PART TWO
VEDANTAM: Jen has strong ideas about keeping the inside of a home separate from the outside world. Over time, Adam has made those ideas his own.
GALINSKY: I think that, you know, that's really made me think about space in a totally different way and sort of how people construct their worlds and their interior environments. And, you know, I have much better interior design now in my house than I ever had when I was single.
VEDANTAM: Adam grew up in a secular Jewish family in North Carolina. Jen grew up in Connecticut with parents who had emigrated from the Philippines. They'd held onto their Filipino culture. Part of that culture includes a deep respect for the home, a respect they passed on to Jen. Jen, in turn, passed on that cultural belief to Adam.
GALINSKY: I still actually own my apartment in Chicago, and I went back it to recently. I'm like, basically, what a [expletive] this was. Like, you know, I just - I was just never attentive to all the features of a space that someone who really cares about that and design and how things fit together. And I think that, yeah, the bedroom now is, like - it does feel a little bit more like a sanctuary. Like, and, you know, like, it's almost like you're stepping across, you know, this - into this different portal, if you will.
VEDANTAM: Jen has also adopted some of Adam's values.
J LYON: Adam has taught me, through his Jewish tradition, about embracing - opening up of feelings, which - labeling, identifying feelings. I tend to mute those things or don't like real conflict, so I'll steer off of those...
VEDANTAM: Now, you might be asking, what's the big deal? Anytime a couple gets together, they blend their lives, embrace some things, let go of others. But here's the difference. When people from different countries or cultures come together, it seems to affect their creativity. Adam has studied this topic. We caught up for a longer chat when Jen and the kids weren't around. I wanted to know how he'd gotten interested in the link between diversity and creativity. Adam says it started long ago when he was in high school. Before leaving for a semester abroad, he'd attended a mandatory orientation.
GALINSKY: And I still remember to this day, they said, look; some of you are going to go to China, and in China, it is a sign of respect if you leave food on your plate because it says that you got enough to eat. But in Indonesia, where I was going, it's a sign of disrespect to leave food on your plate because it basically says the food wasn't very good. And so that was sort of eye-opening, transformational experience for me to recognize the same object - food on a plate - could have very different meanings and have very different implications depending on the culture.
VEDANTAM: The same thing means different things depending on your background and perspective. It made Adam wonder how different cultures can help us see the world differently and spark creativity and innovation. Years later, he decided to explore these ideas in a research project.
GALINSKY: The whole project is a great story because it's a good example of both scientific discovery and scientific collaboration.
VEDANTAM: Adam and some colleagues tracked a group of students at a business school. The researchers hypothesized that the students who showed the most creativity at the end of their school years would also be those who'd had the most interactions with people from different countries. They collected a vast amount of data, crunched the results. They were about to publish when...
GALINSKY: Another group of researchers had actually even a better design than we did and scooped our idea and published the paper.
VEDANTAM: That should have been the end of it. Their goal had been to publish, and they'd gotten beat. So even though they had a lot of data, they put it all away and moved on.
GALINSKY: A couple years later, I had a first-year doctoral student, Jackson Lu, and I said, hey, we have this old data; we can't publish in a great journal because someone already scooped us on it, but we could publish it as a replication somewhere good. Why don't you go through the data?
VEDANTAM: What happened next might be an example of the phenomenon Richard Freeman noticed that it helps a research project to have scientists from different ethnicities. Jackson Lu saw something exciting in Adam's data that Adam himself had overlooked.
GALINSKY: And I said, what's that? And he said, I found this finding that people who had dated someone from another culture became more creative during their business school career, but those who just had friends from another culture didn't seem to become more creative. So there's something unique and wonderful about intercultural romantic relationships.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
VEDANTAM: Jackson's enthusiasm made Adam and his colleagues sit up. They realized they may have stumbled on something important. Why would dating someone from another culture spur creativity? Why would casual friendships not work the same way?
GALINSKY: So we started thinking again about this idea of a deep - or the depth and the closeness of those intercultural connections might make a difference.
VEDANTAM: They designed an experiment to test whether the finding was real. This time, they reached out only to students who had both dated someone from a different country and dated someone from their own country. The students were then randomly split into two groups.
GALINSKY: In one condition, we'll ask them to recall their experience they had with their - dating someone from their own culture and just describe that experience. Now, in the other condition, we said, recall a time when you dated - about one of your relationships with someone from another culture. What was that experience like?
VEDANTAM: Afterwards, the researchers asked the students to reflect on how much they'd learned about their own and the other culture, and then they were given a test for creativity. If there was no connection between intercultural romance and creativity, asking the students to reflect on different kinds of encounters should have made no difference. But that's not what the researchers found.
