Many scholars have become increasingly interested in comprehending why people who are liars tend to be more creative as opposed to those who are honest. Consequently, both dishonesty and creativity encompass breaking of rules thus shifting from the norm (Ariely 2012 p 76).Various studies have been undertaken with the aim of attaining an in-depth understanding of this phenomenon. The paper will explicitly evaluate the relationship between creativity and dishonesty.
Thus, the five experiments that were undertaken established that the cheaters were more creative as compared to the non-cheaters. The first experiment involved a hundred and fifty-three individuals that were recruited from the Amazon Mechanical Turk. Four unrelated tasks were executed. Namely: a problem-solving task, a creativity task, a remote association task and a 2-min filler task. In the first experiment, 48% of those who participated solved the problem correctly. Nonetheless, 59% cheated and submitted inaccurate information though they performed better. Nevertheless, according to the results, those participants who cheated were more creative. The second experiment involved a hundred and one students from different universities in the United States. The study entailed a remote association task and computer math and logic game.
The results obtained indicated that performance was higher for those who cheated. Experiment three involved two variables. Namely: those who lie and those who do not lie. Experiment three established that those who broke the rules were more creative. 40% of the participants cheated. In experiment four, there were 178 participants, and a coin toss task was incorporated thus cheating and acting honestly was the two variables. Consequently, individuals who cared less about the different rules cheated. In experiment, five two hundred and eight individuals were participants. The two variables included the rule-breaking prime condition and the neutral prime condition. An analysis of the existing variance revealed that those who broke rules were more creative than those who are honest.
The outcomes can be generalized to the entire population if samples are collected randomly from the population hence collecting samples from only one area is inappropriate. Thus, one of the limitations of the study is the fact that samples were collected from particular areas. Sampling is efficient and effective if it is conducted randomly while capturing all areas. While conducting a follow-up study, I would conduct more experiments in order to ascertain my claims. Otherwise, it is clearly evident that persons who are dishonest are the most creative (Ariely 2012 p 56).
Works Cited
Ariely, Dan. The (honest) Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone-Especially Ourselves. , 2012. Print.
