Crave Creativity? Live abroad.

We all know what a liberating experience being in a foreign country can be. Apparently it can also be a potent creative trigger. There are plenty of artists/thinkers who jump to my mind as brilliant examples of this postulate. Munch's Frieze of Life was conceptualised and executed while he was in Berlin. Nietzsche wandered through Genoa, Nice, St. Moritz and Turin between 1879-1889, writing Daybreak, portions of The Gay Science amongst other writings. Samuel Beckett spent many of his writing years away from Ireland - in London & Germany. Kafka's on and off love affair with Bavaria....the list goes on.

What is it about a foreign land that acts as a Muse?
Research cited in a prominent Social Psychology journal may have an answer. William Maddux (INSEAD) and Adam Galinsky (Northwestern) conducted 5 different studies using a variety of methods to establish a link between time spent living abroad (this explicitly excludes time just travelling abroad) and creativity. The authors start by giving a succinct overview of the personality and contextual variables associated with creativity. These alone make for quite an interesting reading and would be a handy starting point for anyone wishing to explore this area of research. Meta-analytical studies have reported creative persons possessing above-average intelligence, tolerance of ambiguous information, higher levels of energy, self-confidence, intrinsic motivation, ambition, open attitude towards risk and cognitive flexibility (MacKinnon, 1978). It should be pointed out though that the ‘profile’ of a creative person varies with the Industry or professional domain. Creative artists are very different to creative scientists, for example.
The chief components of the authors’ hypothesis explain the rationale behind this study:

• Firstly, (and understandably) living abroad allows people access to a larger number of novel ideas and concepts, which is believed to act as precursors for a creative exercise.
• Secondly, the authors postulate that living abroad gives people access to different perspectives of approaching problems.
• Finally, experiences in alien cultures are indicators of ‘psychological openness’ to novel ideas and result in a marvellous cognitive expansion of the subject’s creative repertoire.

The researchers used a number of different studies to investigate their hypothesis. These included the famous Duncker candle problem (you can read about it here), a task measuring creative one-to-one negotiation skills, a test of convergent thinking (where word association was used), and a creative generation task that requires the participants to draw an alien creature (where you imagine stumbling onto a very different Planet in a Galaxy far, far away and encounter an alien). The results indicated a consistent and robust link between the creativity measures employed and the time that subjects had spent living abroad. Although, I am personally not too convinced by the usage of the Duncker problem as it has been so widely used in undergraduate Psychology classes as well as in ice-breaker sessions across the business world that it hardly comes across as a valid measure of creativity.

The most powerful construct that the authors do explain in this study as being the mechanism beneath the creativity-living abroad link is adaptation. They say, “Because culture is such a pervasive force, impacting and shaping every aspect of one’s life, adapting oneself to a new culture—learning how to behave and think in different way—may make individuals chronically aware of multiple perspectives and approaches when dealing with mundane and novel situations and, thus, may be associated with increased creativity.”

In view of the above, the diversity intention behind those equal opportunity questionnaires makes solid business sense. I think the Corporate world is already onto this. Perhaps it’s time for the recruitment consultants to reformat candidate CVs in terms of Countries visited and lived in! Whether or not the Duncker Candle task makes it to the assessment centres is of course another issue.

References:
Maddux, W, Galinsky, A, Cultural Borders and Mental Barriers: The Relationship Between Living Abroad and Creativity (2009), Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 96, 1047–1061. http://psycnet.apa.org/?fa=main.doiLanding&doi=10.1037/a0014861