The Dark Side of Creativity

Creative minds make our favorite art and develop unique solutions to real-world problems. But is there a dark side? Are creative minds more prone to madness and deception? In this episode, Julie and Robert turn the tables on innovation.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the two thousand twelve Toyota Camera.
It's ready. Are you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind?
From How Stuff Works dot Com? Hey, welcome to Stuff
to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and

(00:20):
I'm Julie Douglas. Julie, did you ever watch Tales from
the Dark Side back in the day? What do you
remember about it? Um? I remember it was creepy tails,
and remember my brother and I love stuff like that
as well as Tales from the Crypt, so like anything
that we could amass of the horror genre, we were there.
Of course, Talles from the Crypt you had to have
HBO access for that. Yes, in our neighbors you have

(00:43):
a Harrison's Thank you, Harrison's See. I had to watch
it half scrambled, so it was sort of half imagination
of what was going on with the Tales from the Crypt.
But then Tails in the Dark Side that came on
at like three o'clock on a Sunday afternoon or something
on cable, and that one always creep the heck out
of it, maybe more so than Tales from the Crips.

(01:03):
I think Tales from the Crip came later for me
and and there was always that fun, campy, you know,
old school classic horror comics motif and all the puns.
It kind of disarmed you, like right from the get go,
you knew that you were entering a world where horrible
things were gonna happen. It was okay because it's just
the vibe, but tales from the Dark side. The intro

(01:24):
I remember as being like super creepy because it had
like this really haunting music that was like bum bum
bum bum bum bum bump, and then this this really old,
terrifying narrator would come on and we would talk about
how how we live in this surface, sunlit world, but
there's a dark side everything, and that's when these these
colorful scenes of like rural America suddenly turn negative, like

(01:47):
photo negative on you. And then the titles come up
and they melt, and then some dark story begins, and
sometimes the story was really scary as well. But that
intro was always great because it was it was just
setting you up for this reverse side of everything you
take for granted and think is wholly and normal in
your life. So for you, it was the psychological aspect

(02:08):
of it that really sort of arrested your imagination. Yeah, yeah,
right from the from the get go, because the narrator
was saying everything you think, there's a reverse side to
it that's creepy and awful and it will totally rock
your understanding of reality. Okay, So we're going to attempt
to do the same thing here. We're going to give
a photo negative image of creativity the dark side, right,

(02:32):
because creativity is one of those things that we tend
to hold up at least, you know, in our society
and in our lives. We hold up creativity is this wonderful,
awesome thing and if you've got it, it's the best
thing in the world, right, I mean, it's it's the
stuff of art and the movies and music and everything.
All the media we consume is born out of creativity.
The jokes you hear somebody tell over dinner born out

(02:53):
of creativity, the dishes you eat creatively presented to you.
It's it's the font of everything that you want in
your life. So how could there be this dark side
to it? How could the tails from the dark Side
narrator come in and mess this up for us? Yeah,
you're right, because there are hundreds of books about creativity
and how to bolster your creativity. And we've talked about
it in an evolutionary sense too, that this was important

(03:15):
to be a creative thinker for our own survival and
also to attract mates and so on and so forth.
And we've seen this in nature, we've seen creativity and animals.
So yeah, how could it be dark? Well, there's this
idea that the dark side could emerge because of our
creative tendencies to be wonderful, fabulous, because essentially, when we're

(03:39):
being creative, we're creating a kind of lie, right, we
are altering our reality to a certain degree and telling
a story about how things are or how they seem. Okay,
like a fictional novel is essentially a lie about something
that happened, even at like a finely prepared meal. You know,
it doesn't taste like fish, because it's kind of lying
to you that it's it's not really a dead animal

(04:02):
that watched up on the shore. It's something else, delightful
and wonderful. Umn just go down the list of things.
Any actors performance, it's really convincing. They're kind of lying
to you because they are putting on a show for you.
They're pretending to be something there or not Yeah. We've
even talked about this with language and semantic distance. We've
talked about when we talk about our cuts of meat,
we don't necessarily say a hey, i'd love a cow burger,

(04:25):
I'd love a hamburger. The way that we sort of
cloak what something means to us or try to portray
it to another person as something else, and then we
have all these these different words for lies and different
shades of lies to like take hyperbole, which I love
to watch hyperbole and science headlines, particularly space science, and
I've been on both sides of this. I've also helped

(04:48):
craft some rather outrageous space headlines before. But it's all
you can't just you know, because you want people to
see that headline and read the article. So it tends
to get out of control really quickly, and you get
you get headlines like mo Ster, black hole gobbles down.
You know, we we tweak the language enough to where
we're creating an image of this thing that is not
the actual scientific content of the article. But that's not lying,

