Harvard Business School Study Links Creativity with Dishonesty

A Harvard Business School (HBS) associate professor recently conducted a study to try to determine whether creative types may actually have lower ethical standards when it comes to making money. In short, the answer she found was yes.

“There’s been a lot of anecdotal evidence linking creativity with dishonesty, but without much empirical evidence,” HBS professor Francesca Gino told the Boston Globe. And so she decided to conduct a series of experiments with several hundred college students to determine just what role creativity and intelligence play in lowering ethical standards, the Globe reported last week. The findings of Gino’s report, entitled “The Dark Side of Creativity: Original Thinkers Can Be More Dishonest,” were published in the most recent issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

For the purposes of the study, students had to answer questionnaires measuring creativity and intelligence and then self-report their performance in a range of experiments. They were paid a flat fee for participation in the study and then received additional compensation based on the results they reported.

Gino found that participants who scored high on a creativity questionnaire were more likely to inflate their results on various tasks in order to earn more money, according to the Globe article. There was not, however, a corresponding link between intelligence and dishonesty – that is, those who scored high for intelligence but not creativity were no more likely to lie than those who scored lower for intelligence.

In an experiment that involved solving math problems, 49 percent of those with high creativity scores overstated their performance to earn a few extra dollars, as compared with 27 percent of those with low to average creativity scores. Another experiment involved participants rolling dice and then reporting the numbers they rolled. Again, those with high creativity scores had higher self-reported performance than those with low creativity.

“When you’re a creative person, you can use that creativity to come up with reasons for why unethical behaviors may be okay,” Gino told the Globe in interpretation of her findings. “Crossing ethical boundaries may not be as problematic,” she continued.

Self-rationalization can be an inherent part of the creative process, the Globe article suggested, as when people look for ways to lower their tax bill or come up with a new advertising campaign. “Anyone who’s thinking creatively at [the] moment may be more likely to engage in unethical behavior,” Gino said.

Based on the study findings, she cautioned that creative types may want to become a little more self-aware, if not less creative. “Knowing that creativity can have this side effect should make us stop and think more carefully when we’re faced with an ethical decision,” she suggested.

For Gino’s complete study, click here.

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Harvard Business School Study Links Creativity with Dishonesty

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