[经济广角]生活在海外可以提升创造力

卢迪亚德·基普林，巴勃罗·毕加索，欧内斯特海明威，提到这些著名的艺术家和诗人，你第一个想到的是什么呢？是的，他们都是时代的巨人，还有呢？是的，他们都曾经在海外生活过。或许你还不清楚我说的意思，然而近来有专家通过实验指出在海外生活的人明显比其他人的创造力要强，并有较高的应变能力。

Living abroad gives you a creative edge

ANECDOTAL （轶事的，趣闻到）evidence has long held that creativity in artists and writers can be associated with living in foreign parts. Rudyard Kipling（卢迪亚德·基普林）, Pablo Picasso（巴勃罗·毕加索）, Ernest Hemingway（欧内斯特海明威）, Paul Gauguin（保罗·高更）, Samuel Beckett（塞缪尔·贝克特） and others spent years dwelling（居住） abroad. Now a pair of psychologists has proved that there is indeed a link.

As they report in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology（《个性与社会心理杂志》）, William Maddux of INSEAD, a business school in Fontainebleau, France（法国枫丹白露）, and Adam Galinsky, of the Kellogg School of Management in Chicago, presented 155 American business students and 55 foreign ones studying in America with a test used by psychologists as a measure of creativity. Given a candle, some matches and a box of drawing pins, the students were asked to attach the candle to a cardboard wall so that no wax would drip on the floor when the candle was lit. (The solution is to use the box as a candleholder（烛台） and fix it to the wall with the pins.) They found 60% of students who were either living abroad or had spent some time doing so, solved the problem, whereas only 42% of those who had not lived abroad did so.

A follow-up （继续的，重复的）study with 72 Americans and 36 foreigners explored their creative negotiating skills. Pairs of students were asked to play the role of a seller of a petrol station who then needed to get a job and a buyer who would need to hire staff to run the business. The two were likely to reach an impasse because the buyer had been told he could not afford what the seller was told was his minimum price. Nevertheless, where both negotiators had lived abroad 70% struck a deal in which the seller was offered a management job at the petrol station in return for a lower asking price. When neither of the negotiators（谈判代表） had lived abroad, none was able to reach a deal.

To check that they had not merely discovered that creative people are more likely to choose to live abroad, Dr Maddux and Dr Galinsky（马克达斯和加林斯基） identified and measured personality traits（特点）, such as openness to new experiences, that are known to predict creativity. They then used statistical controls to filter out such factors. Even after that had been done, the statistical relationship between living abroad and creativity remained, indicating that it is something from the experience of living in foreign parts that helps foster creativity.

Merely travelling abroad, however, was not enough. You do have to live there. Packing your beach towel and suntan lotion will not, by itself, make you Hemingway.

Keke Vew: 中国学生海外留学情况

英国广播公司报道，中国留学生选择某一国家出国的原因呈现多样性，其中，留学国的“教学、科研质量”以及“学位的认可程度”成为广大中国出国留学生选择某一国家的最重要的原因。

美国依然是中国学生的首选留学目的地。超过半数的留学生将美国作为出国留学的“第一选择”(占51.8%)，这一比例大大高于英国(占10.4%)、加拿大(占6.8%)、澳大利亚(占6.8%)和德国(占6.6%)。此外，在“第一选择”中排名前5的国家中，母语为英语的国家占了四席。出国留学目的地“第二选择”中，加拿大、英国受到了留学生的广泛青睐。

出国前，留学生最担心“语言”、“融入国外当地的文化”和“与外国学生的沟通”中可能遇到的困难。