Creativity priming only works for people who have actually lived abroad

Evidence

To test whether living abroad is necessary for recalling multicultural learning to facilitate creativity, experiment 3 included participants who had and had not lived abroad. Overall, we predicted enhanced creativity for participants primed with the functional multicultural learning experience compared to those primed with the nonfunctional multicultural learning experience, but only for participants who had previously lived abroad. This is indeed what we found: Kellogg MBAs were more likely to solve the Duncker candle problem when primed with the functional multicultural learning experience, but only if they had previously lived abroad, presumably because such individuals were less likely to have functional multicultural learning experiences to mentally access: there was no creative difference across conditions for participants who had not lived abroad (Maddux et al., 2010, experiment 3). — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 2246

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• XREF: Connects to the general social capital and experiential-learning literature the reader has flagged; also to creativity research in the same book.

Related

• Recalling multicultural adaptation only boosts creativity in people who actually lived abroad. (similarity 0.92)
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• Living abroad raises insight-creativity performance from 42 to 60 percent (similarity 0.84)
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• Merely experiencing foreign novelty without grasping its underlying reasons does not boost creativity (similarity 0.82)
• Learning why other cultures behave as they do enhances creative problem solving (similarity 0.82)
• Mere exposure to foreign cultures does not boost creativity; active comparison does. (similarity 0.82)
• Living abroad boosts creativity by restructuring cognition toward flexible complexity. (similarity 0.81)
• Past foreign experience alone does not produce creative benefit without identity integration. (similarity 0.81)
• Bicultural individuals outperform monocultural peers on creative tasks (similarity 0.80)
• Selection bias could explain why creative people live abroad, so experiments were needed. (similarity 0.80)