FROM James Moriarty to Ernst Stavro Blofeld, the idea of the evil genius has been a staple of storytelling. But is it true? Or, to put the matter less starkly, is there a connection between creativity and dishonesty in real people who are not bent on world domination, as well as in fictional supervillains? Writing in Psychological Science, Francesca Gino of Harvard University and Scott Wiltermuth of the University of Southern California suggest that there is—and that cheating actually increases creativity.

Dr Gino and Dr Wiltermuth tested the honesty of 153 volunteers with a task that involved adding up numbers for a cash reward, which was presented in a way that seemed to them to allow them to cheat undetected (though the researchers knew when they did). This was sandwiched between two tests for creativity, one of which was to work out how to fix a candle to a cardboard wall with a box of drawing pins*, and the other a word-association test. This combination showed not only that creative people cheat more, but also that cheating seems to encourage creativity—for those who cheated in the adding-up test were even better at word association than their candle-test results predicted.

That result was confirmed by a second set of experiments, in which some people were given many opportunities to cheat and others few. The crucial predictor of creativity, the researchers confirmed, was the actual amount of cheating, not any propensity to cheat.

A third experiment tested the idea that this is because both creativity and dishonesty require, as it were, a flexible attitude to rules. In this experiment volunteers were asked about their attitude to bossy signs, such as “no cycling” and “no diving” notices, after being allowed to cheat (again, in a way transparent to the experimenters) on a coin-tossing test. Cheats, it turned out, were less constrained to obey such signs.

It is, it goes without saying, a long way from such acts of petty defiance to building a lair inside an extinct volcano and threatening Washington from it—or even to non-fictional acts of serious crime. But some sort of link exists, so this research does indeed suggest that Arthur Conan Doyle and Ian Fleming were on to something.

*The trick is to attach the box to the wall with the pins, and then use it as a makeshift candlestick