Effect Of Approach And Avoidance Motivation On Malevolent Creativity

Malevolent creativity is a kind of creativity that applies original ideas to purposely harm others, often to gain an unfair advantage through manipulation, threat, or harm. The present study aimed to explore the effect of approach and avoidance motivation on malevolent creativity. The main hypotheses of the present study were:approach motivation, compared with avoidance motivation, may enhance subjects’malevolent creativity; avoidance motivation may also promote subjects’malevolent creativity in the condition when an extra motive was added; and the aggression trait may play mediate effect in the influence of approach motivation on malevolent creativity.In study 1, approach and avoidance motivation, aggression traits, innovative behavior, and malevolent creativity behavior were all measured by the BAS/BAS scale, the AQ, the RIBS and the MCBS respectively. The resulted suggested that, subjects who perform higher on BAS would possess more malevolent behavior intention, while the relationship between BIS was not significant. The mediate effects of aggression on approach motivation’s effect on malevolent creativity were confirmed by the pathway and effects analysis.Study 2 elicited approach and avoidance motivation with experimental manipulation. Subjects were assigned into approach group and avoidance group randomly, received different introductions and were asked to finish malevolent creativity problem solving task. The results of study 2 showed that approach motivation state can affect malevolent creativity task performance, both on the fluency and the originality.Given the variable "whether approach or avoid successfully", subjects were assigned into four conditional group:successfully approached, approach failed, successfully avoided, and avoidance failed. It was found that, the avoidance failed performed as well as the successfully approached group. But it was the approach failed group should be paying attention, because it possessed the best performance on malevolence creativity.In a sentence, this study found that there do exist effect of approach motivation on malevolent creativity. Approach motivation trait effected malevolent creativity behavior intention, approach motivation state effected malevolent creativity task performance. In the approach failed condition, the failure may drive subjects to do anything regardless of social rules to be succeed, and this may perform more malevolent creativity.