The eyes of creativity: Impact of social comparison and individual creativity on performance and attention to others’ ideas during electronic brainstorming

•A social comparison X individual creativity hypothesis is tested on performance and attention.•Attention to others’ ideas in electronic brainstorming is measured by eye-tracking.•High creative individuals are more original in upward than downward comparison.•A similar interaction effect is observed on attention to the partner’s ideas. 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.