Malevolent creativity, or using creativity in a way that is meant to harm others, can be seen in members of either gender. But a study published in Brain Research suggests that though potential for malevolent creativity may be comparable between women and men, the brain mechanisms that underlie it vary.
Maladaptive behavior can occur in members of either sex, but there are often gender differences that arise. Research suggests that men are more physically aggressive than women, while women prefer social and relational aggression. Malevolent creativity, or using creative ideas to lie, bully, blackmail, assault, defame, or play mean pranks on people is linked to other maladaptive traits such as narcissism and psychopathy.
Past research has been mixed on gender differences, with some studies reporting higher rates of malevolent creativity in men and others reporting higher rates in women. Due to the lack of understanding surrounding the relationship between gender and malevolent creativity, this study sought to better understand the neurological mechanisms that contribute to it.
For their study, Corinna M. Perchtold-Stefan and colleagues utilized 88 participants between the ages of 18 and 46 years old to serve as their sample. All participants reported no psychiatric history, neurological illnesses, substance use, or psychotropic medication. This study utilized an EEG design. Participants completed self-report measures prior to the EEG that assessed current mood, antagonistic personality, and self-reported malevolent creativity behavior. During the EEG, participants completed a malevolent creativity test in which participants are presented with a negative social situation in which they were treated unfairly and are asked to generate as many original revenge ideas as they can.
Results showed that there were no significant gender differences in either self-reported or total malevolent creativity performance scores. But men’s ideas were rated as significantly more harmful than women’s ideas. Men included a higher degree of physical violence into their ideas while women favored ideas that reflected social aggression, though these effects were small and not statistically significant.
The researchers also found differences in EEG results between the genders that pointed to discrepancies in functional connectivity and brain activity. Women showed decreased task-related alpha power from the frontal to left central-temporal lobe, while men showed a less steep and more diffuse pattern of alpha power changes. Additionally, men showed lower functional coupling than women. This suggests that women rely on executive control for their malevolent creativity, while men are likely displaying malevolent creativity through more spontaneous brain processes.
“Adding a novel perspective to previously reported gender differences in malevolent creativity, the present study demonstrated that women and men are similarly capable of malevolent creative ideation, but seem to utilize different neurocognitive processes in their efforts to exact creative revenge on others: While men rely on less controlled motor imagination that may initialize ideas geared towards physical punishment, women more strongly engage executive and semantic processes that may yield more intricate social aggression,” the researchers wrote.
This study took interesting and important strides toward better understanding the differing neurological underpinnings of malevolent creativity for each gender. Despite this, there are limitations to note. One such limitation is that some of these relationships were only seen at a trend level and did not reach statistical significance. Additionally, the study did not control for other factors that could be relevant, such as dark triad traits or menstrual cycle.
“In light of the reciprocal linkup of neurophysiology and behavior, further research on gender differences in malevolent creativity may have crucial practical implications for the detection and prevention of the infinite variety of malevolent creative acts in real-life,” the researchers concluded.
The study, “Women and men have a similar potential for malevolent creativity- But their underlying brain mechanisms are different“, was authored by Corinna M. Perchtold-Stefan, Christian Rominger, Ilona Papousek, and Andreas Fink.