Exposure to new ideas abroad enables significant rather than incremental creative leaps.

Evidence

First, and most fundamentally, people are exposed to and learn about new ideas and concepts during experiences abroad. These ideas can then act as inputs for the creative expansion processes and allow individuals to generate significant rather than incremental creative leaps. The more new ideas people have, the more likely they are to come up with novel combinations and completely new ideas uninfluenced and uncorrupted by previous ideas (Weisberg, 1999). Indeed, this may be why individuals primed with the experience of adapting abroad were able to spontaneously draw more creative aliens than those primed with other experiences (Maddux & Galinsky, 2009, study 5; see Figure 16.1). — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 2260

Categorization

• SEED: A writing angle: the ‘aliens drawing’ experiment as an empirical hook for an essay on how new inputs break cognitive anchoring — distance as creative fuel.