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In Anna Karenina, Tolstoy said that “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Similarly, I suggest that positive creativity is instigated to help make things better for one or more persons or entities – one’s life, the life of one’s family, the life of a nation, science, art, or whatever. But negative creativity, like unhappy families, seems to have many different causes. What are some of these causes? And why is negative creativity so prevalent as well as malevolent in the world? What are the reasons?

1 To enhance one’s reputation by diminishing the reputation of one or more others. In this case, negative creativity serves a somewhat parasitic function. One latches onto someone else in order to draw fame, renown, or resources from that person toward oneself. Usually, some flimsy justification is offered of how one is doing a public good.

2 To cause harm or destruction as a result of anger. One is angry at another, at the world, at oneself, or at whomever or whatever. One creatively plans destruction to appease one’s anger. In the extreme, negative creativity results from hate (Sternberg, 2020a, 2020b).

3 To cause harm or destruction as a result of fear. One is afraid that something bad will happen and proactively seeks to neutralize a potential enemy before one is oneself neutralized.

4 To gain resources for oneself. One may be paid, whether monetarily or otherwise, for negative creative ideas or products.

5 To gain revenge on someone. One may seek to avenge oneself for a perceived slight or harm. How many wars have been started as a way of seeking revenge for a real or imagined slight?

6 To gain renown as an “evil genius.” Some people want to be recognized not for the good things they do, but for the bad ones they do. In the comic books, Superman’s archenemy, Lex Luthor, was such an individual. If only such individuals were limited to comic books. Heads of criminal syndicates and especially drug gangs, sometimes try to outdo each other in the evil they do.

7 To live one’s life in a way one considers normal. Some people, including psychopaths but also others, do not see anything wrong with negative creativity or with harming others. They have no conscience, so it makes little difference to them if their actions cause harm to others.

8  By accident. One is seeking to do one thing and accidentally ends up doing another. The other thing proves to be destructive. Amniocentesis was a creative idea to help parents decide whether to proceed with a pregnancy; in some cases, however, it accidentally damaged or killed the baby.

9 By lack of forethought. Many negative creative inventions seemed to be good ideas in the short run. The inventors did not think sufficiently about their long‐term effects, as in the case of the carbon‐emitting vehicles that now clog so many roads and highways around the world.

10 To do good. One may believe one is doing good by doing harm. For example, a creator of a new explosive device might believe that they are doing good by creating a weapon that will vanquish an enemy. The problem, of course, is that it is almost always impossible to foresee the long‐term consequences of such ideas, such as the idea of nuclear weapons, which now could destroy the world several times over. And how many terrorists and suicide bombers believe they are somehow doing a “good thing” that will take them right to heaven? The inventors may have thought in advance about the long term but simply have underestimated the negative consequences of what they did, as their intentions were positive and honorable.

This last point emphasizes how carefully people have to think about positive creativity in their own lives. It just is so easy to convince ourselves that something we do that is negative is really positive. Without a deep analysis of our own motives, it often is hard to tell just why we are doing what we are doing. Authoritarian governments are cropping up all across the world, including in my own country. Although many supporters of such governments are merely self‐serving, others have convinced themselves they need a powerful leader to re‐instill order to recover some kind of glorious national past (which of course never really existed).

As noted above, creativity always is judged in a context. Positive creativity is similar in concept to what I have called WICS in the past, or Wisdom‐Intelligence‐Creativity‐Synthesized (Sternberg, 2003, 2009). It is creativity tempered by intelligence – analyzing whether an idea or product is logical, tenable, or sensible – and especially wisdom – assessing whether an idea helps to achieve some kind of common good, by balancing one’s own with other interests, over the long term as well as the short term, through the infusion of positive ethical values.

In science as well as in other fields and in society as a whole, we too often have valued creativity in and of itself. We have not adequately considered whether the creativity we are valuing serves a positive, neutral, or even negative purpose. Is a creative idea forwarding science or some other field, or is it merely enhancing our own personal goals? Is it even replicable (Kaufman & Glăveanu, 2018)? Such goals are variable but might include our own eminence, our financial situation, our appearance in a department annual report, our promotion status, or our ego. Indeed, we so easily can get on a scientific treadmill (or an artistic, literary, musical, technological, or other one) that we do not make the time to think about the uses to which our creativity will be put. By the time we have thought things through, it sometimes is too late to put our creativity to optimal use.

An example in science/technology is the invention of ever more powerful weapons of mass destruction. Some of these weapons are enormously creative – novel and effective (in killing people, if that is our goal), assuming our goal is offensive or even to create an effective deterrent. But as Dr. Seuss (1984) recognized in his book The Butter Battle Book, such inventions tend to lead to competition where each side is trying to create weapons that out‐destroy the others. People tend to view potentially creative acts that are ambiguously bad as more creative than acts that are clearly bad, with the result that in psychological science (or elsewhere), people may view research outcomes that are not unambiguously bad as creative, simply because of the ambiguity.

