Living abroad boosts creativity by restructuring cognition toward flexible complexity.

Evidence

Although this model will need to be more rigorously tested going forward, theoretically it stands to reason that living abroad facilitates creativity because it fundamentally alters the structure of individuals’ cognition, making it more flexible, adaptable, and complex, allowing connections to form between disparate and sometimes conflicting ideas, and facilitating the chronic ability to examine issues from multiple perspectives. — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 2269

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels Berry’s acculturation framework and the broader creativity-and-adaptation literature; also resonates with the bicultural integration arguments of Hong et al.’s frame-switching work. — connects to: A culturally evolved tool can restructure an individual’s mental capacities — Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture…, 747