How Experience in Foreign Cultures Facilitates Creativity

The definition of the word ‘create’ – to cause to exist; to bring into being – implies something profound, almost spiritual, which is perhaps the origin of the phrase ‘divine inspiration’. Despite considerable progress towards understanding what causes and facilitates creativity, one of the more common assumptions about it – that experiences in foreign countries can foster creative insights – remains largely unstudied.

Living abroad is often seen as a necessary experience for aspiring artists, and there is abundant anecdotal evidence for the idea that creative individuals produce their best- known masterworks during or following a stint abroad. This is perhaps best exemplified by the thriving community of expatriate American writers in Paris in the early 20th century, including Earnest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, and Ezra Pound.

In addition to writers, many famous painters, (e.g., Gauguin and Picasso), and composers (e.g., Handel, Prokofiev and Stravinsky) created some of their most admired works while living abroad.  Gauguin, a Frenchman, painted his signature pieces in Tahiti; Vladamir Nabokov, a Russian, wrote his masterpieces in America; and George Handel, a German, composed The Messiah in England. Although certain locations (i.e., early-20th century Paris) may be particularly stimulating for a creative mind, the diversity of these examples highlights that there may be a fundamental link between living abroad and creative production, one that perhaps transcends a particular location and era.

Novelist Richard Stern has noted the particular importance of living abroad for a creative mindset: “Once I went abroad it was extremely exciting for me to become a new personality, to be detached from everything that bound me, noticing everything that was different. That noticing of difference was very important; the languages, even though I was no good at them, were very important; how things were said, the different formulas. Being abroad has been very important.”

Shedding Light on Creativity
To date, research has identified a number of personality and contextual factors related to the creative process. For example, studies on creative personalities have demonstrated that creative people tend to be non-conforming, independent, intrinsically motivated, and risk-seeking. Large-scale investigations have found that above-average intelligence, tolerance of ambiguity, energy, self-confidence, ambition, and cognitive flexibility are also traits that tend to be found in creative people. 

In addition, a number of contextual factors have been shown to facilitate creativity, including motivational, cognitive and affective variables. Most notably, there is now an abundant literature supporting the notion that individuals who pursue tasks for intrinsic rather than extrinsic purposes show enhanced creativity. For example, providing external incentives for completing a task -- such as monetary compensation -- can actually lead not only to decreased motivation, but also to decreased creativity. Moreover, creativity is somewhat self-fulfilling: when individuals or teams are given high task-independence and high levels of creativity are expected within the task, creative products and solutions tend to result.

Certain types of cognitive and affective processes can also influence creativity.

Visual imagery and creativity training have both been shown to enhance creative thinking. A distant-future focus, compared to near-future focus, has been shown to lead to more creative negotiation outcomes and to enhanced creative insight on individual problem-solving tasks. Finally, at the affective level, creativity seems to flourish when people are in positive or ambiguous affective states rather than negative affective states.

Empirical evidence also suggests a general relationship between diverse experiences and enhanced creativity. For example, creativity is found at relatively high rates among first- or second-generation immigrants, and for individuals who are multi-ethnic. Similarly, the process of learning multiple languages increases the number of associations between ideas (since the concept-language connections must be made in multiple ways), and research shows that bilingual people tend to be more creative than monolinguals. At the group level, creativity is facilitated within collaborative groups that contain diversity, and in groups where heterogeneous opinions are allowed expression. Even at the societal level, creativity seems to increase when civilizations open themselves to outside influences and when geographic areas are relatively diverse.

Our Research
Given the prior work on the relationship between diverse experiences and subsequent creativity, we set out to prove that cross-cultural experiences such as living abroad contribute to enhanced creativity. There are a number of reasons for our hypothesis. First, exposure to different cultures can allow individuals access to a greater number of novel ideas and concepts which can then act as inputs for the creative process. Simply put, people typically learn new ideas and concepts from their foreign experiences.

