How Experience in Foreign Cultures Facilitates Creativity
he 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.
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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.
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