GALINSKY: We found that there was a boost in temporary creativity just by reflecting on the intercultural relationship. And that was really driven by the fact that people felt that they had learned more about another culture, and that sort of cultural learning then led - that reflection on that cultural learning led to increased creativity.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
VEDANTAM: Psychology research out of Tufts University has found something similar. When you introduce racial diversity into a group, all the people in the group begin to broaden the scope of their thinking and to explore more options. Now, creativity can be difficult to measure, but scientists have devised ways of doing it. Typically, they analyze what they call divergent thinking and convergent thinking.
GALINSKY: And convergent creativity tasks are ones in which there's a single right answer. And one of the most famous examples of a single right answer that we didn't actually use in this particular project but have used in many of our other studies is the Duncker candle problem. In the Duncker candle problem, you ask people to - you give them a candle, a box of tacks and a book of matches. And you tell them, affix the candle to a wall in such way that the candle, when lit, doesn't drip wax onto the wall, table or floor.
VEDANTAM: Adam says that when he tried this with a group of smart undergrads at Princeton, only a small percentage of the students solved the problem within 15 minutes. The reason is that the test requires you to think about familiar objects in a new way.
GALINSKY: A box of tacks can be a repository for tacks but can also be a stand. And the solution is you dump out all the tacks out of the box; you tack the box to the wall, and then you put the candle inside.
VEDANTAM: Divergent tasks don't ask for a single right answer. They require you to produce lots of different ideas.
GALINSKY: In our study, we asked people, at time one, when we first measured their creativity, to generate as many creative uses as they can for a brick. And then at time two, when they graduated from business school, we asked them to think about as many creative uses as they could for a box. And then you can code these uses for the number of uses they come up with. But you can also code them for the number of different categories they come up with. So for a brick, someone might say, oh, it could be used as a piece of furniture. So that's one category. Or it could be used as a weapon; you could throw it at someone. That's another category. Or it could be used as part of a house. That's another category.
VEDANTAM: Again, generating lots of good ideas is a sign of a creative brain. In the study of business school students, Adam and his colleagues gave the volunteers one final task. It's called the Remote Associates Test.
GALINSKY: Where you give people three words, and then you ask them, basically, to find the one word that connects them. And one of the classic examples that people give is you're given these three words - manner, round and tennis. And you got to come up with the one word that connects all three of them. And in this case, the answer is table.
VEDANTAM: Why? You can have table manners. You can have roundtables and...
(SOUNDBITE OF TABLE TENNIS BALL BOUNCING)
VEDANTAM: ...You can have table tennis. What Adam and his colleagues found is that in every one of these tests, the group of volunteers randomly selected to reflect on their experience dating someone from another country outperformed those asked to reflect on their experience dating someone from their own country.
GALINSKY: They increased in their flexibility and novelty of their ideas. And basically, in our final data, what we did is we basically created a single composite creativity score, which really collapsed across all these, but the same effect actually emerges on each of the individual problems, which shows how robust and powerful the effect was.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
VEDANTAM: The findings were intriguing. The researchers decided to go a step further. They wanted to know if the results would hold up in the real world. They were wondering how to do that when one day, Adam went to a presentation given by his colleague Dan Wang.
GALINSKY: And he was presenting this great, amazing data set of everyone who had a J-1 visa to visit the U.S. And he was able to survey them.
VEDANTAM: J-1 visas allow people to work in the United States for a defined period of time, usually between three months and two years. At any given time, there are about 300,000 J-1 visa holders.
GALINSKY: So that means that we have tons of people who have come to the U.S. for a relatively short period of time but - you know, up to 24 months, almost two years - and then return back to their home country.
VEDANTAM: After the talk, Adam went up to Dan and asked him if, by any chance, he had any data on cross-cultural contact and the depth of those connections.
GALINSKY: He said, I think I do.
VEDANTAM: It turned out Dan had asked former J-1 visa holders this question.
GALINSKY: Please report the frequency of contact that you have with your American friends since you have returned to your home country.
VEDANTAM: The survey also asked the former visa holders what kind of work they'd been doing since returning home. Adam asked Dan to take a look at his data and see if there was a correlation between those who would maintained the closest contact with their American friends and...
GALINSKY: Whether they became an entrepreneur when they got home and founded their own company and whether they had created new practices in their company when they got home.
VEDANTAM: Indeed, there was.
GALINSKY: He said, oh, my God, the data are exactly as you would have predicted. And so that was really the icing on the cake of this paper. You know, we already had this great data from laboratory-based, paper-and-pencil creativity measures, but now we have the core of our hypothesis, that the depth of intercultural relationships, the frequency with which they had contact, predicts these real-world, consequential creativity measures - the probability that they became an entrepreneur and started their own business and how much they had changed and transformed and innovated in their own companies.
