A few years ago I read a fascinating (at least to me) book about an artist by the name of Han van Meegeren. Han was a failure as an artist. It's not that he didn't have talent. He just couldn't get much recognition for it. Somewhere along the line, Han came up with an idea. As the Grinch would think, it was a wonderful, awful idea. He became a forger.

Apparently, he thought that if he could paint well enough to fool people into thinking that his work was actually created by some of the great Dutch masters, it would prove he was a genius. Or something like that. One thing led to another and then, during World War 2, he sold some of his forged paintings to some Nazis, including Hermann Goering. He passed his own work off to Goering as being by one of the greatest of those old Dutch masters: Johannes Vermeer.

If the Nazis had figured out that he was selling them fake masterpieces, they would have done horrible things to him. But before they could catch on, the war came to an end and van Meegeren was arrested for being a collaborator. Because he did business with the Nazis, see? So in his own defense, he admitted that he had forged the paintings and everyone had a good laugh and he didn't have to go to prison after all, because cheating the Nazis was just fine.

Funny story, huh?

Well, I thought of it the other day when I ran across a psychological concept I had never heard before: Malevolent Creativity.

The basic idea behind it is that criminals and plain old bad people can come up with very creative ways to scam and hurt other people and it might be interesting to study that. Think about the first person who ever sent a message claiming to be a Nigerian prince. Or the person who invented the rack. Or the way Ted Bundy would pretend to have a broken arm or leg to lure women closer. These were creative inventions that helped make the world a worse place. That's malevolent creativity. It's just like regular creativity but with a higher price for the rest of us.

I ran across the wonderful awful idea of Malevolent Creativity in this article: Creativity secrets from armed robbers, fraudsters and other criminals. I've put a lot of effort into studying creativity yet I don't remember ever seeing that particular term before. I would expect to remember something so deliciously bad!

Anyway, I dug a little. The first thing I found out was that this is a very active field of study. Lots of papers, going back about 15 years. Also some disagreement. Some people believe that creativity itself is neutral. Anyone can have it. If evil people are creative, they're going to do evil things with it.

While that makes perfect sense, is it true? Or is there something about a dark personality that might also bring out creativity? The question isn't answered yet. But there's something that nags at me about it. During World War 2, the US Office of Strategic Services (OSS) had a Research and Development Department, more familiarly known as the Dirty Tricks Department. They had the wonderful sounding job of making gadgets and assorted camouflaged and nasty ways to kill Nazis. The British Special Operations Executive (SOE) had one too. These were creative people who came up with seriously wicked things. Dirty tricks.

Obviously, the Nazis thought of them as evil. I think what they did definitely fell under the heading of Malevolent Creativity but they weren't evil people. That is, they weren't drawn to evil things at any basic level. They did what they did in order to defeat evil. That makes it different, doesn't it? Doesn't it?

A lot of psychology has a moral dimension that I frequently consider to be overblown. Frequently, not always. Obviously we don't want repeats of unethical things like the Milgram experiment, where people were fooled into thinking they were hurting test subjects with bigger and bigger electrical zaps - and did it anyway. That sort of thing can ruin your whole day, even if you're just the one pressing the button!

In this case, the moral dimension gets a bit thorny, though, doesn't it? To study this malevolent creativity, you probably have to spend a lot of time with prison inmates or terrorists or at least very skillful liars. You have to judge them in some way as being people who do things you could characterize as malevolent. Or at least not very nice. Is there such a thing as not-malevolent-but-not-at-all-nice creativity? Probably. If you've ever watched one of those "Best Practical Joke Video" type shows, you've probably seen a lot of that. And how do you judge people who come up with truly creative ways to kill evil people? Knowing that the victims don't have to be evil? A bomb concealed in a dead rat - that's a real thing the SOE guys thought of - doesn't have to sabotage only Nazi ships, just because that's who you intended it for (the first time).

Anyway, the anti-Nazi examples don't disprove the possibility that there might be something different about malevolent creativity. In order to do that, we would have to prove that creativity only comes in one flavor. How do we know that, really? Is a painter's creativity the exact same thing as a stand up comic's, only applied to a different thing? Was Edgar Allan Poe's creative ability the same as Bob Marley's? Was Michelangelo's creativity exactly the same ability as Spike Milligan?

Does that even make sense?

I'm not sure it does. I'm also not sure it doesn't. Much of the time when I've studied creativity, reading textbooks and papers as well as less scientifically oriented stuff, I tend to be frustrated at how little we really know about it. There's not even a good scientific definition. Every researcher seems to have one of their own. Shouldn’t scientists all use the same scientific definition of something?

That’s the thing. Psychology is a young field. It took physics hundreds of years to become somewhat mature. Psychology is trying to study something that's harder to measure than mass or energy or velocity and stuff. It may take a bit longer for it to answer exactly what some of these psychological concepts mean.

Until then, Malevolent Creativity sounds like a fun field to play in.

Here's that prompt: "A whimsical and detailed scene of students in an art class, all focused on capturing the image of an unusual model. The model is a fox wearing a tutu, standing gracefully in the center of the room. The students, equipped with easels, sketchpads, and art supplies, are diligently working on their drawings. The classroom is filled with natural light, and the atmosphere is creative and lively. The fox poses elegantly, adding a touch of humor and charm to the otherwise serious art class setting."

Look Ma, no footnotes! I wonder how that happened.