London - Being labelled as a creative type can make a person dishonest, according to a study.
Those who believe they have a rare talent when it comes to thinking outside the box can develop a “sense of entitlement”, said the researchers.
This way of thinking can lead to unethical behaviours, such as lying, the psychologists warned.
“We suggest that creative identity derives its value specifically from a sense of rarity, specialness and uniqueness, which causes a sense of entitlement,” said the researchers.
“By contributing rare ideas and solutions, creative individuals may feel they deserve preferential treatment due to the rarity inherently associated with creativity and the perceived value placed on creativity by the individual and society. As such, a creative identity could cause a sense of entitlement as a result of the implicit assumption that ‘I am special’ and that creativity is valued. That sense of entitlement, in turn, can cause individuals to engage in dishonest behaviours.”
The researchers, from Syracuse University, New York, and Northwestern University, Illinois, carried out four separate experiments to show a link between perceptions of creativity and unethical behaviour.
In one of the experiments, 153 students completed problems from the Remote Associates Task, a commonly used measure of creativity.
Participants were randomly told one of three messages, each intended to make them believe differently about creativity.
The first message stated that the task had been examining their levels of creativity and they had performed “very well”, which “many people do not”, and added that “creativity is rare”.
The second message stated again that the person had performed “very well” on the creativity activity, but that “many people do” and that “creativity is common”.
The third message just stated that the person had done “very well”, but it did not mention anything about creativity.
Each person then completed a decision-making task in which they had an opportunity to decide to claim more money than their partner by lying to another participant.
Those who believed their creative talent was rare were twice as likely to lie as those who believed creative talent was common, and those in the control group.
The rare-creativity group also scored much higher on a psychological entitlement scale than the others.
The findings were backed up by data from the real-world, the researchers found, after analysing data from 83 pairs of employees and their immediate supervisors.
Employees were surveyed about their own creativity, as well as the “perceived prevalence of creativity in the workgroup'“
Their supervisors were then asked how likely their subordinates were to engage in “ethically questionable behaviours at work”, such as falsifying time reports or using company services for personal use.
Those who reported a high level of creativity, and who believed creativity was rare in their workplace were reported by their supervisors to have engaged in more unethical behaviours, the researchers wrote in the Academy of Management Journal.
Daily Mail