Keith Sawyer writes:

Why do so many great ideas seem to come from people far from home?

I’ve long been fascinated by how creativity crosses borders. Immigrants, research shows, are statistically more likely to generate exceptionally creative works. Indeed, there’s a long list of immigrant geniuses: W. H. Auden, Vladimir Nabokov, Nikola Tesla, Marie Curie, Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein. The list could go on and on. Of course, anecdotes only take us so far. What does the data say?

In 2016, Eric Weiner published some numbers in the Wall Street Journal:

An awful lot of brilliant minds blossomed in alien soil. That is especially true of the U.S., where foreign-born residents account for only 13 percent of the population but hold nearly a third of all patents and a quarter of all Nobel Prizes awarded to Americans.

Those are some pretty convincing numbers — suggesting that immigrants contribute disproportionately to creative and innovative output.

Creativity research offers an explanation: Psychologists have shown that bigger creative insights result from distant associations — connections between ideas drawn from widely different experiences or domains of knowledge. Associations between similar conceptual material also spark creative insights, but those tend to yield the ordinary, incremental kind that improve on what already exists. It’s the distant associations that lead to radical, breakthrough innovation. Weiner makes a similar argument based on recent research, citing studies showing that “schema violations” lead to greater “cognitive flexibility,” which in turn is linked to creativity.

I probably won’t have trouble convincing you that immigration to the U.S. is great for the immigrants. But do immigrants enhance the creativity of the American citizens who already live here? In October 2025, I interviewed creativity researcher and social psychologist Adam Galinsky, who teaches at Columbia Business School. For 20 years, Galinsky has been studying how cross-cultural connections contribute to creativity. In one study, he and Will Maddux, who studies organizational behavior, looked at whether traveling overseas makes you more creative. They asked people whether they’d traveled abroad or not, and then they gave them a creativity test. They found that travel abroad has no effect on creativity. But the people who had lived in another country scored higher on a creativity test. What’s more, the people who’d lived overseas longer scored higher. [Continue reading…]