Abstract: Creativity is commonly understood as a neutral cognitive capacity that enables individuals to generate novel and appropriate ideas, solutions, or products. Depending on its motivational orientation and social consequences, creativity may lead to constructive outcomes, but it may also produce negative social consequences. The latter constitutes the negative side of creativity and includes two closely related forms: negative creativity and malevolent creativity. Both forms share the cognitive foundation of high novelty and high appropriateness, and both may result in negative social outcomes. However, they differ fundamentally in motivational orientation. Negative creativity is primarily driven by self-serving goals, with harm emerging mainly as an incidental byproduct. By contrast, malevolent creativity is motivated by an explicit intention to harm others, organizations, or society, with self-interest functioning as a possible but secondary motive.
In early childhood, behaviors that may contain elements of negative creativity, such as rule-bending, self-serving deception, and risky exploration, begin to emerge. However, the boundary between negative creativity and malevolent creativity is particularly difficult to determine during this developmental period. Children’s negative ideas are often situationally induced, unstable, and closely tied to immature cognitive control, moral reasoning, and social understanding. As a result, it is difficult to distinguish temporary negative ideation from stable malicious intent. Existing measurement tools, which are largely developed for adults and often rely on self-report scales or scenario-based tasks, are limited in their ability to identify children’s negative creativity and to differentiate it from malevolent creativity. This measurement dilemma constrains early identification and intervention.
Adopting a developmental perspective, this review systematically examines the multi-pathway mechanisms through which negative creativity may evolve into malevolent creativity. The proposed dynamic transformation model identifies four internal driving mechanisms: cognitive control failure, situational triggers, motivational reinforcement, and moral disengagement. It also highlights one external contextual factor: insufficient social regulation. These factors may operate independently, but they may also interact and accumulate, thereby increasing the likelihood that self-serving negative creativity becomes transformed into intentional harm. Specifically, cognitive control failure may weaken children’s ability to evaluate consequences and inhibit harmful responses; situational triggers such as anger, perceived injustice, or frustration may activate revenge-oriented ideation; motivational reinforcement may transform accidental gains into intentional value-seeking through harm; moral disengagement may reduce guilt and justify harmful behavior; and insufficient social regulation may weaken the feedback link between behavior and consequence. When these factors converge, the transformation from negative creativity to malevolent creativity may be accelerated. This framework moves beyond static trait-based conceptualizations and advances a process-oriented understanding of the negative side of creativity.
Building on this evolutionary framework, this review proposes the Cognitive-Motivational-Development (CMD) intervention model. The CMD model is grounded in Yeh’s ecological systems theory of creativity development and integrates three theoretical resources: social information processing theory, task motivation theory in the creativity component model, and moral disengagement theory. It consists of three interconnected tiers. The cognitive tier targets cognitive control failure and situational information misinterpretation by strengthening children’s social information processing and creative evaluation abilities. Specific strategies include guiding children to encode multifaceted situational cues, regulate emotion-induced arousal, and evaluate the possible consequences of creative ideas. The motivational tier aims to interrupt motivational reinforcement and prevent the escalation from self-interest to harm. Strategies include validating children’s creative motivation, making visible the social consequences of their actions, identifying morally disengaged justifications, and reconstructing the value link between self-benefit and prosocial outcomes. The developmental tier addresses insufficient social regulation and weak moral constraints by fostering a supportive moral ecology. Strategies include establishing clear behavioral norms and consistent feedback mechanisms, embedding moral dialogue into daily interactions, integrating cultural values into situated activities, and creating supportive physical and social environments.
The CMD model has three major implications. First, it shifts the focus of intervention from post-harm remediation to pre-harm upstream guidance, targeting negative creativity before malevolent intent becomes stabilized. Second, it translates the proposed evolutionary mechanisms into concrete, tiered intervention targets, thereby enhancing the applicability of the model in educational settings. Third, it integrates individual-level cognitive evaluation, motivational value reconstruction, and developmental ecological support into a coherent framework, offering a holistic approach to guiding children’s creative expressions.
The theoretical contribution of this review lies in clarifying the conceptual hierarchy among creativity, negative creativity, and malevolent creativity, and in reframing the negative side of creativity as a developmental process rather than a static trait. It explains how self-serving creativity may, under specific cognitive, motivational, emotional, moral, and environmental conditions, escalate toward intentional harm. The practical significance lies in providing an evidence-informed intervention framework that bypasses the measurement dilemma of malevolent creativity and enables early, developmentally appropriate guidance of children’s negative creativity. Future research should develop validated assessment tools for negative creativity in early childhood, conduct longitudinal and experimental studies to test the proposed transformation pathways and the effectiveness of the CMD model, and translate this framework into teacher-friendly and family-friendly intervention practices.

Key words: negative creativity, malevolent creativity, evolutionary pathways, CMD intervention