Creative types are full of themselves, study confirms

It’s a funny title. but I’m not persuaded.

The research, published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences, stopped short of labeling creative types as jerks, but it didn’t paint a pretty portrait of some aspects of their personalities, either. Psychologists asked more than 1,300 college students to complete a personality test and various creativity questionnaires. The data they collected was self-reported and measured creative abilities mainly in arts, crafts, drama, and creative writing.

The researchers looked at how six different personality traits influenced creativity. They found an openness to experience is the personality characteristic with the largest influence on creativity, a result seen in previous studies. Extroversion had a smaller effect, while emotionality and conscientiousness made no difference.

Agreeableness, which indicates that people can compromise, sympathize and get along well with others, also had no effect. But honesty-humility was shown to have a negative influence on creativity.

“Our research didn’t find a huge effect, and we certainly aren’t claiming that all creative people are insufferably arrogant but, on average, people with a lot of creative accomplishments were less humble and modest,” says Paul Silvia, an associate professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and the study’s lead author.

Judge Judy deals with welfare abuser

This won’t change anyone’s mind as people against a large welfare state will say “see!?” and people who want it will say cases like these are rare enough to not outweigh the need to blindly send out tax payer money to anyone who asks with no follow up or rules on how exactly that money is spent. But it’s still an interesting exchange to watch if only for the choice quotes:

“I don’t want to pay your rent. The government says that I have to pay your rent. Even officer bird doesn’t want to pay your rent, but if we have to pay your rent, we don’t want the money we send to you for rent to go to anything else other than rent.”

“Just me bein around is payin rent. I’m 21, messin with her. she 30. you know what im sayin? thats what she there for.”

Lucille Ball’s 100th Birthday

I hate it when a dead persons birthday crosses a milestone that they absolutely could have made it to, or at least closer to than their actual age at death. Too bad.

She died April 26, 1989 at age 77.

Her last show on television was Life with Lucy, which is available on Youtube. It was a flop and Ball felt scorned by the nations television audience. She didn’t deserve to go out on that sour note. What a shame…


Some better and classic moments below. The first was one of the most memorable for me, where Lucy keeps stealing Ricky’s punchlines. I loved it cuz I was a show-stealing little puke at that young age (long before I matured into the Richard you know today).

Rihanna ‘S&M’ Song: Inappropes?

Feels so good being bad
There’s no way I’m turning back
Now the pain is my pleasure
Cause nothing could measure

Love is great, love is fine
Out the box, out of line
The affliction of the feeling
Leaves me wanting more

[Chorus x2:]
Cause I may be bad
But I’m perfectly good at it
Sex in the air
I don’t care
I love the smell of it
Sticks and stones
May break my bones
But chains and whips
Excite me

Back when the song came out, I heard the obvious commentary about it: she’s singing a song about being sexually aroused by getting beat up when her most notable non-performance news maker instance was her getting beat up by her boyfriend. But I heard one radio commentator also call it inappropriate because she’s black and, I don’t know if you’ve heard or not but: black people were slaves at one point. Yawn. Sounds like the lamest race baiting criticism ever but I’ve heard it more than once since then. What are your thoughts?

Norway Murderer wasn’t a “Christian Terrorist”

A correction and apology and Reason 9Billion why our (meaning America’s) news media sucks: I just found out now that this guys manifesto that was cited as him being Christian says so in the context of him differentiating himself from other non-Christian nations and that instead of any preaching, fundamentalism endorsement or anything somewhat somehow partially approaching a belief that God wants him to kill people – he says he has “no relationship” with God or Jesus Christ. So in other words: he is a “Christian terrorist” on less of a level that he is a “weird studded chin hair whisker terrorist”.

There’s no way around this one, guys. I get that people are eager to have a Christian, or at least non-Muslim terrorist movement example to point to in the decade wake of September 11th and it’s related jihadist bombings around the world, but distortion is never a way to argue a point. This Norway loser said that “Christian fundamentalist theocracy” is “everything we DO NOT want” and a “secular European society” is “what we DO want.” There’s no Christian-terrorism here…

I apologize for my previous comments that took anti-Christian biased reports as fact without checking for myself.

His use of the term is not based on faith but out of collective identification with a notion of “Christian Europe.”

“Regarding my personal relationship with God, I guess I’m not an excessively religious man,” he says in his 1,500-page manifesto. “I am first and foremost a man of logic. However, I am a supporter of a monocultural Christian Europe.”

Breivik’s video, in which he blames “cultural Marxists” for supporting a multicultural Europe, is replete with imagery of various sword-wielding and carnage-provoking crusaders and defenders, many of whom sport crosses.

Ironically, anyone who has recently checked the state of deep and abiding faith, or “piety,” in Europe, will find the place is decidedly, and more than ever, secular. In this sense at least Breivik is honest about his brand of Christianity. God-talk hasn’t occupied much of northern Europe for years, and not because bearded jihadists have blocked the entrance to the church.


Update, August 2012: Trained to be a sociopath?

UPDATE: More info and humorously delivered facts about the killerthat is spot on, but… you’re not gonna like that it’s from Ann Coulter, who titles her piece New York Times Reader Kills Dozens in Norway (a reference to the fact that Breivik cited the NY Times over a dozen times but the bible 0 times):

Breivik says he is “not an excessively religious man,” brags that he is “first and foremost a man of logic,” calls himself “economically liberal” and reveres Darwinism.

But Times reporters had their “Eureka!” moment as soon as they heard Breivik used the word “Christian” someplace to identify himself. No one at the Times bothered to read Breivik’s manifesto to see that he doesn’t use the term the way the rest of us do. That might have interfered with the paper’s obsessive Christian-bashing.

Other famous killers dubbed conservative Christians by the Times include Timothy McVeigh and Jared Loughner.

McVeigh was a pot-smoking atheist who said, “Science is my religion.”

Similarly, Breivik says in his manifesto that “it is essential that science take an undisputed precedence over biblical teachings” –- a statement that would be incomprehensible to all the real scientists, such as Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, Bacon, Newton, Mendel, Pasteur, Planck, Einstein and Pauli, all of whom believed the whole purpose of science was to understand God.

The Tucson shooter, Jared Loughner, was lyingly described by the Times as a pro-life fanatic. Not only did more honest news outlets, such as ABC News, report exactly the opposite — for example, how Loughner alarmed his classmates by laughing about an aborted baby in class — but Loughner’s friends described him as “left wing,” “a political radical,” “quite liberal” and “a pothead.” Another said Loughner’s mother was Jewish.

The only reason Timothy McVeigh has gone down in history as a right-wing Christian and Jared Loughner has not — despite herculean efforts by much of the mainstream media to convince us otherwise — is that by January 2011 when Loughner went on his murder spree, conservatives had enough media outlets to reveal the truth.

As explained in the smash best-seller “Demonic: How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America,” the liberal rule is: Any criminal act committed by a white man with a gun is a right-wing, Christian conspiracy, whereas any criminal act committed by a nonwhite is the government violating someone’s civil liberties.