Creativity can mean skill in justifying immorality.
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In the mid 1990’s, Apple Computers was a dying company. Microsoft’s Windows operating system was overwhelmingly favored by consumers, and Apple’s attempts to win back market share by improving the Macintosh operating system were unsuccessful. After several years of debilitating financial losses, the company chose to purchase a fledgling software company called NeXT. Along with purchasing the rights to NeXT’s software, this move allowed Apple to regain the services of one of the company’s founders, the late Steve Jobs. Under the guidance of Jobs, Apple returned to profitability and is now the largest technology company in the world, with the creativity of Steve Jobs receiving much of the credit.
However, despite the widespread positive image of Jobs as a creative genius, he also has a dark reputation for encouraging censorship,“ losing sight of honesty and integrity”, belittling employees, and engaging in other morally questionable actions. These harshly contrasting images of Jobs raise the question of why a CEO held in such near-universal positive regard could also be the same one accused of engaging in such contemptible behavior. The answer, it turns out, may have something to do with the aspect of Jobs which is so admired by so many.
In a recent paper published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, researchers at Harvard and Duke Universities demonstrate that creativity can lead people to behave unethically. In five studies, the authors show that creative individuals are more likely to be dishonest, and that individuals induced to think creatively were more likely to be dishonest. Importantly, they showed that this effect is not explained by any tendency for creative people to be more intelligent, but rather that creativity leads people to more easily come up with justifications for their unscrupulous actions.
In one study, the authors administered a survey to employees at an advertising agency. The survey asked the employees how likely they were to engage in various kinds of unethical behaviors, such as taking office supplies home or inflating business expense reports. The employees were also asked to report how much creativity was required for their job. Further, the authors asked the executives of the company to provide creativity ratings for each department within the company.
Those who said that their jobs required more creativity also tended to self-report a greater likelihood of unethical behavior. And if the executives said that a particular department required more creativity, the individuals in that department tended to report greater likelihoods of unethical behavior.
The authors hypothesized that it is creativity which causes unethical behavior by allowing people the means to justify their misdeeds, but it is hard to say for certain whether this is correct given the correlational nature of the study. It could just as easily be true, after all, that unethical behavior leads people to be more creative, or that there is something else which causes both creativity and dishonesty, such as intelligence. To explore this, the authors set up an experiment in which participants were induced into a creative mindset and then given the opportunity to cheat.
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17 Comments
Add CommentI'm sorry but does it really take a study to realise that if you're going to weave a tangled web, ie. lie and get away with it, you're going to have to be pretty damned imaginative? The notion that this works the other way round and that lying makes you imaginative is just plain daft! People do not continue with behaviour that does not reward them so lying without imagination (and therefore being caught out) will quickly reduce or even eliminate it. There is every reason to believe that "I cannot tell a lie!" is not a moral decision but a mere statement of fact.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis is one of the most convoluted explanations of a tautology that I have ever seen. What is creativity except "thinking/behaving outside the box"?? And What is immorality except "thinking/behaving outside the box"? There is a VERY small difference here.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI believe it is the objective that causes the cheating, not the creativity. Goal oriented people might get more practice being creative, and being focused on objectives cannot be focused on empathy. Even the objective to optimize everyone's life can be blind to its trespasses. Try the experiment with no reason to cheat (prestige, money).
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFrom personal experience, I think creative people feel that they comprehend the rules so well, that they can flout them without adverse effects.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisExample: Crossing the street even if there is a red light, when there are no cars coming. Clever people feel that their understanding of rules is so good, they need not follow them if they feel their is a better way.
i.e. Creative people think they are not sheeple, which is true.
Your arrogance is adorable.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI can tell you honestly, that as a creative person who earns a living from advertising, the idea of creativity and dishonestly as a link is untrue.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Intellectual giants are moral pygmies" is an old well known saying .Any amount of modern research would only confirm old wisdom and not contradict it in any way.Thank you.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSince I did not see any numbers about how much dishonesty was increased, my guess is that it was very little. Even periodicals catering to the general public manage put in numbers like 10% increase without any difficulty, so why does S.A., which is supposedly catering to the science-minded, have trouble doing so? I think the scientists are trying to exaggerate the importance of their results rather than trying to communicate with the public, which is pretty disappointing.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI had similar thoughts to DonPaul as I read this.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI think the "thinking outside the box" thing could be an alternate explanation: not so much creative thinking increasing justification of immoral actions, as loosening of constraints on thinking bring about both. (I would still expect some justification to be going on, but after the fact.)
