Priming a prior living-abroad experience causally boosts creative association.

Evidence

In one study, we randomly assigned groups of undergraduate students at the Sorbonne in Paris (all of whom had been selected for the study because they had previously lived abroad) to recall and write about a time they had lived abroad; other groups were asked to write about having traveled abroad, being in their hometown, or going to the supermarket. We then asked them to complete the Remote Associates Task (RAT; Mednick, 1962), a test of creative associational thinking. In this task, examinees are presented with three words and asked to come up with an additional word that can logically associate the three words together. For example, for the triad of words “manners, round, tennis” the correct answer individuals need to come up with is “table,” which associates all three words together (i.e., table manners, round table, and table tennis). As predicted, we found that participants who had been primed to recall having lived abroad solved more RAT answers correctly than those who recalled and wrote about other types of experiences, including traveling abroad (Maddux & Galinsky, 2009, study 3). — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 2227

Categorization

• QUESTION: Does merely recalling a past immersive foreign experience raise creativity, or must this depend on the original experience having actually been transformative?
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 2227