(05:11):
and nobody argues that it's lying. But but there are
all these different different levels of dishonesty, even in a
creative headline on an otherwise scientifically accurate article. Well, it
requires a novel approach rights draws directly on creativity. And
so what we're going to talk about today is creativity
in the sense of, um, you know, could could a
creative individual be more dishonest than another person? And we're

(05:34):
going to explore the idea of creativity and madness. We've
touched on it before. Um, we're going to look at
mental illness through the lens of creativity. But before jumping
into all of that, I did want to mention that
a good example of being an excellent, fabulous but perhaps
someone who is going beyond the bounds of storytelling facts

(05:54):
is someone like Jonah Laire, who I think is really
a great journalists in a sense that he is such
a good storyteller. And I don't know if anybody has
heard about this dust up about some of his journalistic practices.
It started off as a dust up. I think it
kind of ended up as more of a blow up.
I was gonna say, sort of Adam bomb. Now, he

(06:16):
had actually written a book called Imagine How Creativity Works,
and it was withdrawn from the market by Laire's publisher
when they discovered that he had fabricated some quotations in
the book, most notably one from Bob Dylan on his
creative process. And he's worth noting at this point, he's
already made a name for himself. He's already big news.
He's been on Radio Lab multiple times at this point.

(06:37):
I think he'd already been on Colbert. I mean, he's
he was out there. He's a you know, he's a
good looking young guy. He's well spoken. He's very much
in the same vein of the sort of the Eagleman's
and the Neil deGrasse Tyson's of the world where they're
they're great at communicating science, both in print and in person. Right.
And that's what I think is sad about the story,
because here's someone who's really committed to the story of science,

(06:58):
and he finds all these different gems and he kind
of makes this the whole sort of theme of science
sparkle for people. Um. And he does this because he
is such a good storyteller. Again, though, the problem is this,
he's going to be on the boundaries of storytelling and
he has, you know, dabbled in some plagiarism um as
well as recycling of his work, and people are are

(07:19):
sort of awe struck by this, and I think I
am too, because here's someone who is a Rhodes scholar,
incredibly smart, and somehow got into this, I guess you
could say, this vortex of lies that sort of spun
out of control. And so we want to look at
that a little bit today. Why would someone jump into
that scenario when they had all the tools at their

(07:39):
disposal and all the creativity that they wanted. Why would
they sort of rationalize this step into the darkness? Yeah,
because I mean another big story out of the ear
was the Mike Daisy affair with the whole apple and
uh Mr Daisy visit the Apple factory, which is part
of a spoken word piece that he did on This
American Life. But the ultimate excuse there, whether you buy

(08:00):
either or not, was that he's a storyteller first that
sort of found himself wandering into journalistic territory, whereas Joann
Hlaire was already in the journalistic territory. He was just
using storytelling a lot to it to his advantage, and
then it all fell apart from there right almost In
Layer's instance, you could kind of see him saying it
wouldn't be awesome if if Dylan said this, or you know,

(08:22):
amended his quote with this to make that story even stronger.
In some ways, I see that with Daisy, But I
think what's intriguing about both of them is that I
think we can all relate to this. There have been
instances in our lives where we maybe took some creative
license and we distorted the truth. So it's sort of
interesting to look at why we might do that. Yeah,

(08:42):
because when Wired actually hired a journalism professor, Charles to
look into his work for Wired, I found various instances
of recycling this is right. This is lair recycling, which
of course is just using bits from one article you
wrote for another, often for any different employee, getting paid
twice right. Press release plagiarism, which of course is your

(09:04):
sent a press release and it it is a write
up of something that somebody did, and then you're supposed
to take that information and make it your own to
gather some other sources, get some quotes, etcetera. But it's
then just taking from the press release. And that's something
that I guess can sometimes be lost on people who
aren't actually handling press releases. On one side of the other,
acquisitions of plagiarism, the quotation issues that we mentioned and

(09:27):
some factual issues as well. So the errors there that
were found by this guy, that they ranged from some
things that some listeners may be surprised to learn that
that's a problem, because, after all, what's wrong with reusing
something you've said? We do it every time that we
tell a joke and it works right, and then you
maybe tweak it a little but reuse the same joke
later on. But it's different if somebody is paying you

(09:47):
for that joke and then you are re selling the
same joke to someone else who thinks it's also bears uniquely. Yeah,
and I think the problem too is that he was
looking at something like eighteen different writings that were published online,
and I don't I believe that he just sort of
cherry picked them. I don't think that he potentially chose
these ones, and you discovered that fourteen out of the
eighteen had the recycled content in them. So, um, you know,

