Travel & Spatial Distancing
In an interview on NPR, John Ridley mentions “People have to travel a distance to find themselves.”. He was describing how Jimi Hendrix, while in London, recognized how much more he could be than just a back up guitarist.
Other famous and not-so-famous artists and creative geniuses seem to incorporate travel into their work, knowing it helps their creativity. Some of the most inspired people are ones who draw from their travels.
Travel is awesome for improving one’s creativity. What travel does is create psychological distance from your day-to-day. And that psychological distance enables your brain to think more abstractly about a problem or project at home. By physically distancing yourself from an issue, problem or project, your mind is better able to step away from the details and see the big picture. It seems to also work even if the distance is perceptual.
So, some research to back up these claims. Lile Jia, a PhD graduate student in psychology at Indiana University (IU) at Bloomington, researched how the idea of psychological distance affected the creative cognition and insights of students on the IU campus. Jia’s study shows that placing oneself in a traveling “mindset” may improve creative problem solving.
Study 1
In this study Jia asked participants to list as many types or modes of transportation as possible. But he divided the particpants into two groups:
Group One — The Distant Condition
Participants were told that Indiana University students studying abroad in Greece developed the task of generating different modes of transportation.
Group Two — The Near Condition
Participants were told that students living on campus at Indiana University developed the task of generating different modes of transportation
In Jira’s Journal of Social Psychology article “Lessons from a Faraway Land: The effect of Spacial Distance on Creative Cognition,” Jia found that these two groups provided strikingly different results. The participants who thought that individuals in Greece developed the task came up with many more transportation options than the participants who thought the task was developed in Indiana.
Group One provided more, and more creative, transportation options than Group Two. As they imagined the source of the problem coming from Greece, a faraway place, they listed horses, scooters and bicycles in addition to the usual buses, trains and planes offered up by both groups. Thy not only considered the local environment of Bloomington, Indiana when deriving their answers, they used Greece and other parts of the world.
Study 2
In a second study, appearing in the same article, Jia administered puzzles or brainteasers to three different groups of students. Two groups were told the brain teasers came from different places. The third group wasn’t told anything about the origin of the puzzles/brainteasers.
Group One — Were told the series of brainteasers came from a California research institute
Group Two — Were told that the brainteasers came from down the hall in a building on campus
Group Three — Weren’t told anything about the origin of the brainteasers.
As in the first study, the participants in Group One, did the best at solving the brainteasers. They considered a wider range of alternatives and solved more of the problems than Groups Two or Three, who were told the puzzles originated locally, or nothing at all about the origin.
