Abstract
Clarifying the mechanisms underlying individual differences in creativity is essential to understand the complex nature of this phenomenon. The current research, drawing on the Investment Theory of Creativity and the AMORAL model, investigated the mediating role of ethics positions (idealism and relativism) in the association between openness to experience and both positive (i.e., funny and irony) and negative creativity (i.e., grotesque and macabre). Two-hundred participants were instructed to fill in two self-report questionnaires, aimed to measure personality (HEXACO-60) and ethics positions (EPQ-5). They also were requested to provide creative captions to five different cartoons taken by the New Yorker, as requested in the cartoon caption task, which were evaluated by two independent judges in terms of positive (funny and ironic) and negative (grotesque and macabre) creativity. Results indicated that relativism mediated only the association between openness to experience and negative creativity, suggesting that ethics positions are partially involved in the creative generation. By investigating the complex relationship between openness to experience and ethics positions, the current study sheds light on the underlying mechanisms that lead people to creative expression, offering fruitful insights into the key role of the ethical dimension in human creativity. Implications, limitations, and future research avenues are discussed.