(10:08):
this is not a condemnation of Layer, because again, I
think this is someone who is incredibly talented, and I
hope that he bounces back from this. It's just a
good example of what we're talking about today. And in fact,
some would actually say that Lair's predicament is really more
of an indirect result of how things are published these days,
because back in the day, you know, even twenty years ago,

(10:29):
the content would have gone through at least five different
people for you know, fact checkers to editors to make
sure that that all of that was correct. So in
some ways we have a much wider scope in which
we can operate because of the technology available to us.
And you'll see that across all sorts of fields like accounting,

(10:49):
there's you know, there's a little bit more margin for Air.
I guess you could say, right, yeah. And also he
was obviously a big name, and so when he began
to fall, a lot of eyes went on to his
work and picked him to pieces. So you can also
say that, say that there there are plenty of other
cases of people committing the same journalistic crimes, if you will,
out there. They just don't have as many eyes on

(11:11):
what they're doing. All right, So enough of these transgressions,
let's talk about where it all happens as creativity in
our brains. Yeah, I guess the best place to start
is with the old idea of left and right brain,
and this came out of nineteen seventies. There are various
studies of split brain patients looking at this idea that
the right hemisphere of control creativity and that the left

(11:36):
hemisphere is the seat of logic and mathematics. And also
everyone loved this. I mean, there's the duality of it
is is kind of beautiful. There's this star bellied sneeches
kind of aspect of it too, where it's like, oh,
are you are you part of Team Edward or team
what's the other team Jacob? Team Jacob? You know, are
you Team Creatives? You're pretending like you don't know what
the other team is? I know, yeah, you can't see

(11:56):
my T shirt. So everyone loved this idea. It was
so bullet resonated and people like to try to decide
which team they were on. But since that time, there
have been a lot more studies into looking at exactly
how the brain works and how the brain works with creativity.
This whole field in fact of neuro aesthetics, right, which
is a scientific attempt to understand the human brains aesthetic

(12:17):
perceptions of art music. Yeah, at the neurological level. Um,
there's an interesting study from the University of South Carolina,
and again it just it exploits this idea that it's
not just a you know, two party system in the brain,
that it really takes the two halves of the brain
to tango when it comes to creativity. And Lisa as

(12:40):
the z A who is the assistant professor of neuroscience,
and her team scan the brains of architecture students. And
they did this because obviously architecture students are engaging what
you would say is both sides, right, there's an art
side to it, and then there's also engineering to it. Yeah,
there's the spatial part of it. So they were showing
three shapes, a circle, a c in an eight, and
they were then asked to visualize the images that could

(13:02):
be made by rearranging those shapes. So this takes a
little bit of creativity, right, because for example, a face
could be made with the eight on its side to
become the eyes. The sea could be a smiling mouth
or a frown, and then the circle could be a nose. Okay,
so that requires a little bit of your brain to say,
oh what, you know, what could I paint with these objects?

(13:25):
It's interesting when you said those I kind of intentionally
misheard C. Instead of picturing the letter C, I pictured
an ocean, and so I imagine like this figure eight
tower rising out of an ocean, and in the circle
is an eye at the top of it. That's because
you're a crazy divergent thinker, which we'll talk about later, okay,
or my hearing sucks one of the two. Well, yeah,

(13:45):
that's possible as well. Um, but I also sometimes talked
really fast, yes, so that could be a problem. But anyway,
they were then asked to engage in what would be
a more spatial sort of task, and so they were
asked to piece together three geometric shapes with their minds
to see if they formed a square or a rectangle. Now,

(14:06):
the creative task, even though it was mainly handled by
the right hemisphere, lit up the left hemisphere hemisphere more
than the non creative task. And this was really a
surprise to them because you would think that the spatial reasoning,
the geometric part of it, would engage less of the
left side, but in fact they found that even the

(14:28):
left side was there. Um, that it was more prevalent
too in the creative side. So again you see that
it's not just one seat of the brain where creativity
is occurring. And it's lending again to this idea of
neuraesthetics that there's a lot more to creativity than we know.
In effect, duality is kind of a misnomer, especially as

(14:50):
far as the brain is concerned, that than any kind
of creative or even engineering task is not one side
of the other, but both sides working in some degree
of harmony. Right. And then to add to all of this,
you have different aspects of what is happening inside of
the brain affecting how data is being perceived and interpreted.
And again this is where we have novel ideas being generated.

