Last week, an interesting psychology paper was published, titled “The Dark Side of Creativity: Original Thinkers Can Be More Dishonest”. Written by Francesca Gino of Harvard University and Dan Ariely of Duke University, the paper’s abstract includes:
Creativity is a common aspiration for individuals, organizations, and societies. Here, however, we test whether creativity increases dishonesty. We propose that a creative personality and a creative mindset promote individuals’ ability to justify their behavior, which, in turn, leads to unethical behavior.
In 5 studies, we show that participants with creative personalities tended to cheat more than less creative individuals and that dispositional creativity is a better predictor of unethical behavior than intelligence (…)
The results provide evidence for an association between creativity and dishonesty, thus highlighting a dark side of creativity.
The full, 47-page study can be downloaded from Harvard (note: PDF file) but I doubt you’d want to do that. It’s a long and technical read.
Harvard Business School has a short review of the paper that’s much easier to read.
