The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty

Creativity and Dishonesty

We Are All Storytellers

Facts are for people who lack the imagination to create their own truth.

—ANONYMOUS

Once upon a time, two researchers named Richard Nisbett (a professor at the University of Michigan) and Tim Wilson (a professor at the University of Virginia) set up camp at their local mall and laid out four pairs of nylon stockings across a table. They then asked female passersby which of the four they liked best. The women voted, and, by and large, they preferred the pair on the far right. Why? Some said they liked the material more. Some said they liked the texture or the color. Others felt that the quality was the highest. This preference was interesting, considering that all four pairs of stockings were identical. (Nisbett and Wilson later repeated the experiment with nightgowns, and found the same results.)

When Nisbett and Wilson questioned each participant about the rationale behind her choice, not one cited the placement of the stockings on the table. Even when the researchers told the women that all the stockings were identical and that there was simply a preference for the right-hand pair, the women “denied it, usually with a worried glance at the interviewer suggesting that they felt either that they had misunderstood the question or were dealing with a madman.”

The moral of this story? We may not always know exactly why we do what we do, choose what we choose, or feel what we feel. But the obscurity of our real motivations doesn’t stop us from creating perfectly logical-sounding reasons for our actions, decisions, and feelings.

YOU CAN THANK (or perhaps blame) the left side of your brain for this incredible ability to confabulate stories. As the cognitive neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga (a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara) puts it, our left brain is “the interpreter,” the half that spins a narrative from our experiences.

Gazzaniga came to this conclusion after many years of research with split-brain patients, a rare group whose corpora callosa—the largest bundle of nerves connecting our brain’s two hemispheres—had been cut (usually as a way to reduce epileptic seizures). Interestingly, this brain abnormality means that these individuals can be presented with a stimulus to one half of the brain without the other half having any awareness of it.

Working with a female patient who had a severed corpus callosum, Gazzaniga wanted to find out what happens when you ask the right side of the brain to do something and then ask the left side (which has no information about what is going on in the right side) to provide a reason for that action. Using a device that showed written instructions to the patient’s right hemisphere, Gazzaniga instructed the right side of the patient’s brain to make her laugh by flashing the word “laugh.” As soon as the woman complied, he asked her why she had laughed. The woman had no idea why she laughed, but rather than responding with “I don’t know,” she made up a story. “You guys come up and test us every month. What a way to make a living!” she said. Apparently she had decided that cognitive neuroscientists were pretty amusing.

This anecdote illustrates an extreme case of a tendency we all have. We want explanations for why we behave as we do and for the ways the world around us functions. Even when our feeble explanations have little to do with reality. We’re storytelling creatures by nature, and we tell ourselves story after story until we come up with an explanation that we like and that sounds reasonable enough to believe. And when the story portrays us in a more glowing and positive light, so much the better.

Cheating Myself

In a commencement speech at Cal Tech in 1974, the physicist Richard Feynman told graduates, “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.” As we have seen so far, we human beings are torn by a fundamental conflict—our deeply ingrained propensity to lie to ourselves and to others, and the desire to think of ourselves as good and honest people. So we justify our dishonesty by telling ourselves stories about why our actions are acceptable and sometimes even admirable. Indeed, we’re pretty skilled at pulling the wool over our own eyes.

Before we examine in more detail what makes us so good at weaving self-glorifying tales, allow me to tell you a little story about how I once (very happily) cheated myself. Quite a few years ago (when I was thirty), I decided that I needed to trade in my motorcycle for a car. I was trying to decide which car would be the perfect one for me. The Internet was just starting to boom with what I’ll politely call “decision aids,” and to my delight I found a website that provided advice for purchasing cars. The website was based on an interview procedure, and it presented me with a lot of questions that ranged from preferences for price and safety to what kind of headlights and brakes I wanted.

It took about twenty minutes to answer all the questions. Each time I completed a page of answers, I could see the progress bar indicating that I was that much closer to discovering my personalized dream car. I finished the final page of questions and eagerly clicked the “Submit” button. In just a few seconds I got my answer. What was the perfect car for me? According to this finely tuned website, the car for me was … drum roll, please … a Ford Taurus!

