Dishonesty and Creativity

When we find someone being dishonest or unscrupulous, we wonder how they can be that way? How do they sleep at night? Is their conscience dead?

I never could think of an answer that made sense. Most answers just seem to be phrased to make you feel morally superior! Which is why I found a couple of passages from Dan Ariely’s book, The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone—Especially Ourselves) more believable.

But let’s start with what Nassim Taleb called the narrative fallacy: the human tendency to build a story around events so they “make sense”. Ariely extended this tendency to describe how most of us think:

“We’re storytelling creatures by nature, and we tell ourselves story after story until we come up with an explanation that we like and that sounds reasonable enough to believe. And when the story portrays us in a more glowing and positive light, so much the better.”

Ariely goes on to argue that a creative person is better than others at coming up with such stories:

“Put simply, the link between creativity and dishonesty seems related to the ability to tell ourselves stories about how we are doing the right thing, even when we are not. The more creative we are, the more we are able to come up with good stories that help us justify our selfish interests.”

Which is a bit depressing: does being creative contain the seeds of being dishonest? Do creative people have to exercise greater self control than the rest to stay honest?

I am sure some lawyer would use this defense the next time his client is accused of plagiarism!