Elsevier

Thinking Skills and Creativity

Volume 9, August 2013, Pages 129-134
Thinking Skills and Creativity

Creative liars: The relationship between creativity and integrity

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tsc.2012.10.003Get rights and content

Abstract

Creativity is typically presented as a constructive activity. Some scholars have proposed the existence of malevolent creativity that has the potential to cause harm, either inadvertently or deliberately. But how do the values and beliefs of creative individuals influence malevolent behavior? In this study participants were given measures of creativity and self-reported integrity and then placed in a situation that required them to make a choice between delaying when they would receive their reward for participating in the experiment or immediately receiving their reward though the task was not complete. The results reinforce the significant negative link between observable integrity and creativity but also provide a significant negative connection between self-reported integrity and creativity. The implications of these findings challenge the prevailing wisdom of creativity being a benevolent construct.

Highlights

► Creativity was associated with integrity when measured as both a personality trait and as a behavioral test. ► Results reinforce the significant, negative link between self-reported integrity and creativity. ► Results also add a significant, negative connection between behavioral integrity and creativity. ► Study offers additional support for the existence of malevolent creativity.

Introduction

Creativity is a topic of study across many disciplines (e.g., Kaufman & Sternberg, 2010) and cultures (Kaufman & Sternberg, 2006). A consistent, basic definition (Kaufman, 2009) is that creativity is both new (or different, novel, or original) and appropriate to the task (or useful or relevant). Cultures vary on the value placed on different facets of creativity; Eastern cultures particularly consider moral goodness to be a key component (Niu & Sternberg, 2002). Yet across these many viewpoints, creativity is typically presented as a constructive activity. It is often associated with such positive personal attributes as humor and altruism (Vaillant & Vaillant, 1990), positive well-being (Carson, Bittner, Cameron, Brown, & Meyer, 1994), better mood (Amabile, Barsade, Mueller, & Staw, 2005), and resiliency (Metzl, 2009). Creativity is also often thought to be connected with personal development to such a degree that it is considered both a positive and necessary part of the human experience (Richards, 2007, Rogers, 1961). In addition, creativity is considered beneficial for society in general, as it is a key force in progress and is considered one of the top economic resources (Florida, 2002). Sternberg (2010) conceptualizes wisdom itself as utilizing aspects of creativity and intelligence for the common good by balancing self-interest with the interests of others.

More recently, however, a new theoretical approach has emerged that questions the inherent benevolence of creativity. Cropley, Kaufman, and Cropley (2008) and Cropley, Cropley, Kaufman, and Runco (2010) propose the idea of malevolent creativity, which is creativity that is designed with the intent of harming others. There are other, related concepts, such as negative creativity (Clark & James, 1999), which emphasize creative actions that have undesirable outcomes, regardless of intent. The roots of malevolent creativity can be seen in broader conceptions of the construct of creativity. For example, fostering creativity can also mean encouraging people to think in different ways than others. The end result can be violations of social norms and expectations; McLaren dubs being creative as a “quest for a radical autonomy apart from the constraints of social responsibility” (1999, p. 490). Can such a journey in the search of creativity lead toward less positive outcomes? Rothenberg (1990) hypothesized that the line between good and bad expression is crossed when creative behavior is used essentially to express negative personal aggression rather than as an artistic outlet. Indeed, some creative people report that their inspiration for engaging in their artistic activities is to redirect self-destructive behaviors (Neihart, 1998).

A wide variety of negative or malevolent acts can be creative. Extreme examples can be disturbing terrorist attacks, such as the innovative preparation and implementation that led to the 9/11 devastation, or other criminal behavior that uses creativity (Brower, 1999, Eisenman, 1999, Eisenman, 2008). Similarly, Lee and Dow (2011) found that physical aggression was correlated with the number of creative items linked with violence that a person would offer on a divergent test of creativity. Other examples include commonplace unethical behavior such as lying, committed by people who may value honesty but display unethical behavior for personal gain when given the opportunity (Gino & Ariely, 2011). Kaufman, Cropley, Chiera, and White (under review) studied how people perceive acts of varying malevolence. They found that people judged morally complex or ambiguous actions as being more creative than more straightforward actions (either benevolent or malevolent).

If creativity is a stable characteristic of an individual, as many have argued (Batey et al., 2010, Feist, 1998, Hennessey and Amabile, 2010), then further evidence for malevolent creativity may be found by examining creativity's relationship with “negative” personality factors. Harris, Reiter-Palmon, and Kaufman (under review) found that people with lower emotional intelligence were more likely to have malevolently creative ideas.

In addition, creativity has been associated with the broad personality factor of Disagreeableness (Burch et al., 2006, King et al., 1996) and the related facets of hostility (Feist, 1993, Feist, 1998) and arrogance (Silvia, Kaufman, Reiter-Palmon, & Wigert, 2011). Creativity in the arts has also been associated with being low in Conscientiousness (Wolfradt & Pretz, 2001) a factor that is associated with the tendency to be irresponsible, prone to take risk, and acting impulsively (Goldberg, 1993, Lynam et al., 2003). But in the realm of creative behavior, there is a necessity for a certain level of sensible risk-taking and impulsivity (Friedman and Förster, 2001, George and Zhou, 2007). It is important to realize that some concepts, such as impulsivity or low Conscientiousness, illustrate ways that someone primed to be creative may also be more at risk for demonstrating malevolent creativity since some of the same personality traits overlap with those associated with low integrity (Collins and Schmidt, 1993, Murphy, 2000).