I confess that I did not know much about cars. In fact, I know very little about cars. But I certainly knew that I did not want a Ford Taurus.^*

I’m not sure what you would do in such a situation, but I did what any creative person might do: I went back into the program and “fixed” my previous answers. From time to time I checked to see how different answers translated into different car recommendations. I kept this up until the program was kind enough to recommend a small convertible—surely the right car for me. I followed that sage advice, and that’s how I became the proud owner of a convertible (which, by the way, has served me loyally for many years).

This experience taught me that sometimes (perhaps often) we don’t make choices based on our explicit preferences. Instead, we have a gut feeling about what we want, and we go through a process of mental gymnastics, applying all kinds of justifications to manipulate the criteria. That way, we can get what we really want, but at the same time keep up the appearance—to ourselves and to others—that we are acting in accordance with our rational and well-reasoned preferences.

Coin Logic

If we accept that we frequently make decisions in this way, perhaps we can make the process of rationalization more efficient and less time-consuming. Here’s how: Imagine that you’re choosing between two digital cameras. Camera A has a nice zoom and a hefty battery, while camera B is lighter and has a snazzier shape. You’re not sure which one to get. You think that camera A is better quality but camera B will make you happier because you like how it looks. What should you do? Here is my advice: Pull a quarter out of your pocket and say to yourself, “Camera A is heads, camera B is tails.” Then toss the coin. If the coin comes up heads and camera A is the one you wanted, good for you, go buy it. But if you’re not happy with the outcome, start the process again, saying to yourself, “The next toss is for real.” Do this until the coin gives you tails. You’ll not only get camera B, which you really wanted all along, but you can justify your decision because you only followed the “advice” of the coin. (You could also replace the coin with your friends and consult them until one of them gives you the advice you want.)

Perhaps that was the real function of the car recommendation software I used to get my convertible. Maybe it was designed not only to help me make a better decision but to create a process that would allow me to justify the choice I really wanted to make. If that is the case, I think it would be useful to develop many more of these handy applications for many other areas of life.

The Liar’s Brain

Most of us think that some people are especially good (or bad) at deception. If this is indeed the case, what characteristics distinguish them? A team of researchers led by Yaling Yang (a postdoc at the University of California, Los Angeles) tried to find out the answer to this question by studying pathological liars—that is, people who lie compulsively and indiscriminately.

To find participants for their study, Yang and her colleagues went to a Los Angeles temporary employment agency. They figured that at least a few of those who were without permanent employment would have had difficulty holding a job because they were pathological liars. (Obviously, this doesn’t apply to all temps.)

The researchers then gave 108 job seekers a battery of psychological tests and conducted several one-on-one interviews with them, their coworkers, and their family members in order to identify major discrepancies that might reveal the pathological liars. In this group, they found twelve people who had pervasive inconsistencies in the stories they told about their work, schooling, crimes committed, and family background. They were also the same individuals who frequently engaged in malingering, or pretending that they were sick in order to get sickness benefits.

Next, the team put the twelve pathological liars—plus twenty-one people who were not pathological liars and were in the same pool of job seekers (the control group)—through a brain scanner to explore each person’s brain structure. The researchers focused on the prefrontal cortex, a part of the brain that sits just behind our foreheads and is considered to be in charge of higher-order thinking, such as planning our daily schedule and deciding how to deal with temptations around us. It’s also the part of the brain that we depend on for our moral judgments and decision making. In short, it’s a kind of control tower for thinking, reasoning, and morality.

In general, there are two types of matter that fill our brains: gray and white. Gray matter is just another name for the collections of neurons that make up the bulk of our brains, the stuff that powers our thinking. White matter is the wiring that connects those brain cells. We all have both gray and white matter, but Yang and her collaborators were particularly interested in the relative amounts of the two types in the participants’ prefrontal cortices. They found that pathological liars had 14 percent less gray matter than the control group, a common finding for many psychologically impaired individuals. What could this mean? One possibility is that since the pathological liars had fewer brain cells (the gray matter) fueling their prefrontal cortex (an area crucial to distinguishing between right and wrong), they find it harder to take morality into account, making it easier for them to lie.