Another thought: where was the study done? Here in the US people are often encouraged to "think outside the box" to be creative, or to not "let people tell you what you can't do", the idea being that artificial or cultural restraints stifle creativity and/or accomplishment. I would suggest repeating this experiment on people not exposed to such ideas/culture to see if the creativity/immorality correlation is culturally-based.
Ok, Hitler was a painter, but Stalin and Mao only practiced in the art of killing.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFlaws abound in the article and the presumptions on which it is based.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAmong other things, it can be argued that there is a definitive difference between originality, imaginativeness and creativity.
And note the sea change in the article, starting off talking about immorality, then diverting into criminality. You start out thinking it's going to talk about great artists and foregoing social mores, then it turns into heads of multi million dollar corporations, most of whose corporate "creativity" comes from their employees and clandestine arrangements with other corporations, and the filthy dealings that characterize those clandestine arrangements.
Among other things, Steve Jobs was no creative genius. If he was so capable, why was Apple buying NeXT and not NeXT buying Apple? Throughout his career, he was known only for gimmickry and self promotion. He made nothing new, he designed nothing new. Being the head of a company that produces a thin cell phone is not necessarily a leap of personal quality.
And consider something crucial. How did the "studies" "analyze" this purported connection between creativity and criminal inclination? By looking at those societally declared "creative", and those are the ones who got famous! They didn't have some people draw pictures, decide which ones were the most imaginative, then watch to see if they stole the wallet of the person next to them! For the majority of individuals who couldn't be imaginative on their best day, becoming famous, popular and rich automatically equates with "creative", so, basically, they were just looking for those who got rich! So you have someone who slept their way to wealth; who stole someone else's ideas; who engaged in ruthless self-promotion, promising to give others a free ride on their coattails, as long as those others didn't admit they were a fraud! Basically, a tautology, they looked at those whose so called "creativity", at least in today's market, masks unethicality and criminality, and then prove that they engaged in unethicality and criminality.
Sweeping generalization! In any case I wish these writers would define their words more carefully. This one seems to have most interested in neo-Ricardian business types. I wouldn't call them "creative"--just bullying and unethical. Maybe sociopathic.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisArtists are creative--writers, painters, composers, etc. They seem to range all over the place in eccentricity and whether or not they prefer to be respectable. You couldn't call uxorious Bach, Mendelssohn, or the Wyeths unethical, immoral, disreputable or eccentric--but Gauguin and Wagner could represent the opposite end of the artistic personality.
OK. Travis Riddle is a creative person demonstrated by his research reports. Therefore he is an immoral, unethical, and/or criminal person. He should be reported to the appropriate religious/philosophical authority, the president, dean, and ethics department at Columbia University, and/or the NYPD.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis study is internally inconsistent and purports to test "honesty" when, in fact, it merely demonstrates the normal result of researchers unilaterally breaking an implicit contract with subjects who then retaliate:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this1. The researchers ask the subjects to perform, implicitly, to the best of their focused ability in executing a task involving creativity;
2. the subjects are then "rewarded" for their focused efforts by being given a randomly chosen -- meaning arbitrary, _unfocused_, and demeaning -- acknowledgement of their merit (which amount the subject then reports to the researchers and so on).
The "honesty" tested in this study appears to be a straw man when in fact, it is the researchers' ingenuous contract that subjects primed for creativity retaliate against. Subjects might be assessing a mere surcharge for the aggravation they've been subjected to here.
Of course, the academic researchers themselves were focused on testing for dishonesty in those slimy and suspect creative types and -- surprise, surprise -- that's what they found.
This article begs the question; are non-creative people more or less immoral than creative people? As a creative person I feel that I'm very moral-minded, my political persuasion is left wing, small-L liberal. I'm a very lateral thinker, I make connections, I see patterns of cause and effect, the amoral actions of much of our political leadership for example appalls me.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSo, it seems to me that there are different kinds of creativity and that it comes as an aspect of moral type, if your moral type is bad then you're likely to put your creativity to work for it, not the other way around; creativity doesn't necessarily engender amoral behaviour.
Since we are not more than " our brains that work purely physicaly" if we have a supper electric brain that to say creative, then it makes the rules but not let any one else do for him the rules.I am convinced that creativity is not to obay all the rules like a flock.Our culture call this dishonesty, or cheating, but in some occasions it is a good quality of brain to make the good interpretations for every cercumstanc as long as it is not causing harm to any one else but a to benifet the person and to the society.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisVery interesting article, though I don't fully agree with it. Let's be creative and apply the "inversion technique": how about renaming it as "unethical people tends to be more creative". It would match the content of the article as well, isn't it? It may turn out that dishonest people do have brain function altered and that's the reason why they are also specially gifted for creative tasks. You don't have to agree with my reflection, but let's be critic enough to keep the conclusions of this article in quarantine too.
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