Dugosh et al., 2000 and Paulus and Yang, 2000) or be motivated to do so ( de Dreu et al., 2011, de Dreu et al., 2008 and Paulus et al., 2011). One way of motivating participants to focus their attention on the ideas produced by others, and potentially improve creative performance, involves inducing social comparison by providing information about the performance of others ( Jung et al., 2010, Roy et al., 1996 and Shepherd et al., 1996), and more specifically of others who are better performers (upward comparison) ( Dugosh and Paulus, 2005 and Paulus and Dzindolet, 1993). To examine this issue further, the present research aimed to investigate the impact of social comparison on creative performance in an electronic brainstorming task, using eye tracking to evaluate in real time the attention paid to ideas produced by others. Additionally, we investigated the role of individual differences in creativity as a potential moderating variable, which surprisingly has not been explored in brainstorming research since the pioneering experiment in this domain (Taylor, Berry, & Block, 1958). The theoretical part of the paper is structured as follows. First, we describe the effects of social comparison on performance of cognitive tasks and on attention allocated to others’ ideas during electronic brainstorming. Next, we describe the potential moderating impact of individual differences in creativity on the relationship between social comparison and creative performance and attention to others’ ideas. Finally, we put forward a series of hypotheses based on the theoretical background.

. Conclusion The present findings support the cognitive–social–motivational model of group ideation (Paulus & Brown, 2007) which posits that attention is one of the crucial variables influencing cognitive tasks such as idea generation. To our knowledge, this study provides the first empirical evidence supporting this proposition, showing that upward comparison with a more creative partner boosts not only the performance of the most creative individuals, who generate ideas of better quality, but also the attention to the ideas of a partner. Our results show that social comparison, moderated by individual differences in creativity, has an impact not only on the quality of ideas produced, but also on the attention allocated to those produced by a partner, as measured in real-time by an eye-tracker. Because eye movements are correlated with self-reported social comparison (Ju & Johnson, 2010), and creative individuals are influenced by comparing themselves with a more creative partner, eye-tracking techniques open up new opportunities to link social comparison and brainstorming research in the future.