But that’s not all. You might wonder about the extra space that pathological liars must have in their skulls since they have so much less gray matter. Yang and her colleagues also found that pathological liars had 22 to 26 percent more white matter in the prefrontal cortex than non–pathological liars. With more white matter (remember, this is what links the gray matter), pathological liars are likely able to make more connections between different memories and ideas, and this increased connectivity and access to the world of associations stored in their gray matter might be the secret ingredient that makes them natural liars.

If we extrapolate these findings to the general population, we might say that higher brain connectivity could make it easier for any of us to lie and at the same time think of ourselves as honorable creatures. After all, more connected brains have more avenues to explore when it comes to interpreting and explaining dubious events—and perhaps this is a crucial element in the rationalization of our dishonest acts.

More Creativity Equals More Money

These findings made me wonder whether increased white matter could be linked to both increased lying and increased creativity. After all, people who have more connections among their different brain parts and more associations are presumably also more creative. To test this possible link between creativity and dishonesty, Francesca Gino and I carried out a series of studies. True to the nature of creativity itself, we approached the question from a variety of angles, starting with a relatively simple approach.

When our participants showed up at the lab, we informed them that they would answer some questions followed by a computerized task. The question set included many irrelevant questions about their general experiences and habits (these filler questions were designed to obscure the real intent of the study) and three types of questions that were the focus of the study.

In the first set of questions, we asked the participants to indicate to what degree they would describe themselves using some “creative” adjectives (insightful, inventive, original, resourceful, unconventional, and so on). In the second, we asked them to tell us how often they engage in seventy-seven different activities, some of which require more creativity and some less (bowling, skiing, skydiving, painting, writing, and so forth). In the third and last set of questions, we asked participants to rate how much they identified with statements such as “I have a lot of creative ideas,” “I prefer tasks that enable me to think creatively,” “I like to do things in an original way,” and other similar statements.

Once the participants completed the personality measures, we asked them to complete the dots task, which was presumably unconnected to the questions. In case you don’t recall this task, flip back to The “What- the- Hell” Effect in chapter 5, “Why Wearing Fakes Make Us Cheat More.”

What do you think happened? Would participants who chose a large number of creative adjectives, engaged in creative activities more frequently, and viewed themselves as more creative cheat more, less, or about the same as the participants who were not as creative?

We found that participants who clicked the more-on-right button (the one with the higher payout) more often tended to be the same people who scored higher on all three creativity measures. Moreover, the difference between more and less creative individuals was most pronounced in the cases where the difference in the number of dots on the right and left sides was relatively small.

This suggested that the difference between creative and less creative individuals comes into play mostly when there is ambiguity in the situation at hand and, with it, more room for justification. When there was an obvious difference between the number of dots on the two sides of the diagonal, the participants simply had to decide whether to lie or not. But when the trials were more ambiguous and it was harder to tell if there were more dots to the right or the left of the diagonal, creativity kicked into action—along with more cheating. The more creative the individuals, the better they were at explaining to themselves why there were more dots to the right of the diagonal (the side with the higher reward).

Put simply, the link between creativity and dishonesty seems related to the ability to tell ourselves stories about how we are doing the right thing, even when we are not. The more creative we are, the more we are able to come up with good stories that help us justify our selfish interests.

Does Intelligence Matter?

Although this was an intriguing result, we didn’t get too excited just yet. This first study showed that creativity and dishonesty are correlated, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that creativity is directly linked to dishonesty. For example, what if a third factor such as intelligence was the factor linked to both creativity and dishonesty?

The link among intelligence, creativity, and dishonesty seems especially plausible when one considers how clever people such as the Ponzi schemer Bernie Madoff or the famous check forger Frank Abagnale (the author of Catch Me If You Can) must have been to fool so many people. And so our next step was to carry out an experiment in which we checked to see whether creativity or intelligence was a better predictor of dishonesty.

Again, picture yourself as one of our participants. This time, the testing starts before you even set foot in the lab. A week earlier, you sit down at your home computer and complete an online survey, which includes questions to assess your creativity and also measure your intelligence. We measure your creativity using the same three measures from the previous study, and measure your intelligence in two ways. First, we ask you to answer three questions designed to test your reliance on logic versus intuition using a set of three questions collected by Shane Frederick (a professor at Yale University). Along with the correct answer, each question comes with an intuitive answer that is in fact incorrect.

To give you an example, try this one: “A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?”

Quick! What’s the answer?

