ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Cognition
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1665765
This article is part of the Research TopicPersonality Traits and the Dual Nature of Creativity: Bright and Dark Sides ExploredView all 4 articles
Creativity within a military setting: Assessing the utility of an existing military visual aid to facilitate military deception amongst a civilian population
Provisionally accepted
Callum A O'Malley1*
David J Harris1
Tom Arthur1
Hannah Blackford2George Raywood-Burke2
Nigel Jones2
Samuel J Vine1*- 1University of Exeter, Exeter, United Kingdom
- 2Trimetis Limited, Bristol, United Kingdom
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
Deception can function as a useful tool for any military figure. Historic examples demonstrate that deception facilitates success by corralling an adversary into failure. Traits such as creativity and imagination are considered of central importance to devising useful and effective deceptive ideas. In lieu of being naturally creative/imaginative, visual aids highlighting core military deception principles could offset these shortcomings. This study assessed whether an existing military deception visual aid improved the number, usefulness, and originality of deceptive ideas amongst a civilian population. An independent samples design comprising 80 participants (44 female) were equally assigned to an experimental (with aid) or control (without aid) group. Participants created as many deceptive stratagems in as much detail as possible, during a 15-minute hypothetical task scenario. The number of stratagems and ratings of the usefulness, originality, and a snapshot score of the participant's self-selected best stratagem were compared between experimental groups. No significant differences emerged for the number of stratagems (𝑝= .061, 𝑟= .238) or usefulness (𝑝= .348, 𝑟= .116), originality (𝑝= .558, 𝑟= .076), or snapshot scores (𝑝= .603, 𝑟= .068). Results question whether deceptive thinking for a military context can be improved by a visual aid containing prompts about military deception principles. However, some task elements (e.g., same hypothetical scenario/only rating the best stratagem) may have reduced/nullified potential differences between groups. The use of an existing military deception visual aid may be limited to military samples. Future studies could employ mixed-method approaches or gamified designs to investigate the potential to enhance military deception planning.
Keywords: Cognitive Flexibiliity, creativity, Imagination, Defence and security, Military deception
Received: 14 Jul 2025; Accepted: 05 Sep 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 O'Malley, Harris, Arthur, Blackford, Raywood-Burke, Jones and Vine. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Callum A O'Malley, University of Exeter, Exeter, United Kingdom
Samuel J Vine, University of Exeter, Exeter, United Kingdom
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.