VEDANTAM: This time, Adam and his colleagues did not get scooped. They got published.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
VEDANTAM: Adam say he sees more and more links between creativity and cultural diversity.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SUPERMODEL (YOU BETTER WORK)")
RUPAUL: You better work.
VEDANTAM: In one of his favorite projects, he looked at fashion lines presented by major fashion houses over 21 seasons.
GALINSKY: Milan, Paris, London and New York.
VEDANTAM: He found that there appeared to be a connection between creativity and the time that fashion creators had spent immersed in a different culture.
GALINSKY: And what we found was something really interesting, which is that the amount of time that the creative director had worked abroad predicted their entire fashion line creativity but not the number of countries that they worked abroad. That didn't have near as much of an impact as the amount of time that they worked abroad.
(SOUNDBITE OF RUPAUL SONG, "SUPERMODEL (YOU BETTER WORK)")
VEDANTAM: All these examples have a common thread. The fashion designers look a lot like the students at business school who dated someone from another country. The students look a lot like the scientists who spend time collaborating with partners from different ethnicities. The musicians who work with someone from a different tradition have something in common with the entrepreneurs who make broad connections and spend time maintaining them. What all these cross-cultural relationships have is depth.
GALINSKY: There's something about deeply understanding and learning about another culture that's transformative. We can get that from living abroad. We can get that from dating someone from another culture. We could even get it from traveling but only if we really learned and understood and embraced and adapted to that other culture while we were traveling abroad. And so the - I think the big scientific conclusion that is very robust is that it's about - really, truly, deeply understanding another culture is the key to enhancing your own creativity.
VEDANTAM: Adam Galinsky and his wife Jen say they want their children to see the world in this expansive way. And Adam says the beauty of his research is that it suggests the benefits of broad collaboration are within easy reach, especially in the United States.
GALINSKY: You don't have to go abroad to get some of the creativity benefits of having that intercultural contact. You can get that same benefit here in the United States by embracing, engaging with people from other cultures. But, again, there's the catch. It can't just be superficial. You got to more deeply connect to people from other cultures to have that transformational impact and that experience.
VEDANTAM: You could argue there are limitations in some of the examples we've discussed today. It's possible that scientists who collaborate with diverse teams or musicians who team up with performers from other traditions - these people might just be risk takers. In other words, it's not the musical collaborations that make you more creative; it's just having an open outlook. It's very difficult to explore questions like this scientifically. We can't conduct experiments where we dictate who people date or who scientists should collaborate with. But I would argue that even in studies where you can't prove cause and effect, you can still see the effects that diversity has on creativity. And this is not just at the level of individuals. It's at the level of communities, even nations.
Consider this. The United States, a country that accounts for about 5% of the world's population, has won about 60% of all the Nobel Prizes ever awarded. From the motor car and the airplane to Facebook and Google, from the telephone and the Internet to Hollywood and Wall Street, scientists, entrepreneurs and entertainers from the United States have powerfully shaped the world in which we live. Could some of this outsized creativity have to do with the extraordinary diversity of America, the waves of immigrants who arrived here over the centuries? I'd like to think the answer is yes.
(SOUNDBITE OF CRISTINA PATO AND KOJIRO UMEZAKI'S "VOJO")
VEDANTAM: Today's episode was produced by Jenny Schmidt and Parth Shah and edited by Tara Boyle. Our team includes Rhaina Cohen, Thomas Lu, Laura Kwerel and Cat Schuknecht.
(SOUNDBITE OF CRISTINA PATO AND KOJIRO UMEZAKI'S "VOJO")
VEDANTAM: The song you're listening to right now is "Vojo." It's composed by Cristina Pato and Kojiro Umezaki. It blends the Japanese shakuhachi with a Galician bagpipe. Thanks to the team at WNYC's Soundcheck for sharing this recording with us.
(SOUNDBITE OF CRISTINA PATO AND KOJIRO UMEZAKI'S "VOJO")
VEDANTAM: This week, our unsung hero is Lynette Clemetson. Lynette is currently director of the Knight-Wallace Fellowships program for journalists. But before that, she was a beloved colleague here at NPR. She believes, with every bone in her body, in the link between diversity and creativity. Lynette was an early and ardent supporter of HIDDEN BRAIN. We literally would not exist without her. In fact, I can't believe we haven't previously called her out as an unsung hero. Of course, that is precisely what makes her an unsung hero.
If you liked today's show, please share it with one friend who comes from a different cultural background. Tell us about your conversation on Facebook and Twitter. I'm Shankar Vedantam, and this is NPR.
