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Title:: A Positive Association between Creativity and Morality:Evidence from Cognitive Neuroscience

Abstract:: The relationship between creativity and morality is an important pending issue not only for moral psychology and creative psychology but also for the whole modern society. For the first time, we conducted an empirical research on the relationship between creativity and morality by a cognitive neuroscience approach. Participants were divided randomly into two groups(high moral group vs. low moral group)according to their performances in moral vocabulary classification task, which was developed based on “self-interested man” hypothesis and psycholexical hypothesis. The study adopted high-density event-related brain potentials(ERPs)to record their brain activities as they were performing insight riddle solving tasks. After ruling out potential confoundings such as intellectual foundation, self-esteem and memory, the electrophysiological results showed some salient differences in the mean amplitudes of ERP components between the two groups in the time span of 200～360ms in a wide area of the frontal lobe, indicating that participants with relatively high morality exhibited smaller amplitudes in the frontal sites with a broad distribution than those with relatively low morality. According to the low prefrontal cortical arousal theory of creativity, we can say that high moral group showed higher creativity in insight riddle solving task, which strongly suggests that high morality means high creativity.