Ten cents?

Good try, but no. It’s the seductive answer, but not the right one.

Although your intuition prods you to answer “$0.10,” if you rely on logic more than intuition, you’ll check your answer just to be sure: “If the ball were $0.10, the bat would be $1.10, which combine to equal $1.20, not $1.10 (.1 + (1 + .1) = 1.2)! Once you realize that your initial instinct is wrong, you enlist your memory of high school algebra and produce the correct solution (.05 + (1 + .05) = 1.1): 5 cents. Doesn’t it feel like the SATs all over again? And congratulations if you got it right. (If not, don’t worry, you would have most likely aced the two other questions on this short test.)

Next, we measure your intelligence through a verbal test. Here you’re presented with a series of ten words (such as “dwindle” and “palliate”), and for each word you have to choose which of six options is closest in meaning to the target word.

A week later, you come to the lab and settle into one of the computer-facing chairs. Once you’re situated, the instructions begin: “You’ll be taking part in three different tasks today; these will test your problem-solving abilities, perceptual skills, and general knowledge. For the sake of convenience, we’ve combined them all into one session.”

First up is the problem-solving task, which is none other than our trusty matrix task. When the five minutes for the test are over, you fold your worksheet and drop it into the recycling bin. What do you claim is your score? Do you report your actual score? Or do you dress it up a little?

Your second task, the perceptual skills task, is the dots test. Once again, you can cheat all you want. The incentive is there—you can earn $10 if you cheat in every one of the trials.

Finally, your third and final task is a multiple-choice general-knowledge quiz comprised of fifty questions of varying difficulty and subject matter. The questions include a variety of trivia such as “How far can a kangaroo jump?” (25 to 40 feet) and “What is the capital of Italy?” (Rome). For each correct answer, you receive 10 cents, for a maximum payout of $5. In the instructions for this last test, we ask that you circle your answers on the question sheet before later transferring them to a bubble sheet.

When you reach the end of this quiz, you put down your pencil. Suddenly the experimenter pipes up, “Oh, my gosh! I goofed! I mistakenly photocopied bubble sheets that are already marked with the correct answers. I’m so sorry. Would you mind using one of these premarked bubble sheets? I’ll try to erase all the marks so that they will not show very clearly. Okay?” Of course you agree.

Next the experimenter asks you to copy your answers from the quiz to the premarked bubble sheet, shred the test sheets with your original answers, and only then submit the premarked bubble sheet with your answers in order to collect your payment. Obviously, as you transfer your answers you realize that you can cheat: instead of transferring your own answers to the bubble sheets, you can just fill in the premarked answers and take more money. (“I knew all along that the capital of Switzerland is Bern. I just chose Zurich without thinking about it.”)

To sum things up, you’ve taken part in three tasks in which you can earn up to $20 to put toward your next meal, beer, or textbook. But how much you actually walk away with depends on your smarts and test-taking chops, as well as your moral compass. Would you cheat? And if so, do you think your cheating has anything to do with how smart you are? Does it have anything to do with how creative you are?

Here’s what we found: as in the first experiment, the individuals who were more creative also had higher levels of dishonesty. Intelligence, however, wasn’t correlated to any degree with dishonesty. This means that those who cheated more on each of the three tasks (matrices, dots, and general knowledge) had on average higher creativity scores compared to noncheaters, but their intelligence scores were not very different.

We also studied the scores of the extreme cheaters, the participants who cheated almost to the max. In each of our measures of creativity, they had higher scores than those who cheated to a lower degree. Once again, their intelligence scores were no different.

Stretching the Fudge Factor: The Case for Revenge

Creativity is clearly an important means by which we enable our own cheating, but it’s certainly not the only one. In an earlier book (The Upside of Irrationality) I described an experiment designed to measure what happens when people are upset by bad service. Briefly, Ayelet Gneezy (a professor at the University of California, San Diego) and I hired a young actor named Daniel to run some experiments for us in local coffee shops. Daniel asked coffee shop patrons to participate in a five-minute task in return for $5. When they agreed, he handed them ten sheets of paper covered with random letters and asked them to find as many identical adjacent letters as they could and circle them with a pencil. After they finished, he returned to their table, collected their sheets, handed them a small stack of bills, and told them, “Here is your $5, please count the money, sign the receipt, and leave it on the table. I’ll be back later to collect it.” Then he left to look for another participant. The key was that he gave them $9 rather than $5, and the question was how many of the participants would return the extra cash.

