Summary by Sandy Michels and the Research Committee
Research Highlights
- Results of a meta-analysis revealed overall significant positive relationships between creativity and Machiavellianism and narcissism, but no relationship was found between creativity and psychopathy.
- The dark personalities (psychopathy, Machiavellianism Narcissism) are more strongly related to self-reported creativity than to performance-based measures of creativity.
- It is likely that individuals with dark personalities, particularly narcissism and to a lesser degree Machiavellianism, see themselves as creative and may be motivated to obtain social recognition by reporting they are creative.
What are the dark personalities?
The researchers Lebuda, Figura, and Karwowski explored relationships between the Dark Triad and creativity in their 2021 study. The Dark Triad consists of three distinctly different personality traits: Psychopathy, Narcissism, and Machiavellianism. People with all three kinds of personalities display the characteristic features of emotional coldness, callousness and lack of empathy. But each personality has unique attributes. More specifically, individuals with psychopathy tend to be thrill seekers with high impulsivity, and they are poor at controlling their behavior as well as being remorseless. Individuals with Narcissism tend to be grandiose and self-absorbed. They feel uniquely superior and entitled and have a need to be admired. Finally, individuals with a Machiavellian personality tend to exploit and manipulate others.
What is creativity and how can it be measured?
Creativity is generally defined by originality (novelty) and effectiveness (usefulness) across different contexts. Past research has examined creativity from different perspectives, including from the perspective of a person, in which cognitive functioning (things like imagining and divergent thinking) and general abilities (including intellectual abilities) are often studied since they are linked to creative thinking. Divergent thinking tasks (which ask people to come up with many different solutions or ideas for a problem) are usually used to assess a person’s creative ability (creative potential). For example, Guo et al. (2021) used the Alternative Uses Test performance (a divergent thinking task) to measure each participant’s creative potential by asking them to write on a piece of paper all their imagined uses of a specific object (for example, an umbrella, a book, or a ping pong ball), that was presented to them.
To measure creativity in other ways, researchers have assessed participants’ creative activities (creative things a person does in life) as well as their creative achievements (observable accomplishments such as a discovery in science or creating music) relying on self-reports from participants as well as having raters (other people) evaluate participants reported achievements at times. To measure participants’ creative activities, they are often tasked with checking off items they have previously completed on a list, such as having drawn a picture or having designed a costume (Jauk et al., 2014). And when researchers are measuring participants’ creative achievements, they often ask participants to either list their accomplishments or check off accomplishments from lists in specific creative domains (such as humor, music, writing, visual arts and invention; Carson et al., 2005; Galang et al., 2016).
Finally, researchers have also measured creativity by exploring a participant’s creative self-perception (Snyder et al., 2020) by asking participants to self-rate how creative they think they are in general or in a particular domain or even at a specific task or situation.
How did the researchers do this study?
Lebuda et al. (2021) carried out three meta-analyses (a research approach used to combine the results of a number of scientific studies to understand the ‘bigger picture’ of what the combined study results may indicate) in which they used keywords such as “malevolent creativity”, and “antisocial creativity”, as well as “creative achievement”, “creativity”, along with “psychopathy”, “Machiavellianism”, or “narcissism” to search for published studies. They also asked researchers for any of their unpublished studies. Correlational studies (which are studies that explore the relationships between different concepts such creativity and psychopathy) that measured creativity and one or more of the dark triad personalities were selected – as long as they included enough information to calculate how strong the relationship was between these two variables, which is referred to as effect size (the number of studies included ranged from 20 to 25).
The researchers also analyzed several other variables (potential moderators; which are variables that influence the strength of a relationship) to determine if any of these variables influenced the relationship between the Dark Triad personalities (psychopathy/ Machiavellianism/narcissism) and creativity. These variables included publication status (unpublished versus published data) and type of creativity measure used (task performance versus self-report questionnaires). The researchers also examined four features of creativity (ability, activity, achievement, and self-perception), four creativity domains (Everyday, Arts, Science, and General), and several Dark Triad personality measures, The Dirty Dozen, Short Dark Triad, Narcissistic Personality Inventory and other measures not already mentioned, for moderation affects.
