Looking at the 'Dark Side' of Creativity

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Not all cheaters are creative. But apparently enough creative people cheat to interest researchers like Francesca Gino. Professor Gino is a behavioral economist at the Harvard Business School in Massachusetts. "There are actually a lot of examples in the literature, novels, movies, comic books about this idea of the evil genius, but really no empirical evidence for this relationship." Behavioral economists use ideas from psychology to study how people make economic choices. Professor Gino tested volunteers to see how creative they were. Then she tested them in situations involving small amounts of money, where they could earn extra by cheating. For example, they took a test and had to copy their answers onto another paper. But on that other paper the correct answers were already lightly marked, supposedly by mistake. The test-takers knew they would earn more for correct answers. They were led to believe they could cheat without getting caught. The results showed that the more creative people were more likely to cheat. By comparison, people who were more intelligent but less creative were not more likely to cheat. Professor Gino says creative people are better at creating excuses to justify their actions to themselves. "What we find is that that creativity leads people to be more morally flexible, so they are much more able to come up with justification for the behavior that they're about to engage in and as a result, they are more likely to cheat." She says workplaces that value creativity also create openings for that moral flexibility. Original thinkers may be less likely to follow all the rules. "We think that creativity really helps people resolve this conflict between something that is more longer term --which is the idea of being good and moral -- and then something that is more short term, [which] is the idea of advancing your own self-interest. And that does not necessarily mean getting money out of cheating, but it could also be getting other types of pleasures or utilities." The study shows the "dark side" of creativity: "So it's not that we are trying to say that people shouldn't be creative, we are trying to say that they should be creative but they should be thinking about the fact that their creativity can be used for the wrong reasons." Her research with Dan Ariely at Duke University appears in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. For VOA Special English, I'm Alex Villarreal. (Adapted from a radio program broadcast 14Dec2011)