A team from Ningbo University in China has found that two distinct forms of social exclusion trigger different kinds of dark creativity. In three experiments, participants who felt rejected produced a larger number of creative ideas, though those ideas tended to be less harmful; by contrast, those who felt ignored generated fewer ideas, but with higher levels of malevolence. The research was published in Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts.
Malevolent creativity refers to novel ideas used to harm others, blending originality with harmful intent. Psychologists describe such thinking as a defence mechanism that can emerge in response to perceived social threat or unfair treatment.
Not all exclusion is the same. Explicit rejection directly threatens the need to belong, while silent neglect undermines a sense of control and efficacy. The team behind the study reasoned that these distinct social threats would influence people’s motivation to help others in very different ways, thereby shaping the trajectory from social pain to creative vengeance.
Led by Junsheng Wu, the researchers conducted three independent experiments to test how different social threats alter what they call prosocial motivation, and how that, in turn, affects malevolent creativity.
In the first experiment, 120 college students were randomly allocated to three groups. One group recalled a memory of being explicitly rejected and told they were not wanted. A second group wrote about a time they felt ignored without being told they were disliked. A control group recalled a mundane event from the previous day. After the writing task, participants completed a test of malevolent creativity, asking them to brainstorm revenge strategies against a romantic rival, with instructions to generate as many ideas as possible, regardless of morality.
Anonymous responses were rated by independent judges on fluency (the number of ideas), originality (rarity of ideas within the group), and malice (the perceived harm of the proposed revenge).
The results showed a divergence between the two excluded groups. The rejected participants produced more unique ideas, but those ideas registered relatively low levels of malice. Those who felt ignored produced fewer ideas and demonstrated less originality, yet their proposals scored much higher on the malevolence scale.
A second experiment, with 110 students, used the same memory-prime technique but shifted the outcome measure to prosocial motivation. Rather than brainstorming revenge, participants rated their willingness to donate to a hypothetical curbside fundraiser. This served as a proxy for social-orientated behaviour. The findings mirrored the first groupings: explicit rejection yielded the strongest willingness to help, while silent neglect reduced willingness to donate, even below baseline.
Researchers suggested that explicit rejection motivates people to reconnect and regain social approval, whereas being ignored prompts self-defensive, antisocial tendencies that dampen positive social actions.
In the third experiment, 67 students were assigned to a control group or a prosocial-prime group. Those in the primed group recalled a past act of helping someone, thereby elevating their prosocial motivation. All participants then revisited the revenge brainstorming task from the first experiment and were scored on the same three dimensions.
Prosocially primed participants generated more ideas and those ideas were more original, but the harm attached to their proposals was lower than that produced by the control group.
The researchers concluded that a drive to help others can fuel creative effort while simultaneously constraining the impulse to cause significant harm, effectively increasing both fluency and novelty while reducing malevolence.
The studies do come with caveats. The team notes that parsing malevolent creativity into separate components—fluency, originality and harm—may not fully capture the composite nature of the construct. A single, combined measure that merges novelty with harm could offer a more accurate picture of real-world dark creativity. They also acknowledge that they did not directly measure emotional arousal, which could influence persistence in creative tasks independently of prosocial motives. Future work, they say, should track multiple emotional and motivational pathways to map how social threats translate into aggressive innovation.
The study is titled The Impact of Social Exclusion on Malevolent Creativity: The Mediating Role of Prosocial Motivation and is attributed to Junsheng Wu, Xiao Rao, Jiabin Liu, Shuaijun You, Yang Cao, and Lan Jiao of Ningbo University.
