How Does Social Exclusion Stimulate Malevolent Creativity? The Mediating Roles of Need for Uniqueness and Empathic Concern

Xu Xiaobo; Qin Xinghao; Qiao Xinuo; Xie Mengjie; Yuan Ming

doi:10.16719/j.cnki.1671-6981.20250108

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Journal of Psychological Science ›› 2025, Vol. 48 ›› Issue (1) : 75-85. DOI: 10.16719/j.cnki.1671-6981.20250108

How Does Social Exclusion Stimulate Malevolent Creativity? The Mediating Roles of Need for Uniqueness and Empathic Concern

Xu Xiaobo^1,2, Qin Xinghao¹, Qiao Xinuo³, Xie Mengjie¹, Yuan Ming¹

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Abstract

Although existing research has identified the role of social exclusion in stimulating malevolent creativity and explored the mediating roles of intrapersonal emotions (e.g., anger) and behavioral tendencies (e.g., aggression, negative coping styles), it has relatively neglected the roles of intrapersonal cognition and interpersonal emotional processing. Taking a step further, this study explores whether the need for uniqueness (as an intrapersonal cognitive process) and empathic concern (as an interpersonal emotional processing tendency) mediate the relation between social exclusion and malevolent creativity.
Study 1 recruited 279 university students (236 female, mean age 20.12 years) to complete the scales of social exclusion, need for uniqueness, empathic concern, and malevolent creative behavior; Study 2 recruited 127 university students (115 female, mean age 20.62 years) to complete a malevolent creative problem-solving task (MCT) under different exclusion conditions and to report on-task feelings of need for uniqueness and empathic concern.
Correlation analysis showed that: (1)Social exclusion was positively correlated with need for uniqueness, malevolent creative behavior, MCT originality and malevolence; and negatively correlated with empathic concern; (2) The need for uniqueness was positively correlated with malevolent creative behaviors, MCT fluency, originality, and malevolence; (3) Empathic concern was negatively associated with malevolent creative behaviors, MCT fluency and malevolence. Mediation analyses showed that (1) The need for uniqueness and empathic concern mediated the relationship between social exclusion and malevolent creative behavior; (2) The need for uniqueness mediated the link between social exclusion and MCT originality and malevolence; (3) Empathic concern mediated the link between social exclusion and MCT fluency and malevolence.
The above results support our hypotheses and suggest that social exclusion can stimulate individuals' malevolent creativity by promoting the need for uniqueness and inhibiting empathic concern tendencies. According to the cognitive dissonance theory, after experiencing social exclusion, individuals can mitigate negative emotional experiences (e.g., sadness and anger) accompanying exclusion by classifying themselves as different from others. As the need for uniqueness increases, individuals can better inhibit the interference of conventional ideas and recombine existing elements in more novel and unique ways to produce new ideas or products. However, social exclusion can also contribute to defensive emotional numbness. While this state reduces an individual's emotional sensitivity to painful experiences, it also reduces their ability to assess and regulate interpersonal emotional information, undermines their tendency to empathize and care for the suffering of others, and thus are more likely to utilize their creative potential to generate original ideas for harming or retaliating against others.
There are some limitations in this study. First, the current research did not examine how to decrease the stimulatory effect of social exclusion on malevolent creativity. Future studies could design more targeted behavioral (e.g., positive mindfulness stress reduction training) or neurological (e.g., use of non-invasive neuromodulation techniques such as tDCS to influence empathy-related brain regions) intervention programs to reduce the emergence of malevolent creativity by attenuating the inhibitory effect of social exclusion on empathic concern. Second, the boundary conditions that modulate the link are not yet clear. Future research could examine whether other individual (e.g., psychological resilience and emotion regulation) or situational (e.g., social support and organizational climate) factors modulate the influence of social exclusion on malevolent creativity to enhance the understanding of the complex influencing mechanisms underlying it. Finally, although we controlled for the effect of gender on the statistical results, the unbalanced gender distribution (male participants comprised only 15.41% and 10.40% of the sample in Studies 1 and 2, respectively) remains a research limitation. Future studies could recruit more gender-balanced samples from different age and occupational backgrounds to further test the robustness of the results.

Key words

social exclusion / need for uniqueness / empathic concern / malevolent creativity

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Xu Xiaobo, Qin Xinghao, Qiao Xinuo, Xie Mengjie, Yuan Ming. How Does Social Exclusion Stimulate Malevolent Creativity? The Mediating Roles of Need for Uniqueness and Empathic Concern[J]. Journal of Psychological Science. 2025, 48(1): 75-85 https://doi.org/10.16719/j.cnki.1671-6981.20250108

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