What were the findings?
Results of the meta-analysis revealed overall significant positive relationships between creativity and Machiavellianism and narcissism, but no relationship was found between creativity and psychopathy. Further, results of the potential moderators that were explored with respect to the Dark Triad (psychopathy/Machiavellianism/narcissism) and creativity relationships are listed below:
Psychopathy and Creativity
- Publication status and Dark Triad personality measures had no differential effect on this relationship.
- Creativity measures had a differential effect on this relationship. When creativity was measured using self-reports, a significant positive relationship was found between psychopathic traits and creativity, but when performance was measured, no such relationship was found.
- Features of creativity affected this relationship differentially. When creative achievement and activity were examined, significant positive relationships were found for both, but when creative abilities or self-perceptions (participants’ ratings of their own creative abilities) were examined, no relationships were found.
- Domain had a differential effect on this relationship. Significant positive relationships were found for the arts and science domains, while no relationships were found for the general or everyday
Machiavellianism and Creativity
- Publication status and Dark Triad personality measures had no differential effect on this relationship.
- Creativity measures had a differential effect on this relationship. When creativity was measured using self-report a significant positive relationship was found, but when performance was measured no relationship was found.
- Features of creativity effected this relationship differentially. When creative achievement, activity and self-perception were assessed, significant positive correlations were found with the latter relationship being weaker than the first two. When creative ability was examined, no relationship was found.
- Domain had a differential effect on this relationship. Significant positive correlations were found for all four domains tested, but the relationships were weaker for the three domains of art, everyday and general than for the relationship in the domain of science.
Narcissism and Creativity
- Publication status and Dark Triad personality measures had no differential effect on this relationship.
- Creativity measures had a differential effect on this relationship. Both self-report and performance measures of creativity were positively related to narcissism scores. In addition, the relationship between self-reported creativity and narcissism was stronger than the relationship between creative performance and narcissism.
- Features of creativity had a differential effect on this relationship. Although the results showed that each of the four features assessed, self-perception, activity, achievement and ability, had significant positive relationship with narcissism, the relationship was weaker for ability than for the other three features of creativity.
- Domain had a differential effect on this relationship. Significant positive correlations were found for all four domains tested, but a stronger relationship was observed for the science domain than for the three domains of art, everyday and general.
What did the researchers conclude?
Lebuda et al. (2021) concluded that the dark personalities are more strongly related to self-reported creativity than to performance-based measures of creativity. Although the effect sizes (indicating the strength of relationships) were all relatively small. It is likely that individuals with these dark personalities, particularly Narcissism and to a lesser degree Machiavellianism, see themselves as creative and may be motivated to obtain social recognition by reporting they are creative. Future research should investigate the motivations for why this association exists for individuals with Narcissistic traits and Machiavellian traits and further investigate the associations of the dark personality traits across the different domains of creativity.
Reference
Lebuda, I., Figura, B., & Karwowski, M. (2021). Creativity and the Dark Triad: A meta-analysis. Journal of Research in Personality, 92, 1-13. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2021.104088.
Additional References
Carson, S. H., Peterson, J. B., & Higgins, D. M. (2005). Reliability, validity, and factor structure of the creative achievement questionnaire. Creativity Research Journal, 17(1), 37-50.
Galang, A. J. R., Castelo, V. L. C., Santos III, L. C., Perlas,C. M. C., & Angeles, Ma. A. B. (2016). Investigating the prosocial psychopath model of the creative personality: Evidence from traits and psychophysiology. Personality and Individual Differences, 100, 28-36.
Guo, J., Zhang, J., De Fruyt, F, & Pang, W. (2021). The bright and dark personality correlates of creative potentials, creative activities, and creative achievements. Current Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-021-0171-x.
Jauk, E., Benedek, M., & Neubauer, A. C. (2014). The road to creative achievement: A latent variable model of ability and personality predictors: The road to creative achievement. European Journal of Personality, 28(1), 95-105.
Snyder, H. T., Sowden, P. T., Silvia, P. J., & Kaufman, J. C. (2020). The creative self: Do people distinguish creative self-perceptions, efficacy, and personal identity? Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/aca0000317
