Creativity is not just for artists, musicians, writers, and scientists. Each of us depends on our creative faculties each day as we negotiate problems in work, decorate our homes, deal with family crises and interact with others in both personal and professional capacities. In fact, as I've mentioned in previous posts, we need to hone our creative abilities (at the individual, corporate, and societal levels) if we are going to thrive in the rapid-change climate of the 21st century. This is why, according to top headhunters, creativity is one of the most sought-after traits in CEOs today. But is creativity also associated with dishonesty and unethical behavior?
Earlier this week, the Harvard Business School released the findings of a working paper entitled "The Dark Side of Creativity: Original Thinkers Can Be More Dishonest." Francesca Gino of Harvard Business School and Dan Ariely of Duke's Fuqua School of Business reported that, across five studies conducted in both the laboratory and the field, creative subjects were more likely to take liberties with the truth than their less creative counterparts, especially when lying would lead to increased personal gains (such as money).
The authors of this paper suggest that two factors associated with creativity -- the ability to think outside the box (divergent thinking) and cognitive flexibility -- may account for this propensity toward dishonesty. The ability to think outside the box may allow the creative individual to envision novel and original ways to bypass moral rules, while cognitive flexibility may allow them to reinterpret their behavior in a way the justifies moral transgressions.
The idea that creative individuals are not always guided by a moral or ethical compass is not new. Back in the latter decades of the 19th Century, a set of prominent philosophers, doctors and sociologists popularized a theory that suggested both creative geniuses and violent criminals shared a set of "degenerate genes."
This degeneracy theory of creativity was supported by "evidence." The Italian criminologist and surgeon Cesare Lombroso published a book called "The Man of Genius" in which he catalogued the eccentric and often immoral behavior of past creative luminaries. Scientists and artists, he charged, alter the truth in their own interest. Lombroso concluded, "Unfortunately, goodness and honor are rather the exception than the rule among exceptional men, not to speak of geniuses."
Besides Lombroso's anecdotal evidence, sociologist Robert Nisbet reported that the degenerate genes of creative geniuses and criminals could be physically detected in their similar odd skull shapes. Lumps on the skull were believed to indicate character traits and defects, according to the then-popular pseudoscience of phrenology. To add fuel to the fire, Warren Babcock, a prominent New York physician, wrote in an 1895 article in The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease that the dire consequences of being born with degenerate genes included early death, a life of criminality, mental derangement and (less frequently) startling the world by scientific discovery or great contributions in art, music or literature.
In more modern times, researchers have also made a connection between creativity and moral laxness. Hans Eysenck, the influential English-German psychologist believed that creative individuals were characterized by a personality factor he called "psychoticism." This trait is associated with lack of empathy, a thwarting of conventional norms, and assorted anti-social behaviors. Several empirical studies indicate that creative people, as well as psychopaths, have higher than average scores on a measure of this trait.
Additional research conducted at Berkeley in the 1970s sought to measure the personality of creative individuals by testing thousands of subjects from different creative professions and determining which of 300 adjectives these subjects most often endorsed as describing themselves. The Creative Personality Scale, which is still widely used, was formulated out of the thirty adjectives that most highly predicted the self-reported personality traits of creative people in these IPAR studies. The adjective "honest" was among the most predictive, but it was negatively associated with creativity; that is, creative individuals saw themselves as decidedly not honest!
That brings us up to the recently-reported studies from the Harvard Business School in which Gino and Ariely found that creative people were more likely than less creative people to fudge the truth when it led to personal gain. So what does this connection between creativity and potential unscrupulous or dishonest behavior mean? Is the quest to hone our creative aptitude (as I advocate in my recent book, "Your Creative Brain") or to hire creative CEOs and employees misguided? If we enhance our collective creative skills, will we become less honest individuals, corporations and societies?
Please weigh in on this, and I'll present my own answer in an upcoming post.
Follow Shelley Carson, Ph.D. on Twitter: www.twitter.com/DrShelleyCarson
Trisha Gura: Genius: How Genetic Is It?
Study: Creative Minds May Be Cheaters | News | The Harvard Crimson
The Weird Rules of Creativity - Harvard Business Review
Andrew Malcolm, Creative (And Dishonest) As Always | Media Matters ...
The Dark Side of Creativity- Are Original Thinkers More Dishonest ...
The Dark Side of Creativity: Original Thinkers Can be More ...
My answer: he flouts convention. Not cruel, but not complying w/ the letter of the law.