(15:13):
So this is when we begin to talk about mental
illness and creativity, because you know, this is a subject
that has been explored a lot more like, hey, there's
that ban go and so creative, but have this unfortunate
side effect of hallucinations and cutting off his ear and
so on and so forth. Yeah, I mean, it's the
idea of the unhinged creative types and old notion, and

(15:36):
we continue to to carry it along with us. Sometimes
we use it as a means of forgiving our own
problems or or to sort of to make sense of
the catech lives of individuals whose whose lives are illuminated
by the fame they've a missed. Yeah, and so I
mean it just here's the thing. Being creative does not
mean that you are mentally ill, right, What it means

(15:56):
is that there are some markers that mentally ill people
have with creative, highly creative people, and then vice versa
as well. And I mean, certainly just like the average
person who has some sort of severemental illness, it's not
gonna translate directly into creative output. And will explore that
a little more. Again, we're talking about is stimuli and
the interpretation of that. Here's something that's interesting. High creative

(16:19):
skills have been shown to be somewhat more common in
people who have mental illnesses we've talked about. But the
connection here, they think has to do with the dopamine system.
Because researchers at the Swedish Medical University Carolinska Institute is
to it have managed to show that this dopamine system
and healthy highly creative people is really similar in respects

(16:40):
to people with schizophrenia. Specifically when we talk about mental illness,
and it all has to do with the thalamus, which
is a part of the brain that acts as the
relay center, filtering information before it reaches the cortex or
reasoning and cognition occur. So it turns out that people
who are highly creative and schizophrenic people have fewer dopamine

(17:01):
receptors in the thalamus than other people. And this is
really important because, uh, again, this is sort of telling
us about how data comes through our brains and how
it is interpreted. Now, when I talk about highly creative
people in this day of what we're talking about are
healthy individuals who have been tested on divergent psychological tests.
And this is certain kinds of tests that are looking

(17:23):
at how you solve things. So it would require a
novel approach, right, and this is how they sort of
weed out who's highly creative and who's not in this
particular study. So the idea is that the fewer D
two receptors in the thalamus probably means a lower degree
of signal filtering and then a higher flow of information
from the thalamus. This is why you see this correlation

(17:48):
between people who are schizophrenic and people who are highly
creative or highly imaginative, because what you're seeing is again
a flooding of stimuli to the brain and then this
idea that you have to sort through it. Right, This
is similar to what we've talked about in the way
children perceive the world, the idea that their their brains
are sponges and it's just stuff just flowing in and

(18:10):
then they have to make sense of it all. So
I guess this brings us to the question, then, what's
going on in the rest of the brains? Right? What
what do the muggles have going on that that prevents
them from seeing and creating the magic in the world
around them or from suffering from severe schizophrenia. Well, I
mean part of it is that, again, you have so

(18:30):
much stimulation there and and if you can cherry pick
from that stimulation, you begin to make bizarre associations because
you're simply aware of that much stuff in your brain.
And in fact, it reminds me just you know, a
little side trip here reminds me of the cognitive psychologists
Alice and goth Nick when she was talking about infants

(18:51):
having this lantern awareness versus adults having flashlight awareness, because
she's saying that infant are far more conscious than adults
because they're taking in everything and if you look at
their brains you can see that that, you know, neurotransmitters
are squirted all over that brain, marinating in it, and
it allows them to have the neural connections to process

(19:14):
all of that data. Okay, and so she's made that
comment before of you know, this is perhaps the reason
why some creative thinkers um have the breakthroughs that they can,
because they are sort of holding onto a bit of
that infant brain in that lantern awareness. Yeah. So, so
to take us back to our unrealistic caveman examples, you

(19:35):
have a grown up caveman who has who has completely
grown up, not creative at all. That he's he's very
much focused on what's important. Is that a tiger over
there behind those bushes or is it a gazelle? Am
I about to be eating? Or am I about to
score some dinner? Whereas in everything else kind of fades
into the background, right only focused on what's most important

(19:56):
to survival at this moment, whereas his friend, who's more
creatively in Clauden caveman might look over at a tree
and link himself. I wonder if that tree is a
woman who was somehow petrified by a god or something,
because it kind of looks like a woman, and so
he's staring at this tree, risking consumption by the tiger
or missing out on a meal, whereas the the hunter

(20:17):
is focused on what is actually occurring. Hey, you can't
be uh, you can't be painting little happy trees in
your mind and that scenario. But but on one level,
you can sort of say, okay, well, one caveman is
daydreaming and one is serious about the task at hand.
But then you can also look at it in terms
of one has shut off unnecessary stimuli and the other
one is remaining open to stimuli even if the input

