Selection bias could explain why creative people live abroad, so experiments were needed.

Evidence

Although these studies were informative, their correlational designs did not allow us to provide causal evidence that living abroad (but not traveling abroad) may actually cause increased creativity. The most obvious alternative explanation is that creative people, perhaps seduced by stories of Hemingway drinking martinis at the Paris Ritz or Gauguin painting on the beach in Tahiti surrounded by bronzed, bikinied women, are simply more likely to go abroad in the first place. To solve this question of whether being abroad actually causes individuals to be more creative, we went into the laboratory and experimentally primed the experience of living abroad to see if cognitively reactivating this experience actually causes more creativity. — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 2226

Categorization

• DEFINE: Identifies the self-selection alternative explanation that correlational designs cannot rule out.