An outcome of ambiguously valenced technology is social media. Social media take a variety of forms – Facebook, Twitter, and blogs, for example. They serve varied purposes and complement each other in terms of how they function in the world of psychological science, and in the world more generally. Such media can facilitate and speed up communication among people in distant locations, raise awareness of issues facing society, and give people forums for airing debates.

Scholars sometimes have resorted to the use of social media because they have believed that their contributions to the scientific literature have been blocked by editors or referees of journals. For example, articles critiquing work published in a journal may cause anxiety in editors (“Will the critique of authors publishing in my journal make me, as editor, look bad?”), and if the researchers whose work is critiqued serve as reviewers, these researchers sometimes may be able to sabotage publication by writing negative reviews. But truth be told, some scientists and other scholars who have written critiques on social media have never even tried to have their work published in conventional journals. Why? It is easier, less time‐consuming, and emotionally less painful to skip the peer‐review process. Anyone who publishes knows that this process can be lengthy, frustrating, and, sometimes, simply unsuccessful. One spends a lot of time trying to get one’s work published, to no avail (unless one goes to a journal that is perhaps not worth publishing in). The same can happen in any domain – authors of novels or short stories who cannot get their work published; or authors of op‐eds who have sent their pieces to one refereed outlet after another with no success.

Social media once seemed like a good and positive idea. When social media first were invented, the inventors likely did not think through and probably could not have anticipated – even if they tried – how social media might later be used for negative purposes: to undermine or at least distort free elections, to spread false and hateful propaganda, to serve as a basis for blatant cyberbullying, or even to undermine and sometimes destroy the careers of people one does not like, for whatever reason.

In the past, if a scientist or other scholar wanted publicly to criticize the work of another, they would have been obliged to have scholarly referees pass their judgment on the criticism. The scholars could not have gone public at the push of a button. But the referees who sometimes are detested also often have saved scientists and other scholars from making foolish and even destructive comments with no basis in fact. With the advent of social media, the push of a button on a phone or a computer can bypass the step of having referees. Echo chambers come to be established consisting of like‐minded, and often narrow‐minded individuals. These individuals may reinforce what has been said, no matter how obnoxious, damaging, or simply incorrect it may be. Crowd mindlessness–groupthink–takes over, with predictable results.

Some people may come to the viewpoint that anyone in their right mind would share the same “facts” or points of view – namely, their own point of view. Accompanying the increase in use of social media in psychological science and elsewhere (correlationally, not necessarily causally) has been, perhaps, a decrease in the shame people feel in attacking others personally, not just professionally. Falk (2018) has argued that “social media has fouled the virtual public square with bile and menace” (p. 3). Although this comment may seem strong, anyone who has been attacked on social media will understand where Falk was coming from.

Thus, social media present us with great opportunities but also serious challenges. Can we use them to showcase and enhance positive creativity or will our rush to get out our latest half‐baked thoughts lead us to use them in a way that fosters negative creativity? And will we recognize what creativity is positive and what creativity is negative?

I believe that there are useful principles for distinguishing between positive and negative creativity. They are the same principles that have contributed, over many centuries, to the generation of wise ideas: honesty, sincerity, transparency, acting toward others the way one would have them act toward oneself, and, of course, reflective analysis of the long‐term as well as short‐term consequences of one’s thoughts and actions.

How would one go about assessing positive creativity, if one indeed wanted to assess it? At a general level, instead of asking questions about things such as unusual uses of a paperclip or what word has something in common with a set of other words, one might ask people challenging questions like “What steps could be taken, which would not bust local or state budgets, to improve our secondary schools?” or “What are some things everyone could do to reduce effects of climate change, even if their individual efforts had only a minor effect?” or in our own field, “What are some ways in which psychological science could be applied to help address the current opioid crisis” (or any other crisis)? Students would be scored for novelty and quality of responses and only separately on the basis of their knowledge of the issue at hand. That is, knowledge is important for creativity, but possession of it does not guarantee creativity and much creative work is done by people who are not necessarily the most knowledgeable (Sternberg, Kaufman, & Pretz, 2002). Expertise can facilitate creativity, but it also can facilitate entrenchment and mental “change blindness.” They also would be scored, where applicable, for the potential positivity of their ideas.

It might seem that such assessments would require value judgments, and in testing, at least in many countries, test constructors often try to create measures that are seemingly more “objective.” But there are three factors to consider.

First, assessment of creativity, because creativity always occurs in a context (Plucker, 2017), inevitably requires value judgments. Second, when all is said and done, all tests involve value judgments – they often just hide them (Sternberg, 1997, 2016). When, for example, one asks students how to solve challenging math problems on an intelligence test or a college‐admissions exam, one is assuming that the skill in solving such problems is important, even for, say, a future English major, stage actor, or pianist. Third, if our students took tests based on the adaptive challenges of other cultures, they might look quite inadequate because their skills in solving such challenges, such as ice fishing or using natural herbal medicines to combat malaria, are lacking (Sternberg & Grigorenko, 2004). That is, all tests and their scoring involve value judgments, if not in scoring, then certainly in deciding what to measure, whether implicit or explicit.