(20:40):
of said stimuli is not immediately relevant to basic survival. Okay,
so what you're talking about is a process called latent inhibition. Yeah,
and uh. University of Tennessee psychology professor Jordan's Peterson says, quote,
the normal person classifies an object and then forgets about it,
even though that object is much more complex and interesting

(21:01):
than he or she thinks. The creative person, by contrast,
is always open to new possibilities. So again, here's this
idea that you're able to look at these objects and
pay more attention to them than your counterpart. Right. It
also reminds me of vampires. I guess vampires have no
latent inhibition, because there's the old idea that you could

(21:23):
leave like something with an intricate weave pattern out for
or not, and they would have to sit there and
untangle it, even though the sun is about to come
up and melt them. Well, in speaking of of of vampires,
we should talk about how this plays into personality. Because
there's something called the schizotypical personality. Now this is um
sort of typified by illuminaries like Albert Einstein or Tesla,

(21:48):
right um, and it kind of points a little bit
more to their preoccupations which some people might think are odd.
Right Um. I'm thinking about Nicola Tesla in his obsession
and with Well this is more towards the end of
his life, so there might have been more going on
with it. But his obsession with a certain pigeon that

(22:08):
he fell in love with. Whoa yeah, but he fed that,
he fed her day in and day out and uh,
and was sort of obsessed with us, just as he
was obsessed with many of his scientific discoveries and his endeavors.
But at play, here's this idea that these people may
be engaging in a kind of more magical reality than

(22:30):
the rest of us. Yeah, there's an article by Margharita
Tarakovski in psych Central where she actually goes through some
of the forums that schizotypical personalities take, and for instance,
there's magical thinking. There's one possibility, and she points out
that you had the composer Schumann who believed that Beethoven
was channeling music to him from beyond the grave. Another

(22:51):
form that this condition takes unusual perceptional experiences, and she
draws the analogy here to Dickens belief that he was
being followed by characters from his novels. That's right, didn't
he used an umbrella to poke away at the little
street urchins? Yeah, imaginary street urchins. There you go. And
then there's also a preference for solitary activities, which obviously
you see in a lot of creative types. And the

(23:12):
author here pointed out Emily Dickinson tesla Isaac Newton, you know,
anybody who likes to shut themselves away and work on something.
You could also throw a J. D. Salinger, any number
of authors and artists into that pot. And then finally
another form of takes his mild paranoia. And there are
various examples of this where authors, artists, creative types begin
to have peculiar ideas about what is threatening them in

(23:33):
the world and where those threats lie. So, this schizotype
personality is not obviously a full blown schizophrenia disorder. It's
just someone who is who processes things a little bit
differently right now. And it's yeah, it's not to the
point where it's necessarily just really tapping down on your
ability to function, but it is certainly changing the ways

(23:56):
in which you function in an otherwise normal situation. Yeah.
Researchers at Vanderbilt University have actually looked specifically at the
schizotype to try to figure out how their brains work,
particularly in conjunction with or i should say, in contrast
to a schizophrenics brain. And then someone who was quote
unquote normal, Brad Foley in so he Park, actually published

(24:20):
their findings in the Journal of Schizophrenia Research. And so
they looked at these three groups, the control this, the
schizotypes in the schizophrenics. And in the first experiment, they
showed research subjects a variety of household objects and they
asked them to make up new functions for them, and
the schizotypes were better able to creatively suggest new uses

(24:41):
for the objects, while the schizophrenics, interestingly enough, and the
average subjects performed similarly to one another. And so what
they think is that it's that the schizophrenics were unable
to generate new uses because their thought processes are very
often disorganized to the point where they can't be creative

(25:02):
because they can't get all of their thoughts in one
coherent place. So the normal person is more again the
flashlight view of reality, but then the schizophrenic individual, it's
that lamp view, but the lamp is turned up so
much that there's just too much information coming at them
and it's just a dipping around in their mind. It's
such a chaotic way, right, yeah. Yeah, So well sort
of like the normal person has the flashlight and the

(25:25):
schizotype and the schizophrenic have the lantern. But the difference
is that the schizotype can really pick out the things
that matter because they can sort of have some of
that focus and make those connections, whereas you say, there's
so much going on in the schizophrenic brain that they
can't really make a coherent story there. So they did

(25:47):
a second experiment. They are asked to identify uses for
everyday objects again, but as well, they performed a basic
control task while the activity in their prefrontal lobes were monitored.
So they found in these brain scans is that all
groups used both brains for creative tasks. Again, here's this
idea of both brains being engaged. But the activation of

