关键词: 创造力, 恶意创造力, 创造力“阴暗面”, 犯罪, 精神疾病

Abstract: Creativity is an ability to create something both novel (original and unexpected) and effective (appropriate and useful). Creativity may be applied for both good and bad purposes; it could have a dark side in its nature. The dark side of creativity means the negative aspects related to creativity, including the negative application of creativity, and the negative characteristic or factors accompanying with creativity. Based on the “4P” theory of creativity research (i.e. product, person, press, and process), this study explored the possibly negative aspects of creativity in the first three dimensions. First, malevolent creativity (MC) may generate products that do harm to people and society. MC is defined as creativity that deliberately leads to harmful or immoral results. The products of MC mostly appear in terrorism and crimes, such as the "9/11". However, common people also have more or less MC. Some situational factors (e.g. dissatisfaction to current society), poor ability to regulate emotion (i.e. low emotional intelligence), some negative personality traits (e.g. high physical aggression) may be related to the MC of individuals. Second, high creativity tends to accompany with various negative characteristics. For instance, the offspring of individuals with high creativity may have a high susceptibility of mental illness than those normal ones. Besides, creativity has complicatedly bidirectional relationship with dishonesty, which partly due to their overlapping characteristic of “break rules”. On one hand, creativity performance may make individuals more dishonest. On the other hand, individuals who cheated may gain higher performance in following creativity tasks. Third, high creative performance tends to be related to some negative situations. People perform better on creativity tasks when they are primed for distrust (vs. trust), especially in the private situation. Feeling the sense of interpersonal conflict or threat may be beneficial to creativity. For example, compared to "non-threat pictures", the stories written by people based on "threat pictures" have higher novelty scores. Mortality salience and social rejection could help improving the creativity of certain person. For example, even slight rejection (e.g. be told not to be selected in a group), could improve the creativity of individuals with independent self-concept. Future research should solve the following problems. First, it’s necessary to improve the method of inducing MC. To induce MC effectively, participants could be told clearly to "generate novel and harmful ideas or solutions". Second, it’s necessary to improve the arithmetic of assessing MC. When it comes to subjective assessment, "snapshot" is a good method. That is, the ideas of each subject are first put together, and then raters give a global score of the malevolent creativity of these ideas in a short time. In addition, classic objective scoring process could be used to assess MC. Third, it’s necessary to expand methodologies of studying MC, such as, to explore the cognitive and neural mechanisms by means of EEG, fMRI, and tDCS. Fourth, it’s necessary to pay much attention to how improve benevolent creativity and reduce malevolent creativity.

Key words: creativity, malevolent creativity, dark side of creativity, crime, mental illness