Abstract: Creativity is an ability to create something both novel (original and unexpected) and effective (appropriate and useful). Creativity may be applied for both good and bad purposes; it could have a dark side in its nature. The dark side of creativity means the negative aspects related to creativity, including the negative application of creativity, and the negative characteristic or factors accompanying with creativity. Based on the “4P” theory of creativity research (i.e. product, person, press, and process), this study explored the possibly negative aspects of creativity in the first three dimensions. First, malevolent creativity (MC) may generate products that do harm to people and society. MC is defined as creativity that deliberately leads to harmful or immoral results. The products of MC mostly appear in terrorism and crimes, such as the "9/11". However, common people also have more or less MC. Some situational factors (e.g. dissatisfaction to current society), poor ability to regulate emotion (i.e. low emotional intelligence), some negative personality traits (e.g. high physical aggression) may be related to the MC of individuals. Second, high creativity tends to accompany with various negative characteristics. For instance, the offspring of individuals with high creativity may have a high susceptibility of mental illness than those normal ones. Besides, creativity has complicatedly bidirectional relationship with dishonesty, which partly due to their overlapping characteristic of “break rules”. On one hand, creativity performance may make individuals more dishonest. On the other hand, individuals who cheated may gain higher performance in following creativity tasks. Third, high creative performance tends to be related to some negative situations. People perform better on creativity tasks when they are primed for distrust (vs. trust), especially in the private situation. Feeling the sense of interpersonal conflict or threat may be beneficial to creativity. For example, compared to "non-threat pictures", the stories written by people based on "threat pictures" have higher novelty scores. Mortality salience and social rejection could help improving the creativity of certain person. For example, even slight rejection (e.g. be told not to be selected in a group), could improve the creativity of individuals with independent self-concept. Future research should solve the following problems. First, it’s necessary to improve the method of inducing MC. To induce MC effectively, participants could be told clearly to "generate novel and harmful ideas or solutions". Second, it’s necessary to improve the arithmetic of assessing MC. When it comes to subjective assessment, "snapshot" is a good method. That is, the ideas of each subject are first put together, and then raters give a global score of the malevolent creativity of these ideas in a short time. In addition, classic objective scoring process could be used to assess MC. Third, it’s necessary to expand methodologies of studying MC, such as, to explore the cognitive and neural mechanisms by means of EEG, fMRI, and tDCS. Fourth, it’s necessary to pay much attention to how improve benevolent creativity and reduce malevolent creativity.

Key words: creativity, malevolent creativity, dark side of creativity, crime, mental illness

摘要： 创造力有其“阴暗面”。从产品角度而言，创造力可产出伤害性或消极的产品；从个体角度而言，高创造力者可能具有一些消极特征，如精神疾病易感性强、宜人性差、说谎、不诚信等；从情境角度而言，高创造力表现可能与不信任感、生存危机感、社会拒绝等消极因素有关。未来研究应开发高生态效度的恶意创造力测评工具，改进计算恶意创造力水平的算法，探索消极个体特征和消极情境因素作用于创造性思维的认知与神经机制。

关键词: 创造力, 恶意创造力, 创造力“阴暗面”, 犯罪, 精神疾病