Original Thinkers Can Be More Dishonest [pdf] (2011) | Hacker News Reader

Original Thinkers Can Be More Dishonest [pdf] (2011)

apa.org

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This paper uses the Gough Creativity Scale to measure creativity in participants.

The Gough Creativity Scale asks people to check the adjectives that apply to them.

If you check "Honest" that is -1 for your creativity rating.

These results are built into the pre-assumptions of the self-assessment metric the study used for a creative rating.

Therefore the study uses circular reasoning and is invalid.

That's a bias, but it's not sufficient to guarantee that the highest "creativity" scores show a lower prevalence of self-reported honesty than the lower scores. It could easily be the other way around.

If I measured creativity in a group of test subjects using the Gough Creativity Scale and found that, e.g., the people in the top 10% of measured creativity were Honest at double the rate of the bottom 90%, would that finding be invalid because of the design of the Gough Creativity Scale?

#1. "Evil Genius? How Dishonesty Can Lead to Greater Creativity"

Psychological Science published online 18 February 2014

"Abstract: We propose that dishonest and creative behavior have something in common: They both involve breaking rules. Because of this shared feature, creativity may lead to dishonesty (as shown in prior work), and dishonesty may lead to creativity (the hypothesis we tested in this research). In five experiments, participants had the opportunity to behave dishonestly by overreporting their performance on various tasks. They then completed one or more tasks designed to measure creativity. Those who cheated were subsequently more creative than noncheaters, even when we accounted for individual differences in their creative ability (Experiment 1). Using random assignment, we confirmed that acting dishonestly leads to greater creativity in subsequent tasks (Experiments 2 and 3). The link between dishonesty and creativity is explained by a heightened feeling of being unconstrained by rules, as indicated by both mediation (Experiment 4) and moderation (Experiment 5)"

https://msbfile03.usc.edu/digitalmeasures/wiltermu/intellcon... ( pdf )

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#2. "Computational Evidence that Self-regulation of Creativity is Good for Society" 11 Aug 2014

http://arxiv.org/pdf/1408.2512.pdf ( pdf )

My anecdotal experience:

In games with "choice" and "morals" (Fable, Black and White, The Sims) I often chose evil. Evil choices attracted me more. From this study, I'm thinking they might be more creative. I call myself a "programmer" and think myself a "creative," not a "software engineer."

By contrast, my dad and some of my friends went for the good guys in video games, and they don't call themselves creatives.

Just anecdote. Still this study offers an explanation for something that's bugged me for years: how am I attracted to evil choices in video games?

I have in fact noticed that most of my friends are more honest than me. Everybody seems generally more candid, more honorable, more trustworthy than myself.

So I can see the day coming where I'm gonna have to face the facts and admit I'm a big phony.

Correlation is not causation.

true. but either way this is an interesting correlation. No one said it implied causation.

I take that as a compliment.

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