A study on Chinese colleges students revealed that people with more pronounced dark personality traits tend to have more malevolent creativity. The study was published in the Journal of Intelligence.
Creativity is the ability to produce original and useful works. It is a trait responsible for the creation of novel inventions, engineering accomplishments, but also art, literature, and many other types of human creations. Creativity is traditionally seen as a purely positive ability that improves people’s lives and advances human civilization.
However, creativity also has a dark side. It is called malevolent creativity. It refers to the ability to find novel/original ways to intentionally harm others or cause damage. For example, a terrorist who invents a new type of bomb to more effectively massacre people. Another example would be a torturer devising new and unexpected ways to cause harm and suffering to his victims. As creativity is, by definition, original and thus unexpected, so can products of malevolent creativity also be unpredictable and extremely dangerous.
One set of personality characteristics thought to be related to proneness to malevolent creativity are the Dark Triad personality traits. The Dark Triad consists of personality traits of Machiavellianism (characterized by superficial charm, cynicism, coldness, manipulativeness, opportunism, belief that ends justify the means), narcissism (characterized by vanity, grandiosity, dominance, superiority, and entitlement), and psychopathy (characterized by thrill-seeking, aggressiveness, impulsivity, criminality, low fear and anxiety, callousness, and limited empathy). Assessments of these three traits can also be combined to form a single composite score.
Study author Zhenni Gao and her colleagues wanted to explore whether there is a link between the Dark Triad personality traits and malevolent creativity. Their expectation was that aggression and creativity will mediate the relationship between malevolent creativity and these personality traits. They also expected that the moral identity of a person will shape how and if the malevolent creativity of a person will be expressed in behavior.
A total of 217 Chinese college students (166 females, 22 years average age) participated in the study. Students were asked to complete the Malevolent Creativity Task, a set of 20 open-ended realistic situations for which the students were asked to devise novel and malevolent solutions (e.g., “Hong is going to battle with an outstanding player in a tennis final, who is hard to defeat. Please think of a novel way for Hong to make the opponent ‘accidently’ injured before the final.”) Based on these answers, the study authors created assessments of malevolent originality and harmfulness for each participant.
Participants also completed assessments of malevolent creative behavioral tendencies (the Malevolent Creativity Behavior Scale, e.g. “When I am treated unfairly, I will retaliate in a different way”), general creative behavioral tendencies (the Runco Ideational Behavior Scale, e.g., “I have some ideas for new inventions”), aggression (the Buss-Perry Aggression Questionnaire), Dark Triad traits expressed as a single joint composite score (the Dirty Dozen), and moral identity (the Moral Identity Measures).
Results showed that students whose malevolent solutions to problems were more original produced solutions that were more harmful and had more pronounced malevolent behavioral tendencies. Students whose malevolent solutions were more original had a bit more pronounced Dark Triad personality traits and were a bit more aggressive. Students who were able to devise more harmful malevolent solutions had higher creative behavioral tendencies. Higher malevolent behavioral tendencies were linked with higher creativity and higher aggression.
Further analysis showed that males were better at devising original malevolent solutions than females, but this difference disappeared when malevolent behavioral tendencies were taken into account. Younger and more creative students devised more harmful malevolent solutions to problems.
Further analysis showed that the link between the Dark Triad personality traits and malevolent behavioral tendencies may be at least partially achieved through their associations with aggression and creative behavioral tendencies. The link between malevolent behavioral tendencies and the originality of malevolent solutions students offered may depend on the moral identity of the person.
“Individuals with higher levels of Dark Triad personality traits tend to have higher aggression and general creativity behavioral tendencies, which then further cultivate their malevolent creativity behavioral tendencies. At the behavioral level, malevolent creativity behavioral tendencies may be closer to the originality than the harmfulness of malevolent ideation,” the study authors concluded.
“The Dark Triad promotes MCT originality [originality in the malevolent creativity task] by fostering malevolent creativity behavioral tendencies, but this mediation effect is only significant with low-to-medium moral identity. Based on the above-mentioned results, cultivating moral identity may be an effective way to prevent malevolent creativity performance.”
The study sheds light on the psychological underpinnings of malevolent creativity. However, it also has limitations that need to be taken into account. Namely, the study was done on university students and results on participants from other populations might not be the same. Additionally, the study design does not allow any cause-and-effect conclusions.
The study, “Darkness within: The Internal Mechanism between Dark Triad and Malevolent Creativity”, was authored by Zhenni Gao, Xinuo Qiao, Xiaobo Xu, and Ning Hao.