Target Personification Influences the Positive Emotional Link Between Generating and Implementing Malevolently Creative Ideas

Research on malevolent creativity has rarely linked the generation of harmful ideas with their implementation (i.e., malevolent innovation). To explain why people might act upon their malevolently creative ideas, we drew on affective events theory. Specifically, given evidence that aggressive and creative thought events can elicit positive emotions, we argued that generating new and harmful ideas can evoke positive emotional states that make malevolent innovation a more desirable course of action. We first tested our mediational pathway in two studies with different malevolent creativity tasks. Finding only partial support for our predictions in Study 1 (N = 126), but full support in Study 2 (N = 296), we reflected on our study tasks and suspected that our mixed results may have occurred because the target of ideas in Study 2 embodied more human qualities than in Study 1. Thus, we integrated theory on target personification to see if assigning personhood to a target moderated the malevolent creativity-innovation pathway. We tested our updated model in Study 3 (N = 214) and found that the indirect effect of malevolent creativity on the desire to implement ideas (through positive emotions) was indeed conditional upon individuals’ personification of a target.