(26:09):
the right hemispheres of the schizotypes was dramatically greater than
the schizophrenic and the average subjects. So this suggests that
there is a positive benefit to schizoph to schizo tippy
and that again their brains are accessing information in a
different way and that there are a lot more able
to sort of go between both hemispheres and and work

(26:32):
a little bit more diligently to produce novel concepts. So
here's another interesting thing. Peter Brewger is a Swiss neuroscientist,
and so he's kind of said, like, yeah, I think
that these schizotypes are different thinkers, and I think that
you know, the part of the brain that says, hey,
that's a car key on your key chain, and you know,
identifying that is a little bit different with the schizotype

(26:55):
brain because they can imagine different fates for that, you know,
car key or whatever, But he is saying that there
is a disproportional number of schizotypes and schizophrenics that are
neither right or left handed dominant right and they instead
use both hands for a bunch of things, for a
bunch of tasks. And so he's saying again, I think
that this, you know, the motor function and the mind

(27:16):
function are interwoven here, and that they're recruiting both sides
of their brains for these tasks, and there's something a
little bit different going on with the schizotype. So there's
a little insight into what's going on inside the creative
process inside the human mind, and also how this crosses
over into the territory of mental illness. So, as promised,

(27:36):
we are going to discuss this link, this idea that
creativity and dishonesty are actually linked together. There's some cross
over here, and it's after what we've discussed. What do
you think, ignoring the study that we've we've both read
and and have notes about, would you be convinced at
this point that that these individuals we've discussed might also

(27:57):
have a particular flare for dishonesty. Um, I think that
it makes total sense that if if you're creative and
you make up stuff that that it would lend itself
to fibbing every once in a while, or sort of
moving the goal post of what you think is appropriate,

(28:18):
either behavior or um or just even what you report
in life to be truth. I'll buy that. Now. That's
not to say I don't think that, you know, all
creative people are dishonest, and certainly nobody in the study
that we're about to look at is arguing that that
this is a rallying cry to go and collect the

(28:39):
creative types and keep them under tight watch because they're
just lying their faces off NonStop. It's just showing that
there's a certain correlation between the two. Well, and what
we're going to discuss um our studies that were conducted
in the lab under very specific circumstances, and just as
we found in our laing podcast How Line Works, um

(29:01):
there there is a bunch of motivating factors here for
why people lie were engaged in creative storytelling. I eve line.
So the studying question comes to us from Francesca Gino
and Dan Airley. It's a fascinating five part study where
they where they basically did five different experiments to to
test creative and non creative types and see what their

(29:24):
propensity for falsehood happened to be. Yeah, because there are
a bunch of different studies out there looking at creativity
and dishonesty. But as the author Scott Barry Kaufman in
his article The Dark Side of Creativity on Huffington Post
points out, they are really after pinning uh, dishonesty to
creativity and to creative types. And they really aren't, I

(29:45):
mean not because they have some sort of vendetity created
war and the creative Let me say that they are
very thorough in investigating this idea, perhaps more throw than
some other studies, as you say, at the five part study,
and in the first of their studies they administered a
variety of different measures of creativity, assessing a person's creative personality, behaviors,

(30:08):
and cognitive style. So first they weeded out what they
thought was were more creative people. Yeah, because you have
to get that sort of down for your test subjects.
These are the creative people in U in Block A,
these are the Mogels and block B right, as you say,
the mos. Yes, The participants also completed a visual perception task.
In this task, participants were presented with a bunch of

(30:28):
squares that were bisected by a diagonal line. Yeah, so
it's a square cut down the middle the next two triangles. Yeah,
and on either side of the line there are an
array of dots. Yeah, like a scattering of red dots
that seem almost random, like somebody just threw them up there.
So that in some cases you might have it might

(30:50):
be kind of ambiguous as to which side of the
square had more dots. And in other cases it's very
obvious when you look at it that most of the
dots are in one side or the other. Now, the
participants don't know this, but all of the dots on
the right hand side are going to be less than
the left in every single instance. And if they report,
and then in the participants findings, if they report that

(31:13):
the right side has more dots, they actually are going
to get ten times the amount in money. I think
it's oh, it's okay, okay, well yeah, let me let
me back up. Um, if they report that it's the
left side that has more dots, they'll get a half
a cent. Okay. Now, if they report that it's the
right side, they'll get It's important to point this out

(31:33):
that it's you're talking about a piddling amount of money
involved here, right, It's it's nothing. Right, So it's not
a huge motivate. You're not gonna walk a right away
from this study saying, oh man, I'm quitting my job. Yeah,
No matter what financial problems lead you to take part
in this blow a Saturday and this scientific study, for
these guys, this is not going to make a difference. Okay.

