magazine issue 7 2007 / Issue 4

Do Multicultural Experiences Make People More Creative? If So, How?

• written by Chi-yue Chiu & Angela Ka-yee Leung

MacDonalds' Rice-burger in Asia; Starbucks’ Coffee Mooncake in Singapore; Disneyland Yin-Yang Mickey Mouse Cookies in Hong Kong; Lay's Peking Duck Flavored Potato Clip … The list can go on. What is common in all these examples is that they are all novel product ideas created by integrating seemingly non-overlapping cultural or product ideas from Eastern and Western cultures.

Combining seemingly non-overlapping ideas from different cultures is an example of creative conceptual expansion, a term in cognitive psychology that refers to the process of extending the conceptual boundaries of an existing concept by synthesizing it with other seemingly irrelevant concepts (Ward, Smith, & Vaid , 1997). Creative conceptual expansion is an ordinary process that produces extraordinary, creative results (Wan & Chiu, 2002; Ward, 2001).

Multicultural experiences increase creativity, and do so in more than one way. To begin with, multicultural experiences liberate people from their mental sets. People learn from their experiences, but experiences also create mental sets that limit creativity. When people need to solve a problem creatively in a certain conceptual domain, their cultural experiences in that domain often constrain the way they will solve the problem. For instance, undergraduates instructed to deign novel coins tend to produce coins that are strikingly similar to the attributes of known coins (Rubin & Kontis, 1983). Individuals under the instruction of using theirwildest imagination to develop creatures on Mars tend to develop creatures that resemble Earth animals (Ward, Patterson, Sifonis, Dodds, & Saunders 2002).

People break sets when they expand the conceptual boundary of a well-learned concept. For instance, when people think offurniture, culturally familiar exemplars such as tables and chairs readily come to mind. However, this mental set is breakable. For example, people can think more creatively with the concept of furniture after they have solved problems like “What is a piece of furniture that is also a kind of fruit?” This kind of problems, known to cognitive scientists as novel conceptual combinationproblems, requires the problem-solver to find an exemplar that belongs to two seemingly non-overlapping concepts. People solve these problems by crafting new instances of the concepts (furniture and fruits). As a result, the concepts’ boundaries are expanded (Hampton, 1997).

Multicultural experiences can increase creativity by providing people with both the intellectual materials and opportunities for creative conceptual expansion. Take Starbucks Coffee Mooncake as an example, the person who came up with this product idea knows the Starbucks Coffee concept in American culture and the mooncake concept in Chinese culture. Although the two concepts do not seem to be a love match at first glance, an arranged marriage has resulted in a new, innovative range of handcrafted snow-skin mooncakes – Caramel Macchiato, Cranberry Hibiscus, and Orange Citron – for the Singaporean Chinese to celebrate the Mid-Autumn Festival.

What is most intriguing about the creative effects of multicultural experiences is that it can be carried forwarded to a subsequent, unrelated task. This happens because the experience of combining non-overlapping concepts also fosters a habitual tendency to perform extensive memory for unconventional solutions when solving a problem. As a result, people become more fluent in generating creative ideas in a subsequent task unrelated to the conceptual combination task. In one experiment (Wan & Chiu, Experiment 1), some participants, randomly selected, solved a set of novel conceptual combination problems (e.g., What is a vehicle that is also a kind of fish?). The remaining participants solved a set of ordinary conceptual combination problems (e.g.,What is a plant that is also a kind of fuel?). Next, the participants took the Figural Tests of the Torrance Tests of Creativity Thinking (Torrance, 1974), a widely used standard test of creativity. As expected, participants who solved the novel conceptual combination problems first had better performance on the creativity test than did those who solved the ordinary conceptual combination problems first. In another experiment (Wan & Chiu, 2002, Experiment 2) using the same experimental design but a different dependent measure, the investigators obtained the same results. In this experiment, after solving the novel or ordinary conceptual combination problems, participants used LEGO blocks to build model(s) of any objects they liked. Again, the participants who solved the novel conceptual combination problems first built more creative LEGO models than did those who solved the ordinary conceptual combination problems first.