Cliché as it may sound, a lot of people can testify from personal experience that moving abroad helps you find yourself. Now a new study by Hajo Adam, an assistant professor of management at Rice University in Houston, Texas, explains why that is.
His meta-analysis looked at six studies that examined subjects’ “self-concept clarity”—a scale used to measure how well people know themselves. The scale includes a series of twelve statements, such as “my beliefs about myself often conflict with one another,” or “I spend a lot of time wondering about what kind of person I am.” [...]
Adam’s study found that what makes the expat experience so clarifying is not the number of countries people live in, but how long they live there. “It’s better to live 10 years in one country than two years in five countries,” he said. That’s because when you’re new to a country, you’re more absorbed with practical considerations. “In the first weeks, you think where you are going to live, how to get a doctor, but once you settle, you have more time to focus on yourself,” Adam told me. [...]
Another 2010 study conducted by Adam found that living abroad and interacting with many different cultures made people more creative. For my own part, in the Netherlands, I started seeing stories around me everywhere. For example, when I picked up a Dutch magazine at the supermarket and read an article about niksen—the Dutch trend of doing… nothing—I knew I had to write about that. I started developing an eye for stories that are quirky, such as American crayfish invading Delft, or people yelling at rice.
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