Apparently some science geek was having a bad day at work when they came up with two very specific studies which insidiously undermine any sort of personal accomplishment.

Not sure exactly what else to take from these two articles below…

Other than?

Being super creative…

[via Scientific American] [...]In a recent paper published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, researchers at Harvard and Duke Universities demonstrate that creativity can lead people to behave unethically.  In five studies, the authors show that creative individuals are more likely to be dishonest, and that individuals induced to think creatively were more likely to be dishonest. Importantly, they showed that this effect is not explained by any tendency for creative people to be more intelligent, but rather that creativity leads people to more easily come up with justifications for their unscrupulous actions.

In one study, the authors administered a survey to employees at an advertising agency.  The survey asked the employees how likely they were to engage in various kinds of unethical behaviors, such as taking office supplies home or inflating business expense reports.  The employees were also asked to report how much creativity was required for their job.  Further, the authors asked the executives of the company to provide creativity ratings for each department within the company.

Those who said that their jobs required more creativity also tended to self-report a greater likelihood of unethical behavior.  And if the executives said that a particular department required more creativity, the individuals in that department tended to report greater likelihoods of unethical behavior.

The authors hypothesized that it is creativity which causes unethical behavior by allowing people the means to justify their misdeeds, but it is hard to say for certain whether this is correct given the correlational nature of the study.  It could just as easily be true, after all, that unethical behavior leads people to be more creative, or that there is something else which causes both creativity and dishonesty, such as intelligence.  [Read More]

And successful to the point your lifestyle reflects all your hard work?

Are apparently bad…

Bad ways to be.

Because chances are if who you are reflects ANY SORT of personal accomplishments?

You you just suck as a human being.

[via World-Science.net]  Up­per-class folk have a high­er propens­ity for un­eth­i­cal be­hav­ior, new re­search has found, and it’s largely be­cause they be­lieve—as did the mov­ie char­ac­ter Gor­don Gekko—that “greed is good.”

One part of the research sug­gested that if sti­mu­lated with thoughts about the ad­vant­ages of greed, lower-class people can be­come just as un­princi­pled as the wealthy.In sev­en stud­ies, re­search­ers from the Uni­vers­ity of Cal­i­for­nia at Berke­ley found that up­per-class par­ti­ci­pants were more likely to lie and cheat when gam­bling or ne­go­ti­at­ing; cut peo­ple off when driv­ing; and en­dorse un­eth­i­cal work­place be­hav­ior.  The studies were con­ducted on the uni­vers­ity cam­pus, in the San Fran­cis­co Bay Ar­ea and na­t­ion­wide.“The in­creased un­eth­i­cal ten­den­cies of up­per-class in­di­vid­u­als are driv­en, in part, by their more fa­vor­a­ble at­ti­tudes to­ward greed,” said Paul Piff, a doc­tor­al stu­dent in psy­chol­o­gy at the uni­vers­ity and lead au­thor of a re­port on the find­ings pub­lished Mon­day in the jour­nal Pro­ceed­ings of the Na­t­ional Acad­e­my of Sci­ences. “Our re­search – and that by oth­ers – helps shed light on the role of in­equal­ity in shap­ing pat­terns of eth­i­cal con­duct and self­ish be­hav­ior, and points to cer­tain ways in which these pat­terns might al­so be changed.” [Read More]

At least according to science.

Lesson Learned: So its better to be an unimganitive, less intelligent failure?

Wait…

That can’t be right.

Jeez, talk about a logic fallacy!