Because the Eurail ticket seller had given us just a flimsy piece of photocopied paper with a hand drawing of our planned route, it was physically easy for us to make our changes—and because we were just marking the path in the same way as the ticket seller (making lines on a piece of paper), this physical ease quickly translated into a moral ease as well.
When I think about all of these justifications together, I realize how extensive and expansive our ability to justify is and how prevalent rationalization can be in just about every one of our daily activities. We have an incredible ability to distance ourselves in all kinds of ways from the knowledge that we are breaking the rules, especially when our actions are a few steps removed from causing direct harm to someone else.
The Cheater’s Department
Pablo Picasso once said, “Good artists copy, great artists steal.” Throughout history, there has been no dearth of creative borrowers. William Shakespeare found his plot ideas in classical Greek, Roman, Italian, and historical sources and then wrote brilliant plays based on them. Even Steve Jobs occasionally boasted that much like Picasso, Apple was shameless about stealing great ideas.
Our experiments thus far suggested that creativity is a guiding force when it comes to cheating. But we didn’t know whether we could take some people, increase their creativity, and with it also increase their level of dishonesty. This is where the next step of our empirical investigation came in.
In the next version of our experiments, Francesca and I looked into whether we could increase the level of cheating simply by getting our participants into a more creative mind-set (using what social scientists call priming). Imagine that you’re one of the participants. You show up, and we introduce you to the dots task. You start off by completing a practice round, for which you do not receive any payment. Before you transition into the real phase— the one that involves the biased payment—we ask you to complete a sentence creation task. (This is where we work our creativity-inducing magic by using a scrambled sentence task, a common tactic for changing participants’ momentary mind-sets.) In this task, you are given twenty sets of five words presented in a random order (such as “sky,” “is,” “the,” “why,” “blue”), and you are asked to construct a grammatically correct four-word sentence from each set (“The sky is blue”). What you don’t know is that there are two different versions of this task, and you are going to see only one of them. One version is the creative set, in which twelve of the twenty sentences include words related to creativity (“creative,” “original,” “novel,” “new,” “ingenious,” “imagination,” “ideas,” and so on). The other version is the control set, in which none of the twenty sentences includes any words related to creativity. Our aim was to prime some of the participants into a more innovative, aspiring mind-set a la Albert Einstein or Leonardo da Vinci by using the words associated with creativity. Everyone else was stuck with their usual mind- set.
Once you complete the sentence task (in one of the two versions), you go back to the dots task. But this time you’re doing it for real money. Just as before, you earn half a cent for choosing the left side and 5 cents for choosing the right.
What kind of picture did the data paint? Did facilitating a more creative mind-set affect a person’s morality? Although the two groups didn’t differ in their levels of performance in the practice rounds of the dots task (when there was no payment), there was a difference after the scrambled sentence task. As we expected, the participants who had been primed with the creative words chose “right” (the response with the higher pay) more often than those in the control condition.
SO FAR, IT appeared that a creative mind-set could make people cheat a bit more. In the final stage of our investigation, we wanted to see how creativity and cheating correlate in the real world. We approached a large advertising agency and got most of the employees to answer a series of questions about moral dilemmas. We asked questions such as “How likely would you be to inflate your business expense report?”; “How likely would you be to tell your supervisor that progress has been made on a project when none has been made at all?”; and “How likely are you to take home office supplies from work?” We also asked them which department they worked for within the company (accounting, copywriting, account management, design, and so on). Finally, we got the CEO of the advertising agency to tell us how much creativity was required to work in each of the departments.
Now we knew the basic moral disposition of each employee, their departments, and the level of creativity expected in each department. With this data at hand, we computed the moral flexibility of the employees in each of the different departments and how this flexibility related to the creativity demanded by their jobs. As it turned out, the level of moral flexibility was highly related to the level of creativity required in their department and by their job. Designers and copy-writers were at the top of the moral flexibility scale, and the accountants ranked at the bottom. It seems that when “creativity” is in our job description, we are more likely to say “Go for it” when it comes to dishonest behavior.
The Dark Side of Creativity
Of course, we’re used to hearing creativity extolled as a personal virtue and as an important engine for the progress of society. It’s a trait we aspire to—not just as individuals but also as companies and communities. We honor innovators, praise and envy those who have original minds, and shake our heads when others aren’t able to think outside the box.
There’s good reason for all of this. Creativity enhances our ability to solve problems by opening doors to new approaches and solutions. It’s what has enabled mankind to redesign our world in (sometimes) beneficial ways with inventions ranging from sewer and clean water systems to solar panels, and from skyscrapers to nanotechnology. Though we still have a way to go, we can thank creativity for much of our progress. After all, the world would be a much bleaker place without creative trailblazers such as Einstein, Shakespeare, and da Vinci.
But that’s only part of the story. Just as creativity enables us to envision novel solutions to tough problems, it can also enable us to develop original paths around rules, all the while allowing us to reinterpret information in a self-serving way. Putting our creative minds to work can help us come up with a narrative that lets us have our cake and eat it too, and create stories in which we’re always the hero, never the villain. If the key to our dishonesty is our ability to think of ourselves as honest and moral people while at the same time benefitting from cheating, creativity can help us tell better stories—stories that allow us to be even more dishonest but still think of ourselves as wonderfully honest people.
The combination of positive and desired outcomes, on the one hand, and the dark side of creativity, on the other, leaves us in a tight spot. Though we need and want creativity, it is also clear that under some circumstances creativity can have a negative influence. As the historian (and also my colleague and friend) Ed Balleisen describes in his forthcoming book
For example, Ed shows that one of the first uses of the U.S. postal service was for selling products that did not exist. It took some time to figure that out, and eventually the problem of mail fraud ushered in a strong set of regulations that now help ensure the high quality, efficiency, and trust in this important service. If you think about technological development from this perspective, it means that we should be thankful to some of the creative swindlers for some of their innovation and some of our progress.
Where does this leave us? Obviously, we should keep hiring creative people, we should still aspire to be
