The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty

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 à 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.