Second, being abroad may allow people to recognize that the same surface behaviors can have different meanings and thus different implications for social behavior. For example, in some cultures (e.g., China, Jordan), leaving food on one’s plate at a host’s house is an implicit but clear sign of appreciation, implying that the host has provided enough to eat. In other countries (e.g., Indonesia, the United States), the same behavior would be taken as an insult, a condemnation of the meal. Thus, those with experience living in foreign countries should be more likely to see the same problem or issue from different perspectives.

Third, because one function of culture is to provide routinized scripts or sets of norms for behaviors, new cultural experiences offer alternative routines, particularly as people adapt their own thoughts and behaviors to the new environment. And because these foreign routines, values, and beliefs are often very different from or even in conflict with those in one’s own culture, living abroad can lead to increased cognitive complexity compared to those who have had exposure to only one culture and one set of cultural norms.

In other words, cognitive orientations may become more open and complex when individuals process and integrate new methods of thinking and behaving. Having successfully adapted to new routines and integrated new values and perspectives from other cultures, these foreign experiences may then increase the psychological readiness to accept and recruit ideas from unfamiliar sources and places. Therefore, an individual who has had reflective and transformational foreign cultural experiences should be better able to integrate discrepant ideas in novel ways.

We conducted a series of five studies involving multiple methods to obtain support for the ‘foreign culture leads to creativity’ link. In Studies 1 and 2, we measured whether individuals with experiences living and/or traveling in foreign countries were more creative on insight tasks than those without these experiences. In Study 3 we examined whether the effect of priming (or temporarily activating) cognitions associated with living abroad can also have facilitative effects on subsequent creativity on a word-association task for a sample of individuals who had previously lived abroad. In Study 4 we explored whether adapting to foreign cultures while living abroad mediates the link between living in foreign countries and creativity. And finally, in Study 5, we explored the causal role of an important mediating variable -- the degree one adapts to a new culture -- on a creative generation task.

Our Findings
Across the five studies, we found evidence that the experience of living abroad and adapting to a new culture facilitates creativity.  In the first two studies, we demonstrated that the more time participants spent living abroad, the more likely they were to find a hidden, but correct solution to a problem, and the more likely they were to find a hidden but necessary solution to an interpersonal negotiation task. Importantly, living abroad rather than traveling abroad proved to be the critical type of foreign experience that facilitated creativity, and this effect occurred independently of a number of personality variables and other possible confounding factors.

Study 3 provided causal evidence that mentally accessing the experience of living abroad enhances creativity, while Study 4 demonstrated that the degree to which individuals indicated they had adapted themselves to the local culture while living abroad was a critical variable mediating the ‘foreign culture living leads to creativity’ link. This suggests that a certain amount of mental and behavioral transformation on the part of expatriates is necessary to derive enduring benefits of enhanced creativity. It also suggests one reason why living abroad seems to be a particularly critical type of foreign experience: if adapting oneself to take on new behaviors and thoughts is critical for enhanced creativity, such experiences are much more likely to occur when individuals are living (not merely traveling) in a new country.

Our results suggest that the specific attitude and approach individuals take during their foreign culture experience is a critical determinant of whether creativity becomes enhanced. A person who lives abroad but remains separate from its citizens and sheltered from its customs will likely not experience a boost in creativity. Similarly, travelers who actively reflect on the differences and similarities between their own and the foreign culture, perhaps by engaging local people and participating in activities that give an insider experience of the culture, will be more likely to walk away more creative.

We do not mean to suggest that more cursory cross-cultural experiences are without value.  There are numerous examples of high-profile individuals having life-changing experiences while traveling or during short visits to a foreign country. For example, the late Boris Yeltsin indicated that his beliefs in the value of the communist system were transformed following a visit to a Houston, Texas supermarket, where he was astounded at the wide selection of foods available to any American, and appalled that the Soviets had no such access to basic necessities. Malcolm X similarly had his views on racial prejudice completely altered during a pilgrimage to Mecca, where he was amazed to see Muslims of all nationalities and ethnic backgrounds living and worshipping in harmony.

