# The Social Context of Malevolent Creativity

## TL;DR

This study explores how social context and morality influence malevolent creativity, finding that real-life threatening scenarios increase it more than neutral ones.

## Contribution

The study introduces a novel comparison between two types of social problem tasks to assess malevolent creativity.

## Key findings

- Fluency and originality are significantly related to malevolent creativity.
- Realistic Presented Problems elicit more malevolent creative responses than Social Games tasks.
- Morality correlates with creative personality but does not moderate creativity-malevolence relations.

## Abstract

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the influence of social context and morality on malevolent creativity. The sample consisted of 217 (176 female, 41 male) undergraduate and graduate students in a Southeastern public research university in the U.S. Six different open-ended socially oriented problems (three Divergent Thinking (DT) Social Games and three DT Realistic Presented Problems tasks) were used to explore the way malevolent creativity differs in two sets of problem tasks. Realistic Presented Problems are constructed differently from Social Games tasks in such a way that they include unfair, disturbing, and threatening contextual factors, while Social Games problems have more neutral and everyday problem scenarios. Participants also completed the Self-Report of Creative Traits and morality measures. The findings of the study indicated that fluency and originality were related significantly to malevolent creativity. Further, social contexts in DT tasks led to a significant difference in malevolent creativity. Participants generated significantly more malevolent creative responses in Realistic Presented Problems than in Social Games tasks. The results also revealed that morality was significantly correlated with creative personality, but the results provided no evidence that morality moderates the relation between creativity indices and malevolent creativity.