Contents
Talent is usually associated with positive character traits – sensitivity to others, the ability to understand, the desire to make the lives of others brighter. But creative people are not only good. Why do they get on the nerves of others so much?
No, you can not love them just out of envy – talented people are often successful in their careers. And research by psychologists has shown that there are a number of unpleasant qualities that gifted individuals possess more often than the average person.
1. Creative people lie more willingly and more sophisticatedly.
Fantasy, the ability to create beautiful castles in the air, which will then be captured in a work of art, is an amazing quality of creative people. But this gift has its own downside: as psychologists have found out, it helps creative people come up with much more complex lies. After conducting four experiments, psychologists have found that gifted individuals are not only prone to deceit more than other people, but also lie much more cunningly than others.
In addition, they are better at guessing lies in the mouth of others: by nature, most people are able to recognize mostly simple lies, but creative people can unravel even complex tangles of deception. Finally, psychologists have found that gifted people are excellent at making excuses for their unethical acts. In general, talents are characterized by considerable flexibility in accepting the actions of others, as well as in their own behavior. Creative people are used to breaking patterns and generally accepted rules, which means that universal human ethics for them is nothing more than a set of clichés, each of which can be abandoned at your discretion.
Note that the basis of many creative professions is precisely the ability to deceive others: for example, good advertisers are a kind of professional liars, able to assure the public that the product they praise really has all the declared qualities.1.
2. At the same time, they are also distrustful!
Paradox: despite the fact that creative people themselves love to lie and perfectly recognize the lies of others, they are distinguished by increased distrust. Psychologists who have established this fact believe that incredulity is not an accidental companion of a talented nature, but its essence.
The fact is that the basis of creative thinking is the ability to question what seems to other people to be a long-term resolved issue with a single answer. Gifted people think according to the principle of “what if …”. They are able to use ordinary objects in a non-standard way, to find unexpected features in phenomena that are considered well studied, to look at the situation from unexpected points of view.
However, the researchers found that it is mainly those creative people who are not public figures who are distrustful, but those who, by their occupation, are constantly forced to resort to self-presentation, cannot afford such a luxury as distrust of others, — on the contrary, they must captivate others with their ideas and initiatives, and without faith in others this is impossible.2.
3. Gifted natures are often cheeky
Another unpleasant quality associated with the moral relativism characteristic of talented individuals is impudence. The researchers analyzed the characters of 1304 volunteers using the HEXACO six-dimensional personality model, one of the scales of which is devoted to assessing such qualities as sincerity, justice, generosity and modesty. After that, all volunteers had to solve several tests to evaluate their creativity.
It turned out that the most gifted had minimal scores for all of the qualities mentioned. They especially lacked modesty – according to the researchers, gifted people are more aware of their talents than others and, as a rule, have an unusually high opinion of themselves.
Another curious result of the study was that there was no significant difference between creative and ordinary people in the manifestations of a number of qualities traditionally associated with giftedness – tolerance, readiness for dialogue, gentleness, kindness, etc. level of openness to new experiences and experiments3.
4. Creative people are more likely to suffer from clinical depression
A gifted person is not a very good comrade, not only because he is prone to lies: in addition, he often has a bad mood. Moreover, talented people easily fall into depression and get out of it much harder. Every educated person will easily remember the names of writers and artists in whose work it is easy to detect panic notes, but learn with great surprise that a modern psychologist would find an increased tendency to depression not only in authors such as Ernest Hemingway or Virginia Woolf, but even those whose work is marked by faith in God and hope for the best, such as Charles Dickens and Leo Tolstoy.
Creative people are also subject to a large number of different phobias: for example, Edgar Poe and Nikolai Gogol suffered the same fear of being buried alive. Swedish psychologists decided to test whether the link between talent and depression was just a common stereotype, and used data from 1,2 million psychiatric patients and their relatives to do this. Cards of patients included a mention of their professions, and psychologists easily compiled statistics on the prevalence of various mental illnesses among representatives of one occupation or another.
It turned out that creative workers – in particular, writers, photographers and dancers, are much more likely to suffer from serious illnesses – so, they were 8% more likely than other people to be diagnosed with bipolar affective personality disorder. In addition, for example, writers are as much as 121% more likely to suffer from the conditions of their lives than ordinary people, and almost 50% more likely to commit suicide.
The fact that mental illnesses (schizophrenia, autism, bipolar disorder, and even anorexia) were more common among relatives of representatives of creative professions than among other people allowed scientists to draw another important conclusion: both the ability to be creative and the mentioned disorders are largely due to genetics4.
1 J. Walczyka et al. «The Creativity of Lying: Divergent Thinking and Ideational Correlates of the Resolution of Social Dilemmas». Creativity Research Journal, 2008.
2 J. Mayer, T. Mussweiler «Suspicious spirits, flexible minds: When distrust enhances creativity». Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2011.
3 P. Silvia et al. «Cantankerous creativity: Honesty–Humility, Agreeableness, and the HEXACO structure of creative achievement». Personality and Individual Differences, 2011.
4 S. Kyaga et al. «Mental illness, suicide and creativity: 40-year prospective total population study». Journal of Psychiatric Research. 2013.