The DOI matches its Crossref record; 5 of the 5 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Retracted: Evil Genius? How Dishonesty Can Lead to Greater Creativity
Abstract
We propose that dishonest and creative behavior have something in common: They both involve breaking rules. Because of this shared feature, creativity may lead to dishonesty (as shown in prior work), and dishonesty may lead to creativity (the hypothesis we tested in this research). In five experiments, participants had the opportunity to behave dishonestly by overreporting their performance on various tasks. They then completed one or more tasks designed to measure creativity. Those who cheated were subsequently more creative than noncheaters, even when we accounted for individual differences in their creative ability (Experiment 1). Using random assignment, we confirmed that acting dishonestly leads to greater creativity in subsequent tasks (Experiments 2 and 3). The link between dishonesty and creativity is explained by a heightened feeling of being unconstrained by rules, as indicated by both mediation (Experiment 4) and moderation (Experiment 5).
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
The associative basis of the creative process.
Mednick, S. (1962) · Psychological Review · doi:10.1037/h0048850 · Cited by 4,140
Duncker, K. (1945) · Psychological Monographs · doi:10.1037/h0093599 · Cited by 2,938
The Dishonesty of Honest People: A Theory of Self-Concept Maintenance
Mazar, N., Amir, O., & Ariely, D. (2008) · Journal of Marketing Research · doi:10.1509/jmkr.45.6.633 · Cited by 2,875
Spencer, S. J., Zanna, M. P., & Fong, G. T. (2005) · Journal of Personality and Social Psychology · doi:10.1037/0022-3514.89.6.845 · Cited by 2,452
Behavioral Ethics in Organizations: A Review
Treviño, L. K., Weaver, G. R., & Reynolds, S. J. (2006) · Journal of Management · doi:10.1177/0149206306294258 · Cited by 1,837
Cited by
Ly, A., Verhagen, J., & Wagenmakers, E.-J. (2016) · Journal of Mathematical Psychology · doi:10.1016/j.jmp.2015.06.004 · Cited by 384
Let’s be honest: A review of experimental evidence of honesty and truth-telling
Rosenbaum, S. M., Billinger, S., & Stieglitz, N. (2014) · Journal of Economic Psychology · doi:10.1016/j.joep.2014.10.002 · Cited by 288
Metadata
- Authors
- Gino, F., & Wiltermuth, S. S.
- Venue
- Psychological Science
- Publisher
- SAGE Publications
- Published
- 2014-02-18
- Volume
- 25
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 973-981
- ISSN
- 0956-7976 (ISSN-L)
- 1467-9280
- OpenAlex
- W2106303383
- Cited by
- 185
- References
- 5
- FWCI
- 20.85
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Status
- Retracted
- Open access
- closed
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Retracted: Evil Genius? How Dishonesty Can Lead to Greater Creativity. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1177/0956797614520714
- The paper
- Gino, F., & Wiltermuth, S. S. (2014). Retracted: Evil Genius? How Dishonesty Can Lead to Greater Creativity. Psychological Science. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797614520714
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