The field of psychological science and other scientific fields, even in the face of some notorious examples of negative creativity – manufactured data, massaging of data, serious misinterpretations of data – need to enhance their emphasis on honest and transparent science, but not at the expense of creativity. But there is a risk that we will educate students in ways that enhance their analytical contributions but not their creative ones. Instead, as a field, scientists should simultaneously increase their emphasis both on honest and transparent analysis but also on positive creativity – doing research that not only is career enhancing, but that is field enhancing and potentially even world enhancing. We might ask ourselves what is the research we can do that will truly make a positive and meaningful difference to our field of endeavor?

If we don’t always succeed – and we won’t – at least we will have tried. The emphasis in the fields of science, on this view, should shift from creativity – which can be positive but also can be neutral or negative – to positive creativity, which will make our fields better, and that, potentially, will make the world a better place, even if just a tiny little bit. There are many examples, but certainly one example would be that of how to lead people to make better decisions in their lives, both for themselves and for others (Kahneman, 2013; Thaler & Sunstein, 2009).

The good thing about the new approaches to science is that they may encourage more transparency and honesty. Because of pressures to publish, difficulties in getting large samples, and the mere fact that underpowered studies could get into good journals, we have been less careful than we needed to be in ensuring that our studies are ones that future researchers can rely on. The cost of such carelessness, on all our parts, has been reliance on results that are “will‐o’‐the‐wisps,” setting back the field.

Developing and nurturing creativity in students or anyone else requires instilling particular attitudes toward life and work in those individuals (Sternberg, 2000). These attitudes include three kinds of defiance. The first is willingness to defy the crowd – that is, willingness to act in ways other than the ways in which one’s friends and colleagues are acting. The second is willingness to defy oneself and one’s past beliefs – that is, willingness to give up on beliefs one has held, perhaps deeply, when those beliefs are no longer justified or shown just to be plain wrong. The third is willingness to defy the ongoing zeitgeist (Sternberg, 2018) – that is, to question the often‐unconscious beliefs with which one conducts one’s life (such as that creativity is inborn and we can’t really do anything to increase it). Creative individuals also need to overcome obstacles, believe in themselves in the face of severe criticism, and realize that their expertise can get in the way of their creativity (Sternberg, Kaufman, & Pretz, 2002). What would it mean to develop positive creativity?

Developing positive creativity would go beyond what is required for developing creativity that can be positive, neutral, or negative. It would mean additionally asking oneself (a) what are the benefits of and positive uses to which my work can be put? (b) What can I do to augment the positive uses and benefits? (c) What are potential harms of my work? (d) What can I do to mitigate the potential harms? (e) What am I not seeing because I do not want to see it, such as long‐term effects beyond short‐term ones? That is, developing positive creativity would mean developing creativity leavened by intelligence and wisdom (WICS). It would mean thinking about not just coming up with novel and useful ideas, but also what the future implications and uses of these ideas would be. At the same time, we want to ensure the importance of the analytical component – that we assess whether the ideas are truly good ones that work.

There is no way to guarantee that one’s ideas will be put to positive use. But one greatly can enhance the probability of this happening if only one gives it some thought. I am doubtful that we scientists are teaching students to give their work that kind of thought (Sternberg & Grigorenko, 2004). We can become so preoccupied with career advancement and sometimes short‐range scientific advancement that we may not think about the long term. If we truly want to benefit science as well as education and society, we need to think long term, and we need to foster positive creativity, not merely creativity that may be neutral or negative.

Meanwhile, educators need to move beyond an educational system that heavily emphasizes analytic skills at the expense of positive creative skills. I argued long ago that our educational system tends to produce students who excel in analytical skills but never have much incentive through school to develop their creative skills (Sternberg, 1985a). These are the students who are most heavily rewarded throughout most of schooling, regardless of whether or not they develop their creativity. Historically, students who excel in analytical but not creative skills might come to graduate school and then find that their grade‐achieving skills no longer serve them as well as those skills did in grade school, high school, and college. But what if we, as a field, inadvertently made it enough to get by in a career just with analytical skills? If we further push in our educational system the development of analytical skills or even “hyper‐analytical” ones, we must make sure not to do so at the expense of pushing the development of positive creative skills. Analytically gifted but uncreative students become who they are not because they are born that way, but because their education makes them that way (Sternberg, 1985a). Education needs today, as it always has needed, to balance the development of positive creative skills with the development of analytical ones.

Being creative is usually uncomfortable and can be potentially dangerous. As noted above, it potentially involves defying the crowd, defying oneself, and defying the zeitgeist (Sternberg, 2018). There is a good reason that people always have been reluctant to be creative. They risk falling prey to the “tall poppy” phenomenon, whereby they end up as the tall poppy in a large field of poppies that gets cut down. The world at large needs positive creativity more than ever before. In our push to be transparent, we need to ensure that we encourage positive creative thinking. And, perhaps most of all, we need to encourage simultaneously not only the best science, but also the careful reflection, courtesy, civility, and plain decency that has come to be lacking in so much of contemporary discourse.