The dark side of creativity Flashcards
What is the paper that is related to this topic?
The dark side of creativity: Original Thinkers can be more dishonest Gino, F & D Ariely (2012).
What does uncertainty in a bonus compensation scheme affect?
It can affect employee dishonestly ( more likely to cheat) as opposed to paying a fixed amount of money.
Lets have a scenario where there are 2 groups
1) given a 2 digit number to remember
2) given a 7 digit number to remember
Then given a task
Then walked to another room to collect payment
On walk pass a cart with cake and fruit and have to order which you want once you have collected payment to eat later
What did they order?
Those in the 7 digit group more likely to order the cake because they feel they have put more effort into learning the 7 digit code, so will power more depleted and self control is reduced. The 2 digit group order fruit.
So what is one of the main factors that people cheat?
Depletion of will power ( if your tired or had to think hard about something or have had a nasty experience, the ability to resist temptation falls
What are 2 opposing views on self control?
1) Self control is like a battery, it depletes when you exert effort
2) others argue self control can get better with practice.
What is creativity?
When you come up with new ideas which are new and useful.
What makes someone creative ( this says in the reading) ?
Can say genetics
But mainly personality = divergent and cognitive flexibility.
What is divergent thinking and Cognitive flexibility?
Divergent thinking = ability to envision multiple solutions to problems.
Cognitive flexibility = applying knowledge to different contexts.
Are there external factors that affect someones creativity?
Yes - context in which your trying to be or asked to be creative is very important, if you have pressure or have deadlines, its impossible to be creative. - HENCE EXAMS ARE NOT MEANT TO BE CREATIVE.
What is a major danger to creativity?
Being shown how to solve a problem in a particular way makes you struggle generating solutions using a different approach.
What are some personality traits of creative people?
Arrogance, good liars,not modest.
Now moving on to the paper, what is the main finding of Gino & Ariely paper?
Essentially there is a strong link between creativity and dishonesty. Creative thinkers are better at rationalising dishonesty than uncreative thinkers ‘ thinking outside the box’ which can lead to unethical behaviour.
Are creative people rational?
They are unpragamtic and unconventional so this paper suggests probably not.
Why can we link creativity to dishonesty?
1) Creative people can think of ways to bypass rules ( cheat)
2) Creative people can think of ways to justify unethical behaviour, can interpret facts in a self-serving way( people concerned with self image, if you are creative its easier to find justifications of cheating)
In Gino and Ariely’s paper (2012) there are 4 lab experiments and what can subjects do?
1) subjects could lie about their performance to earn more money.
So lets start with study 1. There are 71 students. We have a personality questionnaire including 3 creativity scales and a visual perception task to measure dishonesty.
You sit in front of the screen and dots appear. All you say is if there are more dots on the left or right. ( as you can see the unambigious trail is easier to do, whereas the ambiguous trial is harder, which we are going to measure dishonesty.
Quite weirdly, the payment scheme doesn’t matter if your right or wrong, for each left decision, you get 0.5 cents, for each right decision you get 5 cents.
They have some practice trails, where they get feedback on what earnings would be and then have real trials on both ambitious and unambiguous ( 50 each), you could earn $10 by always saying right.
What do we predict ?
With the personality assessment at the start we divide people into high creativity( above median) and low creativity( below median).
WHAT ARE THE RESULTS ?
We see in practice trials already the high creative group cheat more, saying more right but no payment.
When its for payment, so real trials, we see a bigger difference. The difference between High and low creativity is very big, why? the high creative people probably worked out quicker that the right is more money, so maybe its intelligence rather than creativity.
Both do cheat though which is important to remember.
So the method of experiment 2 is that they do the same task and before lab experiment, they do online survey to measure IQ( 2 tests) and creativity ( 3 measures as in study 1).
In addition they do 2 more tasks,
Second task ther are 20 matrices with 12 3 digit numbers, find 2 numbers that add up to 10, 5 minutes, $0.25 per correct answer ( so max $5), They mark there own work but experimenter could identify cheating
third task) multiple choice, 50 general knowledge questions $0.10 per correct answer but again could cheat.
How do you read this table and how do we interpret the results?
The way to read it is that the the significant 0.54* shows the correlation between variable 2 ( creative behaviour inventory and creative cognitive style), thus the 3 creativity measures are significantly correlated.
The number 0.30 shows that the IQ measures are significantly correlated
The variables 6-8 are there level of cheating on the 3 tasks, we can see have the cheating on the 3 tasks correlate with the 3 creativity measures and the 2 intelligence measures.
We see that all the correlations are significant for creative personality( more creative cheated more) and cheating, however intelligence and cheating are not correlated.
Thus it isn’t IQ that causes cheating but its creativity driving cheating.
