The dark side of creativity revisited: Is students’ creativity associated with subsequent decreases in their ethical decision making?

• We study the longitudinal relation between students’ creativity and ethical decision making.
• We use self- and teacher-rated measures of creativity and ethical decision making.
• We find no predictive links between creativity and subsequent ethical decision making.

Both creativity and ethical decision making have been identified as 21st century skills that need to be facilitated in modern educational policy and practice. Prior research on the “dark side of creativity” suggests that creativity impacts ethical decision making adversely. This study is the first to study the reciprocity of students’ creativity and ethical decision making longitudinally and to specifically investigate whether students’ creativity is longitudinally associated with decreases in their ethical decision making. In addition, we investigated whether the observed longitudinal relations between creativity and ethical decision making hold after controlling for students’ reasoning skills. Middle school students (overall N = 1869; 48.3% male) were assessed at two time points of measurement. To obtain measures of students’ creativity and ethical decision making, we employed self-ratings as well as teacher-ratings. Reasoning test scores were available for a subsample of 417 students. No association between creativity assessments and changes in subsequent ethical decision-making assessments was found. This resulting pattern held after controlling for students’ reasoning skills. Collectively, these findings suggest that creativity is not a general predictor of decreases in ethical decision making, indicating that being a creative student unlikely implies being an unethical decision maker.