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Researchers: Dishonesty can mean greater creativity

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From ScienceDaily:

Previous work has focused on the factors that might lead to unethical behavior. In earlier research, Gino had found that encouraging out-of-the-box thinking can lead people toward more dishonest decisions when confronted with an ethical dilemma.

This research, however, focuses on the consequences of dishonesty:

“We turned the relationship upside down, in a sense,” says Gino. “Our research raises the possibility that one of the reasons why dishonesty seems so widespread in today’s society is that by acting dishonestly we become more creative — and this creativity may allow us to come up with original justifications for our immoral behavior and make us likely to keep crossing ethical boundaries.”

Gino and Wiltermuth are following up on these findings by investigating how people respond when dishonesty and creativity are combined in the form of “creative” cheating. Their initial findings suggest that people may give cheaters a pass if they cheat in particularly creative ways.

Surely these results are unrelated to the number and depth of research scandals in psychology. Or is that insufficiently nuanced? 😉

One wonders whether great scientists could have shown more creativity by cheating. Well, yes, but …

Note: Other research found that creative people were more likely to cheat, suggesting that creativity made it easier to rationalize their actions. That is, to fool themselves while fooling others.

One is reminded of physicist Feynman’s warning:

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.

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Comments
A, you too. KFkairosfocus
March 10, 2014
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D, and the same to you. KFkairosfocus
March 10, 2014
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kairosfocus @ 5
D and A . . . I should have spotted that name!
I think we exchanged a couple of brief comments recently. Have a good day and week.Dionisio
March 10, 2014
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Axel @ 4 Interesting analogy to children at play, who reject whatever games anyone might suggest, as it's written in Luke 7:32 Thank you.Dionisio
March 10, 2014
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Axel @ 4 You wrote:
Wow! Dionisio Areaopagite (meant to be the vocative, not the English),...
Good observation! that's exactly right - Acts of the Apostles, chapter 17 Paul's sermon led Dionysus to the saving faith in Christ. And we sing hallelujah! :) Have a good week. It's around 9:30am on a bright clear sky morning here in this part of Europe.Dionisio
March 10, 2014
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D and A . . . I should have spotted that name!kairosfocus
March 9, 2014
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Wow! Dionisio Areaopagite(meant to be the vocative, not the English), and thanks. That's off the scale, too! Well, it would be, if, in today's bizarro, corporate-sponsored Academy, the Multiverse hadn't spoilt it for all would-be rivals, I'm inclined to think. Game over. Though, of course, they don't realise it. But, then, they don't realise they are like the children playing in the market square referred to in the Gospels: 'When we said 'historical science', you said: 'History is written by the victors, and you've won nothing but louche economic sponsors'; 'When we said, 'Evolution', you said, 'Cambrian explosion'; 'When we said, 'junk DNA', you said, 'No that's junk. No reason to conjecture any significant quantity of DNA is.' And so on and so forth. I don't wish to mock the afflicted more than is absolutely necessary. They are committed, heart and soul, to a new branch of science, to be called 'non-empirical science' or NES (also the perfect acronym for 'nescience'.Axel
March 9, 2014
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EVOLUTIONARY JUST-SO STORIES Excerpt: “There are no detailed Darwinian accounts for the evolution of any fundamental biochemical or cellular system, only a variety of wishful speculations” (James Shapiro, molecular biologist, National Review, Sept. 16, 1996). Biologist Michael Behe observes: “Some evolutionary biologists--like Richard Dawkins--have fertile imaginations. Given a starting point, they almost always can spin a story to get to any biological structure you wish” (Darwin’s Black Box). http://www.wayoflife.org/database/evolutionary_just_so_stories.htmlbornagain77
March 9, 2014
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Axel @ 1 Interesting comment. Thank you. Isn't a substantial dosage of creativity required in order to extrapolate the Galapagos season-dependent finch beak size adaptation story to the bestseller "origin of species" movie script?Dionisio
March 9, 2014
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There is creativity and creativity. As we discuss all the time on here, it seems clear now that there is no limit to the creativity of the thinking of atheists. Unfortunately, while the paranoid-schizophrenic Victorian painter, Richard Dadd's oeuvres were examples of positive creativity, the kind of insanity of evangelical atheists inspires them to the the most extremely creative, but, alas, ambagiously-phantasmagorical flights of fancy, to avoid the now manifest theistic truth of the primordial reality we inhabit. Alas, when their conjectural discursions are broken down, they amount to nothing more illuminating than the excuse of a young child who has just broken a vase: 'The vase broke...' Surely, the ultimate triumph of vapid, malfeasant creativity has to be the Multiverse. I suppose this nonsense was inevitable, given how the creativity of the great, theistic scientists of yesteryear, most notably, of the first half of the last century, is in such stark contrast to the relative sterility of the modern, cloned, atheist scientist, plum incapable of conceptual leaps that are not infinitely risible. Back to Cerne, lads and lassies, and see if you can find a real 'God' particle that doesn't mean squat.Axel
March 9, 2014
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