(31:54):
So they're getting five cents for reporting on the right,
they're getting half a cent for the left, and this
is creating a conflict between providing the correct answer right. So,
as you said, some of these arrays are really obvious.
It's like, yes, there's no doubt that the right side
only has three dots and the left side has fifty dots.
But some of them were more ambiguous, and that's where

(32:15):
they see the line happening the most. And it's kind
of a brilliant way to construct or design this experiment
because I wanted to point this out. We've talked about
this before that we are all sort of born accountants.
We can look at a rays of dots like this,
and even if it's a little bit ambiguous, you can
already tell which pot has more dots in it, which

(32:37):
array it has more is more populated. That's just going
to become obvious. But the fact that there's just you know,
it's a little bit into question, is a little bit ambiguous,
gives people this license, particularly creative individuals, to interpret the
data so that it suits them. Yeah. In other words,
there when it's ambiguous enough, they're willing to air on
the side of me getting a nickel as opposed to

(33:01):
being factually accurate. And you get it from the study
that it's this is really occurring on almost like a
really subconscious level. It's not like somebody saying, all sides
being equal, I'd rather get that nickel. I'm going to
vote for this one. They've kind of programmed them ahead
of time with the knowledge that all things being equal,
one side is more advantageous, even if it we're talking

(33:22):
again about just a nickel's worth of advantage. Well, and
then you might think to yourself, Okay, so the creative
individual is more prone to lying or being dishonest. Um,
what about someone with high i Q. Could they perhaps
try to figure out a way to deceive better? After all,

(33:43):
you know, you would think that they'd be able to
sort of navigate the waters of dishonesty a little bit better. Yeah,
and that's where the second study cames, and they add
in intelligence as a possible predictor of dishonesty, and they
found it when it was intelligence versus creativity, creativity was
still the better indicator on who was going to be
dishonest on this test. So again, in the first study,
we had the creatives and the non creatives, as judged

(34:05):
by some of the initial weeding out process, Right, So
now you have more than just creative and uncreative. You
have high i Q low i Q thrown in. And
again they're they're finding that if you were gonna bet
money on which ones we're going to feel a little
when the ambiguity hits, it's going to be the creative people.
Book on the creative people instead of trying to book
on the highly intelligent people. Okay, So in their third

(34:28):
study they stiff the kniphone just a little bit deeper
by saying, Okay, what if someone just engaged in the
act of creativity itself, would that make that person more dishonesty?
What if we just sort of buttered them up and
made them feel a little creative, you know, because even
non creative types you feel that you may wake up
one morning and you're you're feeling like, you know, I'm
not gonna going to work them, I'm gonna paint, you know,
because maybe you saw a documentary on painting last night

(34:50):
and that's what did it. So they couldn't actually show
someone a documentary on painting here, But what they did
is that they had participants construct sentences for on a
list of grammatically correct words, so they had a bunch
of words to choose from that. The words that they
had to choose from, most of them were creative in
some sense, like creative innovative imagination, So they were priming

(35:11):
them to think in a creative sense. And so the
question was, will this make people more inclined to cheat
on on our little dot test if they just are
thinking about creativity? It did, It did, It did. And
that's the kind of awful realization that comes into play here,
is that it's not just you know, a creative person

(35:33):
is more prone to be dishonest. It's that engaging in
creativity will actually lead to the possibility in this in
this example, at least of someone again sort of recasting
what reality is telling a different story telling a lie essentially.
Their fourth study was again another variation on this theme

(35:55):
of the visual perception task, the Dota raise, but instead
of now priming them with creative terms, they now just
had them go through divergent thinking tasks. Now, divergent thinking
again is something that will ramp up creativity. They saw
the same thing again and again the people who are
engaging in the creative divergent thinking task were prone to

(36:18):
be more dishonest. Their fifth study, as if they hadn't
made the case already, they had an online survey of
seventeen departments and a corporation, and they had those people
talk about different instances where they could be more honest
or dishonest, basically going through these sort of like integrity

(36:40):
scenarios um and then so they have those people sort
of say what they would do in these certain situations,
and then they had the people rank what they did
in their job, and it was found that those people
who were the more creative types in the creative departments
again were more prone to be dishonest in these scenarios
that they laid out for them. The last one particularly

(37:01):
I found kind of interesting because I wondered what extent
of it is just a matter of having a creative
enough mind too to put yourself in the shoes of this, uh,
this hypothetical individual that you're being surveyed about. You know,
you think they're drawing on their empathy. Well, I wonder
to what extent it's kind of an empathy test as well,
because I find that they're I will hear hear horrible

