The Dark Side of Creativity: Original Thinkers Can be More Dishonest

Creativity is a common aspiration for individuals, organizations, and societies. Here, however, we test whether creativity increases dishonesty. We propose that a creative personality and creativity primes promote individuals' motivation to think outside the box and that this increased motivation leads to unethical behavior. In four studies, we show that participants with creative personalities who scored high on a test measuring divergent thinking tended to cheat more (Study 1); that dispositional creativity is a better predictor of unethical behavior than intelligence (Study 2); and that participants who were primed to think creatively were more likely to behave dishonestly because of their creativity motivation (Study 3) and greater ability to justify their dishonest behavior (Study 4). Finally, a field study constructively replicates these effects and demonstrates that individuals who work in more creative positions are also more morally flexible (Study 5). The results provide evidence for an association between creativity and dishonesty, thus highlighting a dark side of creativity.creativity, creative thinking, dishonesty, intelligence, unethical behavior

If you are going to pay within the next 24 hours, press 1: automatic planning prompt reduces credit card delinquency

People often form intentions but fail to follow through on them. Mounting evidence suggests that such intention-action gaps can be narrowed with prompts to make concrete plans about when, where and how to act to achieve the intention. In this paper we pushed the notion of plan-concreteness to test the efficacy of a prompt under a minimalist automated calling setting, where respondents were only prompted to indicate a narrower duration within which they intent to act. In a field experiment this planning prompt significantly helped people to pay their past dues and get out of debt delinquency. These results suggest that minimalist automatic planning prompts are a scalable, cost-effective intervention.https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/jcpy.1031Published versio

When retailing and Las Vegas meet: probabilistic free price promotions

A number of retailers offer gambling- or lottery-type price promotions with a chance to receive one’s entire purchase for free. Although these retailers seem to share the intuition that probabilistic free price promotions are attractive to consumers, it is unclear how they compare to traditional sure price promotions of equal expected monetary value. We compared these two risky and sure price promotions for planned purchases across six experiments in the field and in the laboratory. Together, we found that consumers are not only more likely to purchase a product promoted with a probabilistic free discount over the same product promoted with a sure discount but that they are also likely to purchase more of it. This preference seems to be primarily due to a diminishing sensitivity to the prices. In addition, we find that the zero price effect, transaction cost, and novelty considerations are likely not implicated.https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/pdf/10.1287/mnsc.2015.2328Published versio

Replicating the effect of moral standards accessibility on dishonesty, author’s response to the replication attempt

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/2515245918769062Accepted manuscriptPublished versio

An Experimental Analysis of Ending Rules in Internet Auctions

A great deal of late bidding has been observed on internet auctions such as eBay, which employ a second price auction with a fixed deadline. Much less late bidding has been observed on internet auctions such as those run by Amazon, which employ similar auction rules, but use an ending rule that automatically extends the auction if necessary after the scheduled close until ten minutes have passed without a bid. This paper reports an experiment that allows us to examine the effect of the different ending rules under controlled conditions, without the other differences between internet auction houses that prevent unambiguous interpretation of the field data. We find that the difference in auction ending rules is sufficient by itself to produce the differences in late bidding observed in the field data. The experimental data also allow us to examine how individuals bid in relation to their private values, and how this behavior is shaped by the different opportunities for learning provided in the auction conditions.

The Dark Side of Creativity: Original Thinkers Can Be More Dishonest

Creativity is a common aspiration for individuals, organizations, and societies. Here, however, we test whether creativity increases dishonesty. We propose that a creative personality and a creative mindset promote individuals' ability to justify their behavior, which, in turn, leads to unethical behavior. In 5 studies, we show that participants with creative personalities tended to cheat more than less creative individuals and that dispositional creativity is a better predictor of unethical behavior than intelligence (Experiment 1). In addition, we find that participants who were primed to think creatively were more likely to behave dishonestly than those in a control condition (Experiment 2) and that greater ability to justify their dishonest behavior explained the link between creativity and increased dishonesty (Experiments 3 and 4). Finally, we demonstrate that dispositional creativity moderates the influence of temporarily priming creativity on dishonest behavior (Experiment 5). The results provide evidence for an association between creativity and dishonesty, thus highlighting a dark side of creativity

Dishonesty in everyday life and its policy implications

Dishonest acts are all too prevalent in day-to-day life. In the current review, we examine some possible psychological causes for such dishonesty that go beyond the standard economic considerations of probability and value of external payoffs. We propose a general model of dishonest behavior that includes also internal psychological reward mechanisms for honesty and dishonesty, and we point to the implications of this model in terms of curbing dishonesty

How small is zero price? The true value of free products

When faced with a choice of selecting one of several available products (or possibly buying nothing), a standard theoretical perspective suggests that the option with the highest benefitcost difference will be chosen. This analysis applies to all prices including the price of zero. In contrast, we propose that decisions about free products are different than simply subtracting costs from benefits, and that in fact the benefits associated with free products are perceived to be higher. We test this idea by contrasting the demands for two products (types of chocolate) across conditions that maintain the cost-benefit difference for the goods, but vary on whether the price of the cheaper good in the set is priced at a low positive price or at zero. Contrary to a standard cost -benefit perspective, the results show that, in the zero-price condition, the proportion of participants choosing the less attractive chocolate dramatically increases, while the proportion of participants choosing the more attractive chocolate dramatically decreases. Thus, individuals seem to act as if pricing a good as free not only decreases its cost, but also adds to its benefits. After documenting this basic effect, we propose and test several possible psychological antecedents of the effect: Social norms, Mapping difficulty, and Affect. The results suggest Affect as the most likely source of the effect

Effort for Payment

The standard model of labor is one in which individuals trade their time and energy in return for monetary rewards. Building on Fiske’s relational theory (1992), we propose that there are two types of markets that determine relationships between effort and payment: monetary and social. We hypothesize that monetary markets are highly sensitive to the magnitude of compensation, whereas social markets are not. This perspective can shed light on the well-established observation that people sometimes expend more effort in exchange for no payment (a social market) than they expend when they receive low payment (a monetary market). Three experiments support these ideas. The experimental evidence also demonstrates that mixed markets (markets that include aspects of both social and monetary markets) more closely resemble monetary than social markets