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Creative people are more prone to lying and deception
Last reviewed: 01.07.2025
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New US research suggests that creative or original people are less honest and more likely to cheat than other people, possibly because they are better at coming up with excuses to "explain" or "justify" their actions.
Study author Dr. Francesca Gino of Harvard University and co-author Dr. Dan Ariely of Duke University report their findings in the journal Personality and Social Psychology.
Greater creativity helps people solve difficult problems in many areas, but the creative spark can also lead people to follow unethical principles when seeking solutions to problems.
Gino and Arily write that although dishonesty and creativity have been widely discussed in the media, the link between the two has not been scientifically examined.
For their study, the scientists first assessed the participants' creativity and intelligence using recognized psychological tests. The participants were then invited to take part in five series of experiments in which they received a small amount of money only for correct answers to tests. Moreover, the more correct answers there were, the greater the reward.
In one experiment, participants were given sheets of general knowledge questions and asked to round off the correct answers and then transfer those results to another sheet, after handing the first sheet to the examiner. The second sheet showed faint traces of the correct answers (thus giving participants the opportunity to cheat and pretend that their answers were the same as before).
In another experiment, participants were given pictures of a diagonal line with scattered dots on either side of the line. They had to say which side had more dots. There were about 200 trials, half of which made it nearly impossible to say which side had more dots. But participants were told they would be paid ten times more for each trial if they said there were more dots on the right (5% versus the original 0.5%).
In their experiments, the scientists found that creative individuals were more likely to cheat than their less creative counterparts, and that creativity was a better predictor of dishonesty than intelligence.
In addition, the researchers found that creative participants were more likely to behave dishonestly than the control group, suggesting that creativity has a downside.
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