This was the no-annoyance condition. Another set of customers—those in the annoyance condition—experienced a slightly different Daniel. In the midst of explaining the task, he pretended that his cell phone was vibrating. He reached into his pocket, took out the phone, and said, “Hi, Mike. What’s up?” After a short pause, he would enthusiastically say, “Perfect, pizza tonight at eight thirty. My place or yours?” Then he would end his call with “Later.” The whole fake conversation took about twelve seconds.

After Daniel slipped the cell phone back into his pocket, he made no reference to the disruption and simply continued describing the task. From that point on, everything was the same as in the no-annoyance condition.

We wanted to see if the customers who had been so rudely ignored would keep the extra money as an act of revenge against Daniel. Turns out they did. In the no-annoyance condition 45 percent of people returned the extra money, but only 14 percent of those who were annoyed did so. Although we found it pretty sad that more than half the people in the no-annoyance condition cheated, it was pretty disturbing to find that the twelve-second interruption provoked people in the annoyance condition to cheat much, much more.

In terms of dishonesty, I think that these results suggest that once something or someone irritates us, it becomes easier for us to justify our immoral behavior. Our dishonesty becomes retribution, a compensatory act against whatever got our goat in the first place. We tell ourselves that we’re not doing anything wrong, we are only getting even. We might even take this rationalization a step further and tell ourselves that we are simply restoring karma and balance to the world. Good for us, we’re crusading for justice!

MY FRIEND AND New York Times technology columnist David Pogue captured some of the annoyance we feel toward customer service—and the desire for revenge that comes with it. Anyone who knows David would tell you that he is the kind of person who would gladly help anyone in need, so the idea that he would go out of his way to hurt anyone is rather surprising—but when we feel hurt, there is hardly a limit to the extent to which we can reframe our moral code. And David, as you’ll see in a moment, is a highly creative individual. Here is David’s song (please sing along to the melody of “The Sounds of Silence”):

Hello voice mail, my old friend

I’ve called for tech support again

I ignored my boss’s warning

I called on a Monday morning

Now it’s evening and my dinner

First grew cold and then grew mold …

I’m still on hold!

I’m listening to the sounds of silence.

You don’t seem to understand.

I think your phone lines are unmanned.

I punched every touchtone I was told,

But I’ve still spent 18 hours on hold.

It’s not enough your program crashed my Mac

And it constantly hangs and bombs;

It erased my ROMs!

Now my Mac makes the sounds of silence.

In my dreams I fantasize

Of wreaking vengeance on you guys.

Say your motorcycle crashes;

Blood comes gushing from your gashes.

With your fading strength you call 911

And you pray for a trained MD …

But you get me!

And you listen to the sounds of silence!

An Italian Story of Creative Revenge

When I was seventeen and my cousin Yoav was eighteen, we spent the summer backpacking in Europe, having a wonderful time. We met lots of people, saw beautiful cities and places, spent time in museums—it was a perfect European jaunt for two restless teenagers.

Our travel itinerary went from Rome up through Italy and France and finally to England. When we originally bought our youth train passes, the nice fellow at the Rome Eurail office gave us a photocopy of a map of the European train system, carefully marking the train path that we were going to take with a black ballpoint pen. He told us that we could use our passes anytime we wanted within the two-month window but that we could travel only along the particular route he had drawn. He stapled the flimsy photocopied map to a more official printed receipt and handed us the package. Initially, we were certain that no conductor would respect this rather unsophisticated-looking map and ticket combo, but the ticket seller assured us that it was all we needed, and in fact that proved to be the case.

After enjoying the sights in Rome, Florence, Venice, and a few smaller Italian towns, we spent a few nights on the shore of a lake outside Verona. On our last night by the lake, we woke up to find that someone had been through our backpacks and strewn our stuff all over the place. After taking a careful inventory of our belongings, we saw that all of our clothes and even my camera were still there. The only thing missing was Yoav’s extra pair of sneakers. We would have considered it a minor loss, except for the fact that Yoav’s mother (my aunt Nava), in her infinite wisdom, had wanted to make sure that we had some emergency cash in case someone stole our money. So she had tucked a few hundred dollars in Yoav’s extra pair of sneakers. The irony of the situation was painful.