Before the link between integrity and creativity can be explored in depth, the basic construct of integrity needs to be defined. Notably, the phenomenon of integrity is not well construed (Sackett & Wanek, 1996). In accordance with the public usage of the word, the term integrity is used in reference to a single absolute morality instead of in reference toward the assumptions of one's value system in question. In an absolute context, the idea of integrity conveys no meaning between individuals with differing definitions of absolute morality, and becomes indeed a vague statement of one being a good or ethical person (Peterson & Seligman, 2004). Within the context of this study, we will say that others “have integrity” to the extent that they show a willingness to comply with rules, norms and expectations, according to an internalized set of values, beliefs, and principles they claim to possess (Murphy, 2005).

Often the concept of integrity can be confused with many philosophical facets, but probably none so much than as it is with honesty. Honesty refers to a facet of moral character that denotes the absence of lying or cheating and is defined by a close matching of what is being experienced and what is being expressed by the individual. Few studies have looked at how factors of integrity such as honesty are influenced by creativity. Gino and Ariely (2011) found that people with creative traits were more likely to manipulate the results of their tests than less creative people by lying more about how well they performed on each trial of the experiment. This tendency was especially true when there was ambiguity that could be interpreted in the favor of the more creative person. It was argued that this creativity then mediates a person's ability to justify cheating and therefore increases the extent that people would lie, leaving the authors to conclude from these results that creativity motivates dishonesty. In the same manner, Walczyk, Runco, Tripp, and Smith (2008) had students come up with solutions to scenarios in which deception would generally lead to successful outcomes. They found that telling many different lies correlated with divergent fluency (being able to derive many different ideas), which is related to creativity. Additionally, De Dreu and Nijstad (2008) studied creativity and conflict resolution and found that during competitive negotiation tactics, creativity was associated with integrity factors such as deception. Taken together, these findings suggest that some situational lying can be associated with certain components of increased creativity such as divergent thinking and cognitive flexibility.

How do the values and beliefs of creative individuals influence their behavior? If integrity is seen as the virtue of basing actions on an internally consistent framework of principles, then self-report integrity measures should theoretically reflect actual behavior. Yet people who show a tendency toward having low integrity, either behaviorally or in a personality measure of testing, will not necessarily exhibit that tendency in life situations (Ariely, 2008). Both anecdotally and empirically it has been shown that people seem to be more corruptible when they think they can get away with it (Gino et al., 2009, Mazar et al., 2008). What Gino and Ariely (2011) showed us was that creativity can play an important role in this phenomenon because it allows people to convince themselves they are not actually behaving without integrity as long as they do not overstep a self-designated boundary. However, this level of deception would likely be considered inconsequential “white lies,” (Hancock, Thom-Santelli, & Ritchie, 2004) since these lies only deviate from the truth by approximately 10%. In the tests of integrity that use an all-or-nothing framework, a lack of probity is unmitigated and therefore more difficult to rationalize. It is possible that creativity's mediating effect on lying, and by extension integrity, may depend on the measure chosen.

Based on past research on lying and malevolent creativity, we believe that when integrity is self-reported and assumed to be a personality trait, it will be significantly and negatively related to creativity (H1). Furthermore, we believe that behavioral integrity will also be significantly and negatively related to creativity (H2).

Section snippets

Participants

Participants were volunteers from a public California university recruited to take an online survey via bulletin board and by e-mail. They were offered extra credit for participation in the study. There were a total of 566 participants (485 females and 81 males). There were 184 European Americans, 49 African Americans, 218 Hispanic Americans, 38 Asian Americans, 7 Native Americans, 10 Indians, 31 people of mixed ethnicity, and 29 people who declined to provide information about their ethnicity.

Procedure

Students were first given the creativity test and then the self-reported integrity scale followed by the demographic questionnaire. To check observable integrity, we gave the students an objective behavioral integrity test (OBIT). When they were finished with the other measures, they were shown a “Thank You” page that gave them two choices; they could click on a button to “return to survey” or they could click on a button to “receive extra credit”. When the mouse hovered over either button a

Results

Before analyzing the primary hypothesis, gender differences were assessed by t-tests with both the self-reported integrity and RAT scores as dependent variables. There were no significant difference between males and females for either self-reported integrity (t(564) = 7.06, p = n.s.) or the RAT (t(564) = 4.50, p = n.s.). In addition, a chi-square of independence was performed to examine the relationship between gender and the OBIT. The relation between these variables was also not significant, X2 (2, N

Discussion

The idea of malevolent creativity is a relatively new one (Cropley et al., 2008, Cropley et al., 2010); there is far more theoretical debate than empirical evidence. Much of the work to date on how integrity (or a lack thereof) is associated with creativity has treated integrity as an observable phenomenon (e.g., Gino & Ariely, 2011) without emphasizing the personality dimension of the issue. This study reinforces the significant, negative link between observable behavioral integrity and

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