(37:21):
cases or you know, read a book about a particularly
horrible character, and if it's if it's you know, if
it's well presented in the novel, or you get enough
details about the the human side of an individual, then
you I find on some level I can empathize with
them and maybe not agree with them completely. But I'm
more I'm less inclined to say, oh, ship that person
to the bottom of the sea. Well, okay, I think

(37:45):
the takeaway from here is that if, particularly if you
are a human resources person and you're listening to this
and you're just about to batten down the hatches on
all the creative types in your company, don't do it. Um.
The point is is that, uh, you know, creativity have
got to have if you want some sort of novel
way of approaching the world. And problems. It's it's central
to us as humans. But I guess you could say

(38:06):
that you have to have things pretty well, the boundaries
pretty well set in a work situation, so that it's
very apparent what the rules are and what they aren't
because again we're talking about here's interpretation, right, because again,
where did we see the dishonesty arising? It was in
this um, this area of ambiguity, the idea of what.

(38:26):
I don't know if there are more dots on one
side or the other, but I can I'm gonna use
my creative thinking to sort of skew it in my advantage.
If you avoid this moral gray area, it's gonna make
it a lot easier for people to do the right thing. Yeah,
and I will say, you know, for our own department,
I would say there are a lot of creative types
in it. But everybody, I want to say it has
a ton of integrity, and I think some in part

(38:48):
because we have a ton of work and we have
really strict deadlines. There's no really, it's pretty obvious what
the boundaries are well. And also it comes down to
the yogurt in the fridge example. Here you just throw
some tasty looking yogurt in the fridge. There's a chance
somebody's going to eat that. But if you put your
name on it, it's it's a it's a rarer individual
who will eat your yogurt because it's there's the name

(39:09):
right there, that is that is Sarah's yogurt. And if
you eat that yogurt, you were stealing from Sarah. You
were messing with her, her her yogurt vibe. You can
no longer objectify Sarah and the yogurt. Yeah, you can't
say I took a yogurt, I borrowed a yogurt. No,
it's I took Sarah's yogurt. And it's a different thing entirely.
It's a less gray, ambiguous zone. And we saw this
too in the Lying podcast, is that people who were

(39:32):
forced to read a statement of integrity and then sign
it and then take a test were less likely much
much less much less likely to cheat because they had
gone through the active This is what the rules are.
And do you agree with these rules? Yes? I do
so again, Yeah, just not too much ambiguity either. All right, Well,

(39:52):
on that note, let's call the robot over all, right,
and we have a little listener mail here from our
mechanical f and this one comes to us from Brian.
Brian says, Dear Roder and Julie, I enjoyed your podcast
on comfort, well done as always, it was bittersweet, however,
on the first day back to work and college in
about five hours after a nice long holiday weekend, inserts

(40:12):
sad trombone here. I don't know, that's not really there.
You go anyway, The big reason I wanted to send
out an email was a correction, not a mean one.
I'm not one of those listeners. Don't worry. The end
quote that Robert mentioned that was from Aristotle is actually
from a poem by Philip James Bailey. As much as
I love Aristotle, I figured Philip James Bailey shouldn't have

(40:35):
his thunder stolen. Uh. There's my two cents, maybe one
cent to help you guys out, keep up the good
work and thank you for all your efforts. And indeed,
the quote in question so everyone doesn't have to rack
their brain to figure out what I said was we
live in deeds, not years, in thoughts, not breaths, in feelings,
not in figures on a dial. We should count time
by heart throbs. He most lives, who thinks most feels

(40:58):
the novus acts the best, And yes, as it turns out,
that is a Philip James Bailey quote, not an Aristotle quote,
which I think I picked that up from the Psychology
Today blog post that had it. Apparently that quote is
applied incorrectly to Aristotle and a few different sources. But
that's my bad for not checking our primaries on that one.

(41:18):
See that sounds more like a Brady Bunch or a
grown up on Peanuts. Want So, if the rest of
you would like to chime in with corrections, with praise,
with examples of creativity in your own life, we'd love
to hear about it specifically. Well, what do you think
about this crossover between creativity and dishonest? If you're creative person,

(41:39):
do you feel like you're a little more inclined to
be dishonest if you are? If you're not really creative?
More of the logical, mathematical side of things, what you're
approach to all this? What do you think? Do you
just trust the creatives in your environment? Or are you
actually the greatest liar of them all? Even it's that
good that these tests aren't catching you, I don't know,
write us let us know about it. We'd love to hear.
You can reach us on Facebook, you can reach us

(42:00):
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(42:25):
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