Living Abroad & Creativity
Adapting to a foreign culture and language pretty much forces one live with ambiguity. Figuring out the simplest of tasks requires renewed thinking about those simple tasks. Ones that at home are so familiar one no longer needs to think about how to go about them. When in an entirely new environment the brain is focused on everything. Not just the task at hand. Every detail could be important because it could be the answer to solving the new task at hand. This renewed decision making fires up brain neurons that normally don’t fire when one is in familiar routine. It’s a very childlike state of mind, filled with curiosity.
Cultural adaptation also broadens the mind to accept that there are multiple valid solutions for completing the same task.
I’ve lived in Amsterdam, Berlin, Cracow, Rio de Janeiro, and of course my home town of Los Angeles. The experiences of living abroad have helped define my creative life. A coffee in each of these places offers a different experience. Let alone opening a bank account, buying a ticket, using local transportation, shopping for groceries, getting to know the geography, culture, language, finding a doctor or repairing a bike, etc. It can be exciting or overwhelming. And it can teach one valuable creative skills for problem solving. I didn’t know this is what all this travel was doing for me then. Just that I felt driven to travel and live abroad.
Sometimes when tooling around Silver Lake I will pretend I’m in Northern Italy and imagine that everyone I see is Italian. I start looking at the homes differently, as though I am a foreigner in a foreign land. And my awareness changes. I become the observer and not the neighbor. It’s a fun trick, and helps me get my mind into a creative space.
I recently learned about the study “Cultural borders and mental barriers: The relationship between living abroad and creativity,” by William W. Maddux of INSEAD in Fountainebleau, France, and Adam D. Galinsky of Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management in Chicago, Illinois. It so made me want to be a scientist, but I digress.
Maddux sums it up, “Gaining experience in foreign cultures has long been a classic prescription for artists interested in stimulating their imaginations or honing their crafts. But does living abroad actually make people more creative?”
Their study gave various problem solving exercises to students. Half had lived abroad at some point. The other half hadn’t lived in a foreign country.
One of these problems was the classic Duncker candle problem. This is a classic test of creative insight. In this problem, participants are given three objects on a table placed next to a cardboard wall: a candle, a pack of matches and a box of tacks. The participants are told they have to attach the candle to the wall so that the candle burns properly and does not drip wax on the table or floor. Fewer than 25% find the solution, which is to use the empty box of tacks as a candle holder, tacking the box to the wall with tacks. The candle attaches to the empty box by dripping wax onto the box from the lit candle.
The solution is considered a measure of creative insight because it involves the ability to see objects as performing different functions from their intended one. The results showed that the longer students had spent living abroad, the more likely they were to come up with the creative solution.
Another test was the Remote Associates Test. This was given to students who all had spent some time living abroad. The difference was that students were primed differently. The priming was to test if recalling the past experience of of living abroad or adapting to a new culture caused the students, at least temporarily, to be more creative.
One set was asked to think about a new experience in another culture in which they learned something new about the culture and also learned the reason why people did what they did. Others were asked to think about an experience in which they learned something new about their own culture and why people do what they do. A third group was asked to think about learning something new about a sport. A fourth group did not do an initial memory task.
Remote Associates Test involves adding a fourth word to a set of three displayed words. Doing this successfully requires thinking about each word and how each relate to the others, and what word would highlight this. For example, one may see the words PUTTING, BACK, HORN. The correct answer in this case would be GREEN.
The researchers found that the first group who thought about their experiences learning about a new culture solved many more of the items from the Remote Associates Test than people in any of the other experimental groups.
Priming people who’ve never lived in another culture with the same question before performing the task did not increase creativity, suggesting that learning something new about another culture is understanding why people do what they do.
Another study in this article set up a mock negotiation involving the sale of a gas station. In the scenario a deal base solely on a sale price was impossible because the seller’s minimum was higher than the buyer’s maximum. But because the two parties’ underlying interests were compatible, there was room for a creative agreement that could satisfy both parties’ interests.
Again it was the students who’d spent time living abroad that came up with a deal that demanded creative insight. Basically the buyer bought the gas station at their maximum price, below the seller’s minimum, but stipulated employment for the seller to manage the place. The underlying interests were that the seller needed funds to finance a two-year sailing trip while also needing employment after the trip. And the buyer wanted to hire managers to run the gas station.
“This shows us that there is some sort of psychological transformation that needs to occur when people are living in a foreign country in order to enhance creativity. This may happen when people work to adapt themselves to a new culture,” said Galinsky.
“This research may have something to say about the increasing impact of globalization on the world, a fact that has been hammered home by the recent financial crisis,” said Maddux. “Knowing that experiences abroad are critical for creative output makes study abroad programs and job assignments in other countries that much more important, especially for people and companies that put a premium on creativity and innovation to stay competitive.”
