“Gaining experience in foreign cultures has long been a classic prescription for artists interested in stimulating their imaginations or honing their crafts. But does living abroad actually make people more creative?” asks the study's lead author, William Maddux, PhD, an assistant professor of organizational behaviour at INSEAD, a business school with campuses in France and Singapore. “It's a longstanding question that we feel we've been able to begin answering through this research.”

 

The research, published by the American Psychological Association  (May 2009, http://www.apa.org/releases/creativity.html), consisted of five studies involving students at Paris' Sorbonne University, at INSEAD, a business school with campuses in France and Singapore and at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University in the United States.

 

Researchers said that although the studies show a strong relationship between living abroad and creativity, they do not prove that living abroad and adapting to a new culture actually cause people to be more creative.

“This research may have something to say about the increasing impact of globalization on the world, a fact that has been hammered home by the recent financial crisis,” said Maddux. “Knowing that experiences abroad are critical for creative output makes study abroad programs and job assignments in other countries that much more important, especially for people and companies that put a premium on creativity and innovation to stay competitive.”

 

In one study, MBA students at the Kellogg School were asked to solve the Duncker candle problem, a classic test of creative insight in which individuals are presented with three objects on a table placed next to a cardboard wall: a candle, a pack of matches and a box of tacks.

The task is to attach the candle to the wall so that the candle burns properly and does not drip wax on the table or the floor and the correct solution involves using the empty box of tacks as a candleholder, and then tack it to the wall.

 

The solution is considered a measure of creative insight because it involves the ability to see objects as performing different functions from what is typical and the results showed that the longer students had spent living abroad, the more likely they were to come up with the solution. “This shows us that there is some sort of psychological transformation that needs to occur when people are living in a foreign country in order to enhance creativity. This may happen when people work to adapt themselves to a new culture,” said Galinsky PhD, from the Kellogg School of Management.