| Malevolent creativity(MC)refers to the creativity that deliberately harms others,organizations,or society,with the purpose of obtaining satisfaction with physical or mental harm.The 4P theory of creativity believes that the environment is an important factor in creativity,and the Hawthorne experiment opened the prelude of the influence of the physical environment on behavior.Previous studies have paid more attention to the impact of different environmental factors on general creativity,and the results are inconsistent and controversial.For the field of malevolent creativity,there is less research on directly exploring the impact and mechanism of specific environments on it.This research aims to compare the effects of dark environment on general creativity and malevolent creativity more comprehensively.Based on this,it explores the relationship between dark environment and general creativity and malevolent creativity,especially reveals the promotion effect of dark environment on malevolent creativity and the cognitive mechanism behind it.The research explored the following key questions through three behavioral experiments:(1)Does the dark environment have a specific effect on malevolent creativity(compared to general creativity)?(2)Is the sense of anonymity the main path which dark environment promotes malevolent creativity?(3)After activating people’s moral sense,can it weaken people’s malevolent creativity performance ?Study 1 directly compares the differences in the performance of the subjects in the creativity task(AUT),the malevolent creativity task(MCT)and the object characteristic task(OCT)under darkness and bright conditions.At the same time,the study measured the participants’ emotions,Dark personality traits,and subjective anonymity as control variables.The results show that,compared with the bright environment,the dark environment significantly improves the fluency,novelty and malicious performance of the participants’ malevolent creativity,but does not promote the performance of general creativity and control tasks.In addition,research has found that dark personality traits are significantly positively correlated with the maliciousness,novelty,and fluency dimensions of malevolent creativity,but there is no mediating effect;individuals in dark environment feel stronger a sense of anonymity,but there is no mediating effect on the influence of the environment on malevolent creativity.Study2 through the dark environment induce a stronger sense of anonymity as an entry point to explore the impact of environment and anonymity on general creativity(RPP)and malevolent creativity(MCT).It turns out that the camera’s manipulation effect on the sense of anonymity is successful,and the sense of anonymity perceived by the group without the camera is significantly stronger than that of the group with the camera.The dark environment significantly promotes the fluency and novelty of MC and the fluency of RPP,and the sense of anonymity induced by the camera also enhances the fluency of MC.The mediating effect test found that the sense of anonymity played a part of mediating role between the fluency and novelty of malevolent creativity and dark environment.Study 3 from the perspective of moral disengagement,using the moral priming paradigm to explore the influence of the dark environment and moral sense on MC and RPP.The results showed that the moral prime was successful,and the high-ethical group showed lower moral disengagement and higher pro-social behavior than the low-ethical group.The dark environment promotes the performance of MC novelty and RPP fluency.The sense of morality regulates the novelty of MC and the novelty of RPP.A high moral level can weaken people’s malevolent creativity performance in a dark environment,and make the idea less original.The sense of morality plays a moderating role in the influence of the dark environment on malevolent creativity.Combining the above three studies,on the one hand,the results consistently found that the dark environment has a more stability effect on malevolent creativity,that is,darkness promotes the performance of malevolent creativity,especially the novelty of individual malicious creative ideas.At the same time,the dark environment also has a certain promotion effect on general creativity,that is,it improves the creative generation ability of the individual in real situation tasks.On the other hand,the research also found that the sense of anonymity and morality are important factors affecting malevolent creativity.The sense of anonymity enhances the performance of malevolent creativity,and has a mediating effect on the fluency and novelty of MC;while the sense of morality can weaken the performance of malevolent creativity and play a moderating role.These results have important significance for us to construct a theoretical model about dark-malevolent creativity. |
