Do all roads lead to Rome? Authenticity, openness to experience, and risk-taking relate to general and malevolent creativity differently

To provide a more comprehensive understanding of the relationship between personality and creativity, the present study discriminated the general and malevolent facets of creativity and examined their associations with three personality traits—authenticity, openness to experience, and risk-taking—that vary in moral preferences. Three hundred Chinese individuals (82% were female; mean age was 20.36 years) voluntarily participated in our online survey in which they were instructed to complete several demographical questions, the Authenticity Scale, the Openness subscale of the NEO Five-Factor Inventory-3, a risk-taking question, the Innovative Behavior Scale (i.e., general creativity), the Malevolent Creative Behavior Scale (i.e., malevolent creativity), and two alternative uses tasks (i.e., creative potential and malevolent response tendency). The results revealed that, when controlling for individuals’ creative potential and malevolent response tendency, authenticity, openness to experience, and risk-taking were all positively correlated with general creativity; however, they predicted malevolent creativity in markedly different ways, demonstrating negative, non-significant, and positive associations, respectively. The results indicate that personality traits could relate to general and malevolent creativity differently. The implications, limitations, and directions for future research are discussed.