Our results point to the conclusion that opportunities and incentives matter: the more opportunity and incentives people have for adapting their thinking and behaviour to a new culture, the more likely creativity will be enhanced, and such experiences are likely to occur more consistently when individuals have the time and depth of exposure that comes with deeper and more immersive experiences such as living abroad. In addition, the particular approach one takes while abroad, and the degree to which this acts as a transformational experience seems to determine the benefit derived.

There may also be other benefits to foreign experiences besides enhanced creativity. People who have spent time in multiple cultures might be higher in ‘relational mobility’, e.g., the extent to which individuals are able to move fluidly between relationships and social groups. Such enhanced exposure to a variety of types of social relationships and groups could be an additional important element in creative enhancement. Our findings may also be part of a larger process of becoming ‘culturally intelligent’, i.e. possessing the ability to make sense of and blend into unfamiliar contexts. The ability to adapt oneself to new environments may not only help people become culturally intelligent, but the mental processes involved may have the beneficial effect of enhancing creativity as well.

A particularly deep and immersive foreign experience might actually serve to change not only one’s cognitive orientation towards the social world in general, but even toward one’s sense of self. Anecdotally at least, people returning from a foreign sojourn often speak of the experience as ‘life-changing’; it is possible that individuals’ self-concepts and core values and attitudes may be fundamentally altered following a stint abroad. As a result, our results also suggest the intriguing possibility that certain types of transformational experiences, such as living abroad, may have a profound-enough influence on individuals to impact variables – such as creativity – that are typically thought of as relatively stable personality traits. For example, might living abroad also cause individuals to subsequently become more open to new experiences? Might putting an introvert into an extrovert-dominated industry (i.e., sales) cause him/her to become more extroverted over time?

Although some researchers have postulated that personality is genetically-based and thus not materially altered by situational experiences , results from the present research at least suggest the possibility that certain traits or abilities typically thought to be fixed may be altered via high-impact experiences.

In closing
Our results are relevant across a variety of disciplines, including technology, education, government and business.  Such industries are currently debating the benefits and drawbacks of the ‘shrinking’ or ‘flattening’ world due to globalization, and our findings identify a very distinct benefit of one type of multicultural experience.

In addition, many ubiquitous practices in educational and organizational settings, including exchange programs, sabbaticals and international assignments, are based on the assumption that diverse experiences foster creativity and innovation. Our research  supports the idea that such practices create distinct value for individuals and organizations, as long as programs allow individuals to live in foreign countries and have the opportunity to adapt to a new culture.

Given that living abroad seems to enhance one’s ability to discover creative solutions, it may behoove organizations to hire individuals with experience living abroad or to transfer employees to foreign branches if creativity is particularly valued in a given firm. For individuals who wish to enhance their own levels of creativity, our results suggest it would be advantageous to consider study-abroad programs or to seek job assignments in foreign countries in which such opportunities present themselves.

Our research also suggests another distinct and serendipitous potential benefit of the increasing globalization of the world: enhanced creativity. Living in a different country may lead to the realization that every form of communication – from gestures to vocal tones to a simple smile – can convey different meanings and have different functions depending on the cultural context. Those critical months or years of turning bewilderment into understanding may instill not only the ability ‘think outside the box’, but also the capacity to realize that the box itself is more than a simple square, but is actually a repository of many creative possibilities.

Adam Galinsky is the Morris and Alice Kaplan Professor of Ethics and Decision in Management at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.  William Maddux is an assistant professor of Organizational Behaviour at INSEAD and co-director of the INSEAD Social Science Research Center (ISSRC) in Paris.

[This article has been reprinted, with permission, from Rotman Management, the magazine of the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management]