Break the rules. It’s official. Lying and cheating are good for you. Or at least they are good for creativity. Or at least there’s a connection between being creative and being a lying, thieving, cheating, scumbag. Allegedly.
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).
That’s not the most readable piece you could find today: it’s from an academic paper written by Francesca Gino from Harvard Business School and Scott S. Wiltermuth from the Marshall School of Business in the University of Southern California.
But this may be the most readable: check out the Lifehacker article on this because it also links out to that productivity site’s own series of ‘evil’ projects.
http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2014/02/18/0956797614520714.abstract