A great new study was recently published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology about the relationship between living abroad and creativity. There’s now abundant evidence to add to what generations of expats have known all along: living in a foreign environment, or in a multicultural experience, mitigates creativity. Interestingly, this increased creativity doesn’t hold true for people who had spent time traveling abroad, just for those who had lived abroad. The level of cultural immersion, not the length of time spent abroad, emerged as a key factor determining creativity.
Living abroad, in my experience, is an exercise in 24-hour creative problem-solving. The daily activities of going to the bank or eating at a friend’s house, while time-consuming, become repeated to the point of automation. In contrast, living abroad–
-makes you break down each activity and rework unmanageable steps
-prompts you to navigate cultural or linguistic unknowns on a regular basis; try talking to the guy at the hardware store when you’ve completely forgotten the name of what you’re looking for
-relax your ideas of functional fixedness, wherein you are only able to conceptualize things according to one set of norms
-lets you pretty much second-guess everything you do the entire time, which in turn prompts different ideas about how to walk, eat, etc.
While it’s certainly true that the study may have been an examination of correlation and not causation–the kind of person who would live abroad may have already been more open to new experiences–but even priming the experience of living abroad raised the participants’ creativity level. My theory that living abroad is cognitive calisthenics still stands.
