Monday, December 03, 2012
Further Evidence Links Creativity, Dishonesty
psmag.com: The Dark Side of Creativity: Original Thinkers Can Be More Dishonest is the title of a provocative paper published precisely one year ago. Francesca Gino of Harvard Business School and Dan Ariely of Duke University presented evidence that highly creative people are more likely to engage in unethical activities, apparently because they are better at finding ways to justify such behavior.
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This is a very interesting article. I find it interesting that the writer believes that those who are highly creative are linked directly with dishonesty. I think this is thought because it is clear that those who are creative are on a different wave length from those who are not. Those who are creative can think of reasons for why something was done and be VERY convincing about it. We see it here everyday. Artist sometimes do something because it looks pretty, or because its the first thing that comes to mind, and then when needed to explain why...they justify it with a statement that is not always true. Everyone who is an artist has done it. We all do. However, that is not to say that artists are dishonest in a negative way. I think that everyone in this world is dishonest. Artists just know how to creatively justify a choice...
I really enjoyed the last sentence in Nate's comment. Well, I guess I could see some correlation between creativity and dishonesty, but really only in minor things. Like Nate said, an artist will create a piece and then maybe give it some justification that wasn't actually the original intention. Actually, I think being able to justify things spontaneously is a strength. I do not however, find the dishonesty found in the cheaters in the study as a strength, though I am interested to look more into why it was more common among those who scored creatively. I do not think that dishonesty should be labeled on a ll creative people and I do think you can be ethical and creative at the same time.
I don't think it is necessarily saying that highly creative people are directly linked to dishonesty. It seems to be saying that creative people have a easier time justifying their dishonesty than those who are not creative. Though this article makes it seem like the test was not very thorough. Their test subjects were 566 people, all college students. Right away you don't have a very diverse population in your study. I wonder how the results would vary if you expanded the age range to a wider breadth of people.
This theory is very interesting. Creative people usually think out of the box so I can see how they could come up with spur of the moment stories to justify unethical behavior. Now, I'm not taking about criminal activity here, but I can see how those that think quick on their feed can come up with little while lies better than the average person who is fairly mundane and even boring. Creative people are just more interesting to me so I can really see how they can use this to their advantage. I by no means think this is black and white. I don't think all creative people are unethical or vise versa. I just think this study shows that it leans towards those facts to some degree.
I agree with Tiffany... a group of 566 college students is not a very diverse group of people to be testing. I would be interested to know what the distribution of majors was, the gender distribution, and even what time of year it was that this study was completed. College students have such a different lifestyle and different responsibilities and priorities than many people out of college don't have. One group of majors may have had a final the next day and so when te error message popped up, just ended the survey because of time constraints. Maybe there was a Art Major party the night before the survey, and all of them are nursing hangovers and just wanted the survey to end. Yea, they are silly reasons, but with such a small sample size, I'm not sure if such strong conclusions can be drawn. The article also doesn't give any percentages or hard numbers for what the results are; the article just says "significantly higher" or significantly lower". If "significantly" means 2% or 3% to those who ran this study, that's only 15-20 people who tipped the scales, which doesn't seem to be a hugely significant number.
Of course, all of this might just be me defending creative people since I tend to work with a lot of them and don't really think they are less moral or more dishonest. But I do question this study, since it doesn't seem to be large or diverse enough to draw the conclusion that it does.
Wow. I am not sure how I feel about this. I can state that I think this article is wrong, that I believe I am moral and creative, but the article even states that self-perception did not line up with actual behaviors. I can understand this argument a bit more with the explanation about exploring all your options, which could lead to dishonesty, since creativity is so inspired by curiosity.
I definitely agree with this. I consider myself to be a creative person. Generally, I don't consider myself dishonest, but that is because I don't lie without motivation. There are those that do, and that is when lying becomes pathological. However, if I am motivated or feel that I have to lie in a certain situation, I definitely see the lie as more as a creative endeavor than for what it is at face value. It requires strategic planning, weighing one option over the other in terms of what would work best.
I know this all sounds terrible, but I believe it is something many creative people do, though few will readily admit to it. I am not promoting dishonesty, but rather saying that a creative mind will probably have an easier time making their dishonesty believable than a less creative mind.
This study points out two possible human traits (ok, two possible human traits exhibited by a small sample of under-developed minds soaking up the sun on the west coast of the most privileged country in the world). The first shouldn't surprise anyone. “Self-perceptions of morality were not related to actual honest behavior.” We are all hypocrites. A brief study of history or world religion would suffice to prove that hypothesis. But linking creativity to dishonesty is a new one on me. I have to question a little the study's definition of creativity. Finding an idiomatic commonality between three words is as much a study of one's cultural upbringing as a test of their ability untie a Gordian Knot. But not being a behavioral psychologist, I will have to defer to the experts that this study proves something. And if so, I wonder if dishonesty and creativity might be linked in our minds out of necessity. The way artists see the world is often intentionally dishonest. I don't think a guitar really looked that way to Braque or Picasso, but they had no qualms painting it that way. The act of storytelling and theatre are in some ways exercises in dishonesty. We believe the stories and actor tells us or see the guitar in the painting because we have agreed for that moment that there is something more to honesty than what our common everyday understanding of truth can allow. I would argue that what is being tested here is not dishonesty, per se. Whether someone is willing to take extra credit for work that was lost through no fault of their own is a question of ethics at best, and a measure of masochism at worst. Like most of our attempts to unravel the mystery of human behavior, this study suffers from the problem that human behavior is both what we do and what other people see us do, and the two are never the same thing.
Seems legit. When I was little, and this is still true just not to the same extent, I could get my friends to do anything with me/ or for me. I don't think this means dishonesty though..... just clever manipulation. Its an ability, being convincing is a useful skill like any other. It just revolves around controlling people so it gets a kind of bad connotation. I think I basically just agree with Nate except I would broaden it. He was talking exclusively about artists. I think this applies to anyone creative. Most of my family works in academia and are very creative, they might be bad example cause they are also all terrible people, but they are very very good at manipulation. I definitely agree with the data in the article
I completely see the correlation between creativeness and dishonesty. Creative people generally see past what is seen on the surface and see things not just on black and white but in many many shade of gray. Creative people are generally more passionate about things and are willing to stand up for what they believe in more so then none creative people and the fact that their brain works differently see ways around certain things more easily than others.
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