Montreal Gazette, October 25, 2010, Monday

Montreal Gazette

October 25, 2010, Monday

Montreal Gazette

Narcissists have no creative edge, but sell selves better: Study

By Shannon Proudfoot, Postmedia News October 25, 2010 Comments (5)

Narcissists are no more creative than other people, a new study finds — but they think they are, and they're good at convincing others of their creative genius.

"The depressing reality we ended this with is that narcissists really aren't very creative objectively, but they're really good at getting other people to think they are," says Jack Goncalo, of the School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.

"What could happen is that narcissists will get their ideas pushed through when they're not very good, and then we have people who are more modest with really good ideas, but they're not getting heard."

In the first experiment, participants had 10 minutes to come up with as many uses as possible for a simple brick. Narcissistic types dreamt up a mean of 19.26 ideas representing 9.43 different categories — a performance that wasn't different in a statistically significant way from the 17.54 ideas covering 10.98 categories generated by non-narcissists.

A second test asked participants to imagine visiting a distant galaxy and a planet very different from Earth, and then to draw a creature from that world.

Responses were scored for "atypical" creative ideas, such as rearrangement of facial features or fanciful attributes like laser-shooting eyes. Narcissists didn't draw alien creatures that were any more creative than their humbler counterparts did, but that didn't stop them from rating their creativity more highly on both tasks.

Another experiment tested how other people judge creativity, with participants asked to come up with a unique movie concept and pitch it to another study participant who rated the idea. Narcissists earned higher creativity scores (a mean of 4.25 out of 7) than non-narcissists (3.44), even though the other experiments demonstrated they didn't actually offer more imaginative ideas.

"We really have to be careful not to mistake charisma for creativity," says Goncalo. "People who are enthusiastic and confident aren't necessarily the ones with the best ideas, just because they think they have the best ideas."

But in another experiment examining creative ideas in group settings, he and co-authors Francis Flynn and Sharon Kim uncovered one encouraging aspect: narcissists don't generate more creative ideas on their own, but they boost group output by spurring others to be more competitive and outspoken.

This study focuses on "sub-clinical narcissism," Goncalo says, which means even the highest score on their scale doesn't indicate a personality disorder.

"People think about narcissism as negative, but at the group level, having a couple around can be really useful," he says. "You can't have too many of them because then they start to get self-destructive."

In fact, the results suggest that in any group, it's optimal to have half or fewer of the members be narcissistic in order to benefit from the competitive creative boost without devolving into chaos. The researchers have since launched a new investigation to pin down exactly how this dynamic works.

The paper is published in the current issue of the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin and opens with the Pablo Picasso quote "God is really an artist, like me . . . I am God."

Goncalo says it was the popular stereotype of creative types as self-absorbed and self-aggrandizing that inspired them to take on this research, and he believes this is the first research to specifically examine the connection between narcissism and creativity.

"If you think about these rock bands that are really creative for short periods of time and then just explode and disband, I wonder if narcissism may be at play there, that the atmosphere can be conducive to creativity for awhile, but then the personalities just create too much friction," he says.

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