My ACC squeaker doesn't go off the reactance deep end with that statement.
According to Wikipedia, "Reactance is an emotional reaction in direct contradiction to rules or regulations that threaten or eliminate specific behavioral freedoms. It can occur when someone is heavily pressured to accept a certain view or attitude. Reactance can cause the person to adopt or strengthen a view or attitude that is contrary to what was intended and also increases resistance to persuasion. An example of such behavior can be observed when an individual engages in a prohibited activity in order to deliberately taunt the authority who prohibits it, regardless of the utility or disutility that the activity confers."
My dishonesty: I will steal ideas from everywhere like a sponge (in the absorb brainset) to fuel my imagination. If Gino wants to nail down the ceiling on my Skinner box with moral condemnations then I will fly out and bite her ankles to drop the hammer. I can do that because it is MY imagination. Nanny Nanny boo boo! (I'm getting better at dodging the "thought police.")
I find it extremely interesting that HBS came up with this abstract. HBS people are highly driven and ambitious and also have a level of intelligence that is high - after all, Harvard is Harvard. Intelligence is a type of creativity - maybe not creativity in the ability to paint and draw well, but creativity in the ability to take an idea and present it in a novel way that serves a purpose.
HBS students attend the school to broaden their social network and to learn about business of course. But is business not a creative way to monopolize on financial gain? And isnt financial gain usually driven by a need for personal gain? I wont make a generalization about HBS people being dishonest - but I think it is highly possible for people with an overly-ambitious pursuit of personal gain to have an ill-set of morals and values resulting in dishonesty.
"The Kobayashi Maru is a Starfleet training exercise designed to test the character of cadets in the command track at Starfleet Academy...The test's name is occasionally used among Star Trek fans or those familiar with the series to describe a "no-win scenario." The "no-win scenario" is also known as a "double-bind. Double binds are often utilized as a form of control without open coercion—the use of confusion makes them difficult to respond to or resist. The essence of a double bind is two conflicting demands, each on a different logical level, neither of which can be ignored or escaped. This leaves the victim torn both ways, so that whichever demand they try to meet, the other demand cannot be met. "I must do it, but I can't do it" is a typical description of the double bind experience." (Anterior Cingulate Cortex Dissonance).
"Double binds can be extremely stressful and become destructive when one is trapped in a dilemma and punished for finding a way out. But making the effort to find the way out of the trap can lead to emotional growth."
The "anti-social" way out of this "social trap"? Two middle fingers erected in the upright position. Two birds in the hand are worth two in the bush aka "Restorative Justice."
Long run loss happens with short sight.
Just because it rains 15 minutes after I've run around in a circle five times, doesn't mean that I caused it to rain.
If you look at successful criminals, you will find that the majority of them are more intelligent than average...but that does not mean that intelligence causes criminal behavior. In just makes you more likely to be successful at it than a criminal of average or below-average intelligence.
Creativity and morality are independant faculties as well. Someone who is creative---like the person who is highly intelligent---is going to be more likely to be successful should they decide to begin exploiting or deceiving people.
...and therefore are more likely to repeat the behavior than people who are more likely to get caught at it, and experience negative consequences.
Or are they including the "creative accounting" of so many corporations who have trashed the US?
Li, wanting to appear truthful for your own personal gain.
Yi, doing what is right on the basis of how you would like to be treated in return.
Ren, based on the most sincere form of empathy toward all others that are different from you in age, gender, culture, experience, family, etc."
"That brings us up to the recently-reported studies from the Harvard Business School in which Gino and Ariely found that creative people were more likely than less creative people to fudge the truth when it led to personal gain."
Can we deduce what level of Confucian honesty, Gino and Ariely reported from?
I do believe there is a correlation between various degrees of anti-social behavior (non-conformist/ pro-self) and creativity.
My automatic thoughts on this, which are no doubt owed to material from Shelley’s class, are that lying and cheating are adaptive behaviors. I believe lying and cheating are rooted to a broader desire to persuade or succeed. Persuasiveness requires a degree of intelligence (understanding other’s point of view) and if the persuasive intent breeches existing norms then it requires innovation (creativity). This would be an adaptive behavior with potential for genetic transmutation—lying and cheating would be a maladaptive (from a social perspective) predisposition of persuasive/innovative personalities; otherwise a consequence of creative genetics.
I pretty much derive this view from Dr. Carson’s Shared-Vulnerability Model. It will be interesting to see how she responds.