Travel Alone Won’t Reset You. Living Somewhere Else Might!

I read a paper this weekend that I want to tell you about, because it gets at something I've suspected for a long time but couldn't quite prove.

The paper is Multicultural Experience Enhances Creativity: The When and How, published in the American Psychologist in 2008 by Angela Leung, William Maddux, Adam Galinsky, and Chi-yue Chiu — researchers from Singapore Management University, INSEAD (in France, notably), Northwestern, and the University of Illinois. It's the first serious empirical work I've come across that actually tests whether living inside another culture changes the way we think, or whether we just tell ourselves it does.

It changes the way we think. But the paper is more interesting than that, because it tells us when it changes us and when it doesn't.

What they found

The researchers measured how deeply people had engaged with foreign cultures — time abroad, bilingualism, family migration history — and tested them on a range of creativity tasks. Insight problems. Remote associations. Idea generation. Retrieval of what the authors call "unconventional knowledge."

People who had lived meaningfully inside another culture scored higher on all of it. Not marginally — measurably. The effect held across labs, across continents, across methods.

The mechanism is a cognitive one. When you spend enough time inside a second culture, your mind gets used to holding two frames at once — two ways of eating, arguing, grieving, doing business — and that suspension of a single frame is what loosens the mental grooves that make us efficient but also predictable. Creativity, in their formulation, is what happens when the brain stops assuming there's only one correct answer.

The part that matters for anyone thinking about France

Here's the caveat, and it's the whole point. The creative benefit, the authors write, is "most apparent when individuals have had the experience of deeply immersing themselves in foreign countries (such as living in a foreign country rather than other more cursory foreign experiences, such as traveling abroad)."

Travel alone doesn't do it. A week in Paris, no matter how well spent, doesn't do it. What produces the shift is residence — the accumulated experience of ordinary days abroad. The frustrations, the intimacies, the boulanger who eventually remembers your face, the notaire who explains for the third time why what you're asking for isn't how things are done here. The mind reorganizes only when it has to.

Two conditions matter. The benefit is larger for people who open themselves to the foreign culture — who let themselves be changed by it rather than watching from behind a screen of expat distance. And it's larger in lives that don't require firm answers, where a person has permission to sit with uncertainty rather than rush to resolution.

What this tells me about the clients I work with

The Americans who thrive in France aren't the ones with the best-decorated maisons or the fastest visa approvals. They're the ones who arrive prepared to be changed. Who understand that the point of the move isn't to import an American life into a French village but to allow a French life to gradually revise them. Who accept that the discomfort of the first eighteen months — the language mistakes, the bureaucratic humbling, the slow arithmetic of ordinary — isn't a problem to be solved. It's the mechanism.

I read this kind of research because I don't want my work to rest on intuition alone. What Leung and her colleagues have shown isn't that France is magic. It's that deep engagement with a different way of being human is one of the most reliably documented paths to thinking well. France, for the right person, happens to be a good place for it.

If you're thinking about a French life, the question worth sitting with isn't can I afford this or where should I look. It's: am I willing to be changed by it?

That's the reset. The rest is logistics.

Leung, A. K., Maddux, W. W., Galinsky, A. D., & Chiu, C. (2008). Multicultural experience enhances creativity: The when and how. American Psychologist, 63(3), 169–181.