Are Creative People More Dishonest? - Carmen Nobel via HBS Working Knowledge
Steve Jobs was theorethically channeling Picasso when he said ‘Good artists borrow, great artists steal,’ but he may have been onto something. It turns out that creatives are more likely to cheat, according to new research by Francesca Gino and Dan Ariely:
Francesca Gino
Carmen Nobel via HBS Working Knowledge
Is there a link between creativity and unethical behavior?
There certainly is, according to an article in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. In “The Dark Side of Creativity: Original Thinkers Can Be More Dishonest,” the authors report that inherently creative people tend to cheat more than noncreative types. Furthermore, they show that inducing creative behavior tends to induce unethical behavior.
It’s a sobering thought in a corporate culture that champions out-of-the-box thinking.
“In any organization, especially in contexts that are global and very competitive, there is so much focus on trying to be innovative and creative,” says Francesca Gino, an associate professor at Harvard Business School, who wrote the article with Dan Ariely of Duke University. “But is creativity always good? We often hear of cases in which people use innovative behavior to create a sense that what they’re doing is not morally wrong. So, Dan and I started wondering whether there is something about the creative process that triggers dishonest behavior. Specifically, we decided to explore the idea that enhancing the motivation to think outside the box can drive individuals toward more dishonest decisions when facing ethical dilemmas.”
[…]
Overall, the researchers learned, the higher the creativity required for the job, the higher the level of self-reported dishonesty.
Then, through a series of experimental studies, the researchers tested—and largely proved—the theory that creative people are more likely to exhibit unethical behavior when faced with ethical dilemmas.
[…]
“These were simple studies, but they were powerful in showing that our ability to justify things is significantly greater if we are in a creative mindset or when we are creative people,” Gino says.
That said, Gino is quick to add that she and Ariely are not suggesting that companies put the kibosh on innovation in order to keep dishonesty at bay.
“We’re not saying that creativity is bad,” Gino says. “But we are saying that it can lead to problems. And so the question from a manager’s perspective is: How do you get the good outcomes of creativity without triggering the bad outcomes?”
While “The Dark Side of Creativity” doesn’t answer that question directly, Gino hopes that the research will remind innovative organizations not to give short shrift to ethics.
“As a manager, if you’re highlighting the importance of being creative and innovative, it’s important to make sure that you’re stressing the presence of ethics, too,” Gino says. “Dan and I are of the hope that managers will start thinking about how to structure the creative process in such a way that they can keep ethics in check, triggering the good behavior without triggering the bad behavior.”
Perhaps the creatives’ world view involves a relaxation of the ‘principles’ that constrain people with other perspectives? What is they are inseparable? I don’t think you can chase away the devils of creativity without losing the angels, as well.
The larger lesson is that the brain is a neural tangle of near infinite possibility, which means that it spends a lot of time and energy choosing what not to notice. As a result, creativity is traded away for efficiency; we think in literal prose, not symbolist poetry. And this is why constraints are so important: It’s not until we encounter an unexpected hindrance – a challenge we can’t easily resolve – that the chains of cognition are loosened, giving us newfound access to the weird connections simmering in the unconscious. Here are the scientists: Consistently, these studies show that encountering an obstacle in one task can elicit a more global, Gestalt-like processing style that automatically carries over to unrelated tasks, leading people to broaden their perception, open up mental categories, and improve at integrating seemingly unrelated concepts.
Source: Wired
The difficulty of always feeling that you ought to be doing something is that you tend to undervalue the times when you’re apparently doing nothing, and those are very important times. It’s the equivalent of the dream time, in your daily life, times when things get sorted out and reshuffled. If you’re constantly awake work-wise you don’t allow that to happen. One of the reasons I have to take distinct breaks when I work is to allow the momentum of a particular direction to run down, so that another one can establish itself.
- Brian Eno, cited by Eric Tamm in Brian Eno: His Music and The Vertical Sound Of Color
I try to take walks everyday, to let the world wash over me and wipe out work thoughts for a while.
If I could use two words to describe what it is that I enjoy it is that I love to be sneakily outrageous … [It may be that] I have decided an idea has no practical worth and would never be likely to be adopted seriously (like most of my ideas), but I like it anyway.
Source: The New York Times
We’re in the abstract-expressionist era of management.
Source: The New York Times
Color Study Looks at Effects of Red and Blue by Pam Belluck
[via NY Times]]
‘If a new study is any guide, the color red can make people’s work more accurate, and blue can make people more creative. In the study, published Thursday on the Web site of the journal Science, researchers at the University of British Columbia conducted tests with 600 people to determine whether cognitive performance varied when people saw red or blue. Participants performed tasks with words or images displayed against red, blue or neutral backgrounds on computer screens. Red groups did better on tests of recall and attention to detail, like remembering words or checking spelling and punctuation. Blue groups did better on tests requiring imagination, like inventing creative uses for a brick or creating toys from shapes.’
Apparently linked to the mood that the colors naturally engender. Blue is calming — longer wave length light is the most pleasing and relaxing color, hence the creativity link. Red leads to more tension, hence better detail focus.
Source: The New York Times
Erratic inquiries of Stowe Boyd, who means well, despite everything.