We decided to look around the town to see if we could spot someone wearing Yoav’s sneakers and went to the police as well. Given the fact that the local policemen understood little English, it was rather difficult to convey the nature of the crime—that a pair of sneakers had been stolen and that it was important because there was cash hidden in the sole of the right shoe. Not surprisingly, we never recovered Yoav’s sneakers, and that left us somewhat embittered. In our minds it was an unfair turn of events, and Europe owed us one.

ABOUT A WEEK after the sneaker-theft incident, we decided that in addition to the other places on our route we also wanted to visit Switzerland and the Netherlands. We could have purchased new train tickets for the detour, but remembering the stolen shoes and the lack of help from the Italian police, we decided instead to expand our options with a bit of creativity. Using a black ballpoint pen just like the ticket seller’s, we drew another path on our photocopied map. This one passed through Switzerland on the way to France and from there to England. Now the map showed two possible routes for our journey: the original route and our modified one. When we showed the maps to the next few conductors, they did not comment on our artwork, so we continued sketching extra routes on our maps for a few weeks.

Our scam worked until we were en route to Basel. The Swiss conductor examined our passes, scowled, shook his head, and handed them back to us.

“You are going to have to buy a ticket for this part of your trip,” he informed us.

“Oh, but you see, sir,” we said ever so politely, “Basel is indeed on our route.” We pointed to the modified path on our map.

The conductor was unconvinced. “I am sorry, but you will have to pay for your ticket to Basel, or I will have to ask you to leave the train.”

“But, sir,” we argued, “all the other conductors have accepted our tickets with no problem.”

The conductor shrugged and shook his head again.

“Please, sir,” pleaded Yoav, “if you allow us to get to Basel, we will give you this tape of the Doors. They’re a great American rock band.”

The conductor did not seem amused or particularly interested in the Doors. “Okay,” he said. “You can go to Basel.”

We weren’t sure whether he finally agreed with us, appreciated the gesture, or had just given up. After that incident we stopped adding lines to our map, and soon we returned to our original planned path.

LOOKING BACK ON our dishonest behavior, I am tempted to chalk it up to the stupidity of youth. But I know that’s not the whole picture. In fact, I suspect that there are a number of aspects of the situation that enabled us to behave that way and justify our actions as perfectly acceptable.

First, I’m sure that being in a foreign country by ourselves for the first time helped us feel more comfortable with the new rules we were creating.^* If we had stopped to give our actions more thought, we would have certainly recognized their seriousness, but somehow without thinking much, we imagined that our creative route enhancements were part of the regular Eurail procedure. Second, losing a few hundred dollars and Yoav’s sneakers made us feel that it was okay for us to take some revenge and get Europe to pay us back. Third, since we were on an adventure, maybe we felt more morally adventurous too. Fourth, we justified our actions by convincing ourselves that we weren’t really hurting anything or anyone. After all, we were just drawing a few extra lines on a piece of paper. The train was going on its track anyway; and besides, the trains were never full, so we weren’t displacing anyone. It was also the case that we very easily justified our actions to ourselves because when we originally purchased the tickets, we could have picked a different route for the same price. And since the different paths were the same to the Eurail office when we originally purchased the tickets, why would it matter at what point in time we decided to choose a different path? (Maybe that’s how people who back-date stock options justify their actions to themselves.) A final source of justification had to do with the physical nature of the ticket itself. 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 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.

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 Suckers, Swindlers, and an Ambivalent State, every time business breaks through new technological frontiers—whether the invention of the postal service, the telephone, the radio, the computer, or mortgage-backed securities—such progress allows people to approach the boundaries of both technology and dishonesty. Only later, once the capabilities, effects, and limitations of a technology have been established, can we determine both the desirable and abusive ways to use these new tools.

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 creative ourselves, and we should continue to encourage creativity in others. But we also need to understand the links between creativity and dishonesty and try to restrict the cases in which creative people might be tempted to use their skills to find new ways to misbehave.

BY THE WAY—I am not sure if I mentioned it, but I think that I am both incredibly honest and highly creative.