Malevolent Creativity as Parochial Altruism? Examining the Intergroup Bases of New and Harmful Ideas

ABSTRACT

Emerging theory and evidence suggest that intergroup relations may stimulate malevolent creativity, but the intergroup foundations of malevolent creativity remain unexplored. Drawing from theories of intergroup conflict, we argue that malevolent creativity can be understood through the lens of parochial altruism, one’s willingness to partake in personally risky activity to harm outgroups (i.e. parochialism) in favor of an ingroup (i.e. altruism). Accordingly, malevolent creativity can be viewed as the willful generation and consideration of novel ideas for oneself to enact harm on an outgroup on behalf of an ingroup. Many instances of parochial altruism such as war or terrorism begin from strong sentiments of ingroup love and become more likely when paired with reasons to aggress against an outgroup. Extending this logic to malevolent creativity, we contend that ingroup affinity predicts malevolent creativity and that this relation grows stronger when people hold hostile attitudes toward the outgroup––or, in the absence of hostility, are directly provoked by outgroup members. We test our propositions in a sample of 307 undergraduate students and find partial support for our predictions.

Acknowledgments

This material is based on work supported by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security under Grant Award Number, 20STTPC00001-02. The views and conclusions included here are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. It should also be noted that many studies have examined malevolent ideational tendencies using a fluency index that captures the number of malevolently creative ideas generated (e.g., Harris & Reiter-Palmon, 2015; Perchtold-Stefan, Rominger, Papousek, & Fink, 2022; Perchtold‐Stefan, Fink, Rominger, & Papousek, 2021). Although creative problem-solving and fluency-based indices fit the construct definition of malevolent creativity (Harris, Reiter-Palmon, & Kaufman, 2013; Hunter, Walters, Nguyen, Manning, & Miller, 2022), the fluency measurement approach is used in task paradigms that allow participants to formulate multiple short-form (i.e., rather than more elaborate) ideas.

2. Correlations between facet-level creativity ratings can range anywhere from negligible or small (r = −.05–.19; e.g., Gutworth, Cushenbery, & Hunter, 2018) to large (r = .60–.77; e.g., Medeiros, Steele, Watts, & Mumford, 2018; Royston & Reiter‐Palmon, 2017) and are likely task-dependent.

3. We thank an anonymous reviewer for raising this concern regarding the measurement of malevolent creativity. It is a challenge to measure whether creative ideas meet malevolent aims when researchers cannot provide explicitly malevolent problems to solve (such that the decision to opt for malevolence must come from the participants’ own volition, rather than task directions).

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security [20STTPC00001-02].