Investigating the prosocial psychopath model of the creative personality: Evidence from traits and psychophysiology

Personality predictors of creative achievement and lawbreaking behavior

“…Whatever underlies the phenotypic tendency towards lawbreaking could explain the consistent observation of low agreeableness in creative persons. This might be P (Eysenck 1995) or, if we cautiously interpret the trend for creativity to be associated with a resilient profile, it might be the fearless dominance or boldness factor in psychopathy (Galang 2010;Galang et al 2016). Alternatively, this might have been due to the inclusion of the general factor in the model, although we also note that this factor was not associated with creative achievement in this dataset.…”

“…Although Eysenck was more focused on the schizotypal side of P, Galang (2010) took up this line of reasoning in an attempt to explain the consistent association of disagreeable traits with creativity. The result is the Bprosocial psychopathĥ ypothesis, which identifies cognitive and affective disinhibition as important drivers of the features that are expected to be common to both creative personalities and psychopaths (Galang et al 2016). Dopaminergic mechanisms, especially in mesolimbic and prefrontal brain regions, are thought to partly explain why these features co-occur with creativity (Galang 2010).…”

“…Both the personological (Eysenck 1995;Galang et al 2016) and social cognitive hypotheses (De Dreu and Nijstad 2008;Gino and Wiltermuth 2014) would lead to expect that if disagreeableness and dishonesty were related to creativity, behaviors related to these traits should be expressed by creative persons even outside of the context of creative activity. Cognitive and affective disinhibition should predispose some creative people to entertain the unlikely, risky, non-normative, and occasionally illegal courses of action (Galang et al 2016), while at the same time feeling flexible and unrestrained enough to enable them to justify the actions once selected or enacted (Gino and Ariely 2012). That is not to say that lawbreakers and creatives would be the same set of individuals, but that they could intersect.…”

“…One could suppose that the association of undesirable behaviors and creative accomplishments of successful artists or scientists is merely an effect of higher status or power that stems from gaining recognition in a domain (see e.g., Piff et al 2012). Yet, such relationships have also been observed between mini-and little-c creativity (Kaufman and Beghetto 2009), and such traits as moral flexibility, dishonesty and deception (Beaussart et al 2013;Gino and Ariely 2012;Gino and Wiltermuth 2014;Kapoor and Khan 2017;Silvia et al 2011;Walczyk et al 2008), narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism (Jonason et al 2017;Jonason et al 2015;McKay et al 2017), as well as difficulty in recognizing one's own and others' emotions (Zenasni and Lubart 2009), emotional disinhibition and tendency to risk-taking (Galang et al 2016), psychoticism (Eysenck 1993), aggressive outbursts, lawbreaking and unethical behavior (Johnson 1983;Mai et al 2015).…”

Bridging the gap: A network approach to Dark Triad, Mental Toughness, the Big Five, and perceived stress

“…Psychopathy is conventionally perceived as socially malevolent. However, some of its facets ( e.g., boldness) predict positive outcomes, such as creative achievement and better divergent thinking (e.g., Galang, Castelo, Santos, Perlas, & Angeles, ).…”