The Effect of Social Comparison Feedback on Creative Performance and the Moderating Roles of Creative Self-Efficacy and Creative Personal Identity
How does social comparison feedback impact creative performance and do creative self-beliefs buffer or enhance the effects of feedback? We asked whether positive (v. negative) social comparison feedback influences subsequent creative performance, and whether creative self-beliefs, specifically creative-self efficacy or creative personal identity, moderates this association. Participants (N=201) were recruited from MTurk and responded to questions about their creative self-beliefs (i.e., creative self-efficacy and creative personal identity) and completed a creative performance task. Subsequently, they were given fake positive or negative social comparison feedback and completed another round of the creative performance task. After data collection, trained coders and two automated scoring methods were used to systematically evaluate participants’ creative performances. Data were analyzed using residualized change regression models. We found that creative personal identity buffered against negative feedback and protected future creative performance (β=0.20, p=.048). We replicated this finding using automated scoring of creative performance (β=0.34, p=.023). Moreover, we found that creative self-efficacy also buffered against negative feedback and protected future creativity when creative performance was assessed with automated scoring (β=0.15, p=.046). Results preliminarily suggest that people’s creativity was differentially impacted by social comparison feedback based on their creative self-beliefs.
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