Creative people are more inclined to lie and deceit
Last reviewed: 23.04.2024
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A new American study suggests that creative or original people are less honest and more prone to deception than other people, perhaps because they are better at inventing excuses to "explain" or "justify" their actions.
The author of the study, Dr. Francesca Gino of Harvard University and co-author Dr. Dan Arieli of Duke University, write about their findings in the journal Personality and Social Psychology.
Greater creativity helps people solve difficult tasks in many areas, but a creative spark can also lead people to follow unethical principles when seeking solutions to problems.
Gino and Arili write that, despite the fact that dishonesty and creativity are widely discussed in the media, the relationship between them has not been explored scientifically.
For their research, scientists first assessed the creativity of participants and intelligence with the help of recognized psychological tests. Then the participants were invited to participate in five series of experiments, in which they received a small amount of money only for the correct answers in the tests. Moreover, the more correct answers, the more was the amount of remuneration.
In one of the experiments, the participants were given sheets with questions about common knowledge and asked to round off the correct answers, and then transfer these results to another sheet, after giving the first sheet to the examiner. On the second sheet, there were weak tracks on the correct answers (thus, the participants had the opportunity to deceive and pretend that their answers were the same as before).
In another experiment, the participants were given drawings with a diagonal line and scattered points on either side of the line. They had to say which side had more points. About 200 trials were carried out, half of which was almost impossible to say which side has more points. But the participants were told that they would be paid ten times more for each test, if they say that the points were larger on the right (the amount was 5% versus the initial 0.5%).
In their experiments, scientists found that creative individuals are more likely to deceive than their lesser-ordinary partners, and that creativity is the best predictor of dishonesty than intelligence.
In addition, scientists have found that participants with creative thinking often behave dishonestly, compared with the control group. This suggests that creativity has the reverse side of the coin.
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