A neighbor asks you for help renovating his house, promises to pay you and then, once the job is finished, denies that the agreement ever existed. 248 university students were presented with this very scene and asked to do something very un-Zen: invent as much revenge as possible.
An interesting association emerged from those responses. Participants with higher levels of narcissistic traits, along with those who reported having previously used their creativity to deceive, mischief, or take revenge, tended to produce ideas that the researchers rated as simultaneously more malicious and more original. The study, published in Journal of Intelligenceis authored by Natalie A. Ceballos, Ruby N. Sweet, and Carmen E. Westerberg of Texas State University.
The important word here is “ideas”. The researchers measured how creatively participants could imagine revenge in a hypothetical scenario. No one was let loose in the neighborhood with a delinquent neighbor to see how it would go.
The neighbor who doesn’t pay and creativity used by the wrong side
The research starts from the so-called malevolent creativitymalicious creativity: the ability to produce new solutions with the aim of harming, manipulating or deceiving someone. Creativity, in short, preserves its inventiveness; The intended use changes a lot.
The initial sample included 276 university students, reduced to 248 in the final analyses; 82% were women. Participants filled out questionnaires on their past behaviors, their perception of their ability to solve problems and on the three traits of the so-called “dark triad”: narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism. Then came the imaginary neighbor who reneges on the payment.
Responses were evaluated along three dimensions. One was simply how many ideas they could produce; one measured how malevolent they were; a composite score instead selected those capable of combining damage and originality. And this is where the results start to separate.
Those who considered themselves good at normal problem solving tended to produce more revenge ideas. The quantity, however, didn’t say much about their badness or originality. For the score that combined both characteristics, the personal history of creatively malevolent behavior and narcissistic traits emerged.
Among the traits of the “dark triad”, narcissism emerges above all
In the final statistical model, narcissism and previous malicious behavior were significant predictors of the composite score. Psychopathy and Machiavellianism did not emerge in the same way after considering the other variables simultaneously.
Not even feeling particularly provoked by the scenario seemed to be enough. Reported anger was linked to darker responses in simple analyses, but lost its specific weight when previous personalities and behaviors entered the model.
It’s a curious result because the proposed situation was designed to irritate: job done, payment promised, neighbor suddenly suffering from contractual amnesia. Yet the immediate reaction to the provocation explained less of the individual differences already present.
Here it is best to keep away a very popular shortcut when talking about narcissism. The study measures narcissistic traits through a questionnaire; it does not diagnose narcissistic personality disorder and does not authorize us to turn every resentful ex, vindictive colleague or quarrelsome neighbor into a clinical case.
The association exists, the effect remains small
Numbers also help keep proportions. In the final model, the variables considered explained approximately 9.1% of the variability in the score that combined originality and malevolence. For the other two indicators it remained around 6.5% and 8.4%. So there is a statistical signal, with a lot of human behavior still out of the equation.
Furthermore, the sample was made up of US university students and was composed of a large majority of women. Some information, including previous malicious behavior, was self-reported. And the research photographs associations: it does not allow us to conclude that having more narcissistic traits directly produces a greater ability to plan revenge.
The result tells something more limited and perhaps for this reason more interesting. Faced with the same imaginary wrong, some people simply generate many solutions; others manage to build more harmful and unusual ones. In the sample studied, previous familiarity with malicious behaviors and narcissistic traits helped predict this second form of creativity. Imagination, evidently, has no moral preferences. It also depends on where we decide to send it.
