Cheating Heightens Creativity, Study Finds

Breaking the rules by lying about performance on a task may increase creativity on a later task by making people feel freer from convention, according to a new study.

"The common saying that 'rules are meant to be broken' is at the root of both creative performance and dishonest behavior," said lead researcher Francesca Gino of Harvard Business School. "Both creativity and dishonesty, in fact, involve rule breaking."

In the study, published in Psychology Science, Gino and her colleague Scott Wiltermuth of the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California used experiments that allowed and sometimes encouraged participants to cheat in order to measure its effect on creativity.

In the first experiment, participants were given a math-related task and were asked to self-report their score at the end of the task. Participants, not knowing the researchers were aware of their actual score, would sometimes inflate their scores.

In the second and supposedly unrelated experiment, participants' creativity was tested using a word association game. Participants were given three words and asked to provide a fourth. Out of all participants, 59 percent cheated by inflating their self-reported score in the first experiment, an action that Gino and Wiltermuth found to be associated with scoring higher on the second experiment, indicating more creative thinking.

Further testing confirmed the link between dishonesty and creativity, while additional data suggested that this correlation may result from cheating participants being more "primed" to be less constrained by rules.

Previous research by Gino found that "encouraging out-of-the-box thinking can lead people toward more dishonest decisions when confronted with an ethical dilemma," according to the press release. The current research focused on the consequences of dishonesty, not the causes.

"We turned the relationship upside down, in a sense," said 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."