A Connection Between Being Creative and Being Dishonest??

by Meredith Maslich

According to an article in Fast Company magazine, The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology recently published an article claiming that there is a connection between creativity and a flexible moral code:

At first, the authors collected data at an ad agency, where 99 employees with jobs requiring assorted levels of creativity were surveyed on how likely they’d engage in unethical behavior, such as stealing office supplies or inflating an expense report. The more creative the job, the higher the self-reported dishonesty,

Fast Company is a business magazine, so most of their comparisons are between unethical business dealings (Enron, Ponzi Schemes, etc) and the creativity it took to pull them off, but the article does reference Mike Daisey in the opening paragraph, dubbing him the “King of Creative License”.

What I found most interesting about the study is that it looked at not just inherently creative people, but people who’d been put into a creative mindset:

[Researchers] induced a “creative mindset” in some subjects–using word scrambles and the like–to determine if creativity might temporarily promote dishonesty. All participants were then given a set of matrices to solve and allowed to grade their own work. Each correct answer earned a quarter of one cent. “The average number of matrices by which participants overstated their performance was greater in the creative-mindset condition … than in the control condition,” according to the paper. In other words: “a creative mindset promotes dishonesty.”

The authors believe the mechanism at work is something called “moral flexibility.” “Our creativity lets us come up with more reasons for why behaving unethical is not morally problematic,” Gino says. That’s not to say that accounting drones are, by default, more upstanding than artists, designers, writers, and poets. It’s the circumstances that count. 

As Fast Company points out, its hard to make too many generalizations from these studies, which were based on paying broke college students, but it does make some interesting points, nonetheless.

Personally I’ve always felt like I had a special gift at using my creativity to get out of trouble or rationalize my behavior. Or, I mean, I did. When I was younger. Not now. Now, all of those crazy things that happen to explain why I’m late to work, missed a meeting, or couldn’t meet a deadline are totally true. I just have a really weird life.

But I want to know what you think about this study – do you see a link between creativity and flexible ethics?