The New Multiculturals
A recent piece from William Maddux and Adam Galinsky from INSEAD, the top-tier European business school, and Columbia University, respectively, has much to say about the value of living abroad:Best casino linkdomain online
"The key to whether foreign experiences are transformed into lasting creative benefits depends on the psychological approaches people take while living abroad. In particular, our work shows that those individuals who adapt their perspectives and behaviors to the new cultural context, or learn deeply about the new culture, are the ones who get the lasting creative benefits from living abroad."
Maddux and Galinsky note that not all foreign experiences are transformative. The key seems to be in whether the experience catalyzes a change in the way the individual thinks about the world:
"Adaptation, learning, and identification all help us decoding new cultures in novel ways. Over time, this process of understanding and integrating what is old with what is new and different can transcend specific cultural contexts, subsequently increasing our ability to consider and combine multiple perspectives, a skill that psychologists call ‘integrative complexity.’ It is this psychological capacity to be intergratively complex that is how adaptation, learning and biculturalism turn foreign experiences into lasting creative benefits."
We at Triangle are tracking the rise of cosmopolitanism as an essential aspect of life in the globalized start to the 21st Century. The challenge for our private, independent K-12 candidates in the United States is to find ways to inculcate the intercultural competence (dare we say intelligence?) needed for transformative experiences to happen abroad.