Sam Bankman-Fried May Be the Latest Example of Malevolent Creativity — But He Won’t Be the Last

The Psychology of Malevolent Creativity

While malevolent creativity sounds like a character in a spooky children’s film, it’s nonetheless the stuff of modern day psychological research. Malevolent creativity is the deliberate utilization of creativity to achieve harmful objectives (1). It entails purposeful harm to an entity or being driven by a malevolent desire to attain certain advantages.

You don’t need to follow the Bankman-Fried trial closely to know it’s a real-time textbook in darker imaginings: From cleverly funneling customer money to another firm that funded his cool-crypto lifestyle to diverting blame away from himself and toward his colleagues and friends, the FTX story is lacking in neither creativity nor venom.

But Bankman-Fried is far from alone…

He joins a literal line-up of executives, from Elizabeth Holmes to Bernie Madoff to Billy McFarland, whose amoral power should incept a spooky realization in us all: With a deeply creative mind comes the risk that its power will be channeled toward shadowy ends. Where there is great potential for entrepreneurialism, there is equal potential for malevolency.

Now, famed executives are certainly not the only ones guilty of malevolent creativity.

We are all capable of it — and exercise it far more than we’d like to imagine: We creatively incept another’s flaws into our boss’ mind to get a promotion. We concoct elaborate schemes to make our exes jealous. We weasel our way out of fees and jury duty and dinner with that family member. But for the most part, the insidiousness of our darker ideas is buffered by our limited impact as individuals.

It’s when malevolent creativity is executed at scale, however, that things get dark, fast.

When factors like celebrity status, mass profitability, or infinite scalability — combined with Dark Tetrad traits like narcissism, psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and sadism (2) — enter the equation, the effects of malevolent creativity begin to unfurl their treacherous tentacles, coiling their grip around everyday people, like you and me. The result is everything from financial ruin to societal turmoil to actual death.

Think about the malevolent creativity behind pain as the “Fifth Vital Sign.”

In the 1990s, some opioid-pushing pharma companies devised the admittedly brilliant and devastatingly effective concept of pain as the “Fifth Vital Sign (3).” By encouraging doctors to assess pain at the everyday office visit with the same ease and regularity as blood pressure or heart rate, they suddenly found that just about everyone could use a little pain relief. Enter: the opioid epidemic.

Or we can consider the malevolent creativity of Cambridge Analytica.

One of their clever researchers devised a fun and seemingly innocuous quiz with the promise of revealing insights about the user’s personality. In reality, the quiz was an entry point to obtain unauthorized data from the user and their friends, resulting in illicit psychographic targeting that swayed the results of the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election and Brexit referendum.

Other examples — though not all equal in their malevolency — include:

• Exploitation: Enron leveraged its significant market power to artificially inflate electricity prices, leading to rolling blackouts and exorbitant energy costs.

• Cheating: Spotify accused Apple of engaging in anticompetitive practices by favoring its own streaming service, Apple Music, over competitors.

• Disinformation: Theranos falsely claimed to have developed revolutionary blood-testing technology, leading to the deception of investors, patients, and the public.

• Defamation: A Chobani ad defamed yogurt-competitor Dannon, suggesting its products contained pesticides that were unsafe for human consumption.

• Manipulation: Facebook conducted unethical experiments in which they showed either positive or negative content to manipulate users’ emotional responses.

• Evasion: Fortnite intentionally violated Apple's in-app payment rules by creating an alternative payment system in its Fortnite app, escaping Apple's 30% commission.

• Deception: Booking.com has been accused of employing ‘dark patterns,’ like hidden fees, fake scarcity, or cancellation difficulty, to deceive users.

These examples demonstrate not just malice — but also tremendous creativity.

This is not superficial naughtiness or dumb-criminality at play. It’s sophisticated entrepreneurial thinking, tainted by amorality and a lack of faith in justice. It’s savvy, it’s imaginative, and it’s costly. It’s a trend that should make us wonder: What malevolence are we agreeing to in the name of innovation?

To be clear, the term ‘creativity’ is not meant to sugarcoat crimes or glorify perpetrators.

In fact, quite the opposite: Machiavellis in crinkled business suits shouldn’t be placed on pedestals because their crimes are creative in nature, but should be perceived as uniquely dangerous. While it’s easy to label a terrorist with a weapon as malevolent, it’s far more difficult to perceive the dangers lurking behind creative opportunism.

As you turn to your own work (potentially now uncomfortably vigilant about your own company’s malevolence-meter), a few guiding questions can be asked: Will this action harm any person, group, or organization? Will this action give me an unearned advantage? Will this action incite unnecessary chaos, turmoil, or hardship?

But the tough truth is that malevolent creativity in the workplace will exist as long as capitalism is alive and well.

It would be naive to suggest that malevolent creativity can be practically eradicated or shamed away. There will always be another Bankman-Fried who’s willing to take the risk. Which leads to questions like: Can those who don’t engage in malevolent creativity possibly compete? Is the Machiavellian view, “the end justifies the means,” an inevitable mentality for those who wish to hit it big? Is malevolent creativity ever… worth it?

I won’t put forth an answer. I don’t think I need to. I’ll leave it for you to decide. All I’ll say is that 110 years is a very, very long time.

Sources

1. H. Kapoor, J.C. Kaufman, The evil within: the AMORAL model of dark creativity, Theor. Psychol. 32 (3) (2022) 467–490.

2. Dow, G. T. (2023). The Dark Tetrad and malevolent creativity. In Creativity and Morality (pp. 69-80). Academic Press.

3. Levy, N., Sturgess, J., & Mills, P. (2018). “Pain as the fifth vital sign” and dependence on the “numerical pain scale” is being abandoned in the US: why?. British journal of anaesthesia, 120(3), 435-438.