Motivational Factors in the Typical Display of Humor and Creative Potential: The Case of Malevolent Creativity

Abstract

Research is still disputing if an individual's use of humor in everyday life is also indicative of his or her creative potential. To date, the focus has been mainly restricted to shared cognitive factors, while motivational aspects that may link the production of humor and of creative ideas have been largely neglected. Humor motivation implicates latent social goals the creator pursues through the use of humor. These goals can be benign or more malicious and manifest in an individual's typical display of comic styles. While often overlooked, creativity often serves social functions as well, especially in common everyday situations. Similar to humor, creativity is typically regarded as beneficial for individuals and society. Yet, creative ideas may also originate from less prosocial goals. This is reflected in the concept of malevolent creativity, where novel ideas are generated to deliberately harm others. The present study investigated individuals' typical display of humor, differentiated in eight distinct comic styles in relation to their productivity in a behavioral test for malevolent creativity and general creative potential (n = 106). Individuals with higher scores on comic styles that are affiliated with malicious interpersonal goals-such as hurting or upsetting others or demonstrating superiority over others-were more fluent in producing malevolent creative ideas in the malevolent creativity test. This finding shows that individual differences in humor motivation relate to the capacity of coming up with relevant creative ideas also outside the domain of humor. The pattern of relationships between humor motivation and general creative potential differed from that of malicious creativity and implied the comic style "wit" only, primarily adding to the notion of shared cognitive processes in the production of humor and creative ideas. The study offers a novel perspective for how the inclusion of motivational factors that are inherent to conceptualizations of humor may also benefit creativity research.

Creativity in an Affective Context

“…Antagonism (but not negative affectivity, detachment, disinhibition, or psychoticism as measured by the Personality Inventory for DSM-5) also emerged as a unique predictor of malevolent creativity in the MCT (Perchtold-Stefan et al, 2020b). A higher capacity for malevolent creative ideation was further reported for individuals with a higher preference for using dark, malicious humor (e.g., sarcasm, irony, cynicism; Perchtold-Stefan et al, 2020a). For an interpretation, the authors suggested shared motivations in the generation of malicious ideas and the use of dark humor, which may be attributed to latent interpersonal goals aimed at hurting, upsetting, or dominating others (Papousek, Ruch, et al, 2017).…”

Funny selves: Development of the Humor Efficacy and Identity Short Scales (HEISS)

“…The ability to create humor-to come up with ideas and practices that make others laugh-is a growing topic in the psychology of creativity. Humor creation dovetails naturally with popular theories and themes in creativity research (Lu et al, 2019;Perchtold-Stefan et al, 2020;Ruch & Heinz, 2019), which has long been concerned with how people generate ideas that are both new and apt for a particular purpose, audience, or context (Diedrich et al, 2015;Sawyer, 2006). In this view, humor production falls under the broader umbrella of creative cognition.…”

The evil within: The AMORAL model of dark creativity

“…Initial papers on the dark side of creativity outlined this behavior in artistic, technological, scientific, and organizational domains (McLaren, 1993). Subsequent work has expanded to terrorist and criminal activity (Cropley et al, 2008), video games (Cropley, 2015), educational settings (Kapoor, 2019), dark humor (Kapoor & Karandikar, 2019;Perchtold-Stefan et al, 2020b), and social media (de Saint Laurent et al, 2020). It is easy to consider other potential additions, such as advertising, propaganda, and interpersonal communication (such as the spread of fake news or misinformation).…”