It is a common escapist fantasy: ditch the daily drudgery, leave your troubles behind and build a new life somewhere else. The idea that living abroad spurs creativity has been in the popular psyche for eons. What would Gauguin have been without Tahiti, or Hemingway without Spain?
Adam Galinsky at Northwestern University in Chicago and Willam Maddux of INSEAD, a business school in Fontainebleau, France, decided to put the anecdote under the microscope. In one experiment, they found that people who had spent time living outside their own countries were more likely than people who hadn鈥檛 to solve the 鈥淒uncker candle problem鈥�: given only a box of thumbtacks and a candle and told to fix the candle to a wall, you need to divine that the tack box can be used as a shelf. What鈥檚 more, the longer someone had lived abroad, the more likely they were to solve the problem. Time spent abroad also predicted whether another set of individuals would be able to reach a deal in a seemingly intractable negotiation.
Just thinking about your time as an expat before engaging in a task can boost your creativity, the researchers found. They primed volunteers, all of whom had lived abroad, by asking them to write about their time spent either in a foreign country, travelling, at home or in the supermarket. They found that the first group did significantly better than the others on a subsequent word-based creativity task (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, ).
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Of course it may be that creative people are also more open to new experiences and so more inclined to live outside their country of birth. However, Galinsky and Maddux reckon it also works the other way around: that the process of adapting yourself to a foreign culture 鈥� learning to think and behave in different ways 鈥� may give you a creative edge. Experiencing a different culture may make you less fixed in your thinking and more able to accept and recombine novel ideas.