Edge Effect

This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Redantham In 2011, Richard Freeman was working on a project He was studying the way groups of people work together Specifically, how scientists work together Richard, who's a Harvard economics professor, noticed something intriguing Scientists in the United States seem to stick to their own kind You'd see Chinese folk concentrated in one layer Indian folk concentrated in another layer Europeans of different groups associating more with their compatriots This was not surprising You'd see this kind of clustering in lots of workplaces But Richard thought, science ought to be different In general, people who are more alike are likely to think more alike And one of the things that gives a kick to science and scientific productivity Is that you get people with somewhat different views Different perspectives coming together This assertion has long been debated Some people say teams with lots of different perspectives come up with better ideas Others say, no When a group has lots of different views, this can produce conflict Gridlock So, which is it? Richard decided to put the question to the test Do scientists who collaborate with others from the same group Produce better science or worse science Than scientists who have a wide network of collaborators To find out, Richard looked at one of the most important signals of scientific success Research publications He surveyed vast numbers of articles and papers And he found that in a large number of these papers Co-authors shared a common ethnicity No surprise But then he went further There's a very powerful way to judge the quality of scientific papers The more groundbreaking a paper The more likely it is to be cited by researchers writing other papers Citations, in other words, are a marker of importance We asked, well, are the papers done by people who are more ethnically the same? Are those papers, do they get more attention? Do they have more citations?

Do they appear in journals that are of greater prestige? The answer was no If you write a paper largely with people of your own group It's likely the paper gets less citations than if you write it with a broader group of people Papers that got the most citations, the most prestige Were often written by a mix of people with different backgrounds It is much better to have people working and collaborating When they're across different laboratories Across different parts of the U.S., between countries Rather than people only working in the same group The finding held true, no matter which ethnic groups you looked at This is a result that goes across all the groups So it's not specific like Chinese guys write a paper together Their paper gets less citations, less intact The same thing is true if native-born Anglo-Americans do that In other words, you're actually at a disadvantage If you are surrounded by people of your own group in some ways Regardless of what that group is Yes, and I think the key thing is to get more ideas sort of linked together So they can spawn better ideas As opposed to us all working in the same way We're going to explore a single idea today That builds upon Richard's finding in science We look at this idea's applications in the arts, in fashion, and in business It's about a strange connection between the kind of ideas we dream up And the kind of people who surround us Diversity and creativity This week on Hidden Brain Homeowners know what trouble sounds like Uh-oh That's why you're covered by Ireland's soundest home insurance provider See for value insurance Okay, but thanks for calling us, Claire Should we have all been there? I'm an airframe man these days One street airframe, turn up I'm a passing pile, actually Get a quote from Super Value Home Insurance To get 15% off online And we'll even throw in 40 euro in vouchers Teasing to supply Vouchers include 220 euro or 40 euro spent Home contents only policies exceeded This home insurance is underwritten by Axis Insurance Bank Super Value Financial Services Dacted by Super Value Insurance Is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland In the far northwest of Spain Is a place of farms and forests and ocean Galicia It's a region of rugged coastlines Hardy stews And the Galician bagpipe I come from Orense Which is one of the four provinces of Galicia This is Christina Pato She's a bagpipe player When you grew up in Galicia You grew up hearing music everywhere Hearing music in a bar Hearing music in a square Celebrating the festivities of the day Or in weddings Or in even birthdays I mean, when you are in Galicia You pretty much can hear the bagpipes Almost everywhere Christina's been playing the bagpipes Since she was a child She grew up in a musical household Her father was an accordion player Her three older sisters All played the bagpipes And I just wanted to be Whatever my sisters were doing So they began with the bagpipes When I was four years old So I just did it The girls were talented By the time she was ten Christina and her sister Raquel Would travel to villages to play at festivals My mother would give us The Galician dresses And then we would start walking In those streets And the sound of the bagpipes At 8 a.m Is something that everybody can Not only hear but also recognize My sister and I Would be just waiting For them to come out Play a little muñeira Which is the Galician national dance And people would just start dancing around As she grew older Christina began to experiment With her bagpipes She started to play music That wasn't embedded In the folkloric tradition She started touring with bands At 18 She released her first solo album The more Christina stretched The better she got By the time her second album Was released two years later She dyed her hair bright green And acquired a nickname The Jimi Hendrix Of the bagpipes For some traditionalists Christina was stepping over a line In Galicia The bagpipes remain deeply embedded In tradition But improvisation came naturally to her She needed to make her own kind of music I was trying to just Tell Paul This is what I am And And I It's not like I don't care About what you think About what I do with my instrument But there is something About what I do with my instrument That keeps me going By the time she was a young adult Christina had to make a choice It seemed to her like the bagpipes Could only take her so far Christina had also been trained In classical piano In her mid-twenties She decided to leave Spain And go to the United States She would pursue A mainstream musical career With the piano And I moved here I didn't tell anybody around me When I went to Rutgers University To get my doctorate That I had another life Christina kept her two lives separate One side of her Was a diligent classical music student The other Was still a green-haired bagpipe player From Belize One day in her second semester A professor asked for help In translating a song So I get this call From the professor Of the vocal department And she says I have a song in here Which is in a language That I believe is closer to Spanish So I was wondering If you could be the pianist For this singer And also the coach The vocal coach for diction And when I see this car It was Luades colorida Which is literally Colorless moon In Galician And this was a poem By the most amazing Galician poet of all times Rosalia de Castro A female writer Of the end of the 19th century And this composer Who, to be honest I didn't know anything about him This composer actually Has chosen that poem To create music around it That composer, it turns out Was celebrated An Argentinian named Oswaldo Goldihoff She met him at rehearsal We started talking about Galicia And he got excited Then I told him Well, I actually play The other most important thing About Galicia Which is The Galician bagpipe And then his eyes Opened even wider Fast forward six months Christina got a call It was Oswaldo He says Why don't you and your husband Come to Lenox Massachusetts I'm here with some friends Bring your bagpipe And yeah Just come and have fun with us So they did We arrived in In Tanglewoods actually That's where they were meeting We see Oswaldo We started talking And he says Well tonight we are having Like a gathering In the place where We are staying in Lenox And I was hoping for you Just to show them Your instrument Talk a little bit about Your tradition Your music What you do And I'm sure they will love it So there I was Like playing my instrument With a bunch of strangers That I The only person I could Recognize physically It was Yo-Yo Yo-Yo? Yo-Yo-Yo-Ma The cellist The most renowned And famous cellist In the world What Christina didn't realize Was that she stumbled Into a room filled With master musicians From around the world They were part of a group Created by Yo-Yo-Ma It's a collective Known as the Silk Road Ensemble And it brings together Musicians from different cultures And different traditions I kind of was lucky That that night I didn't even know Who I was playing for Because if I did Probably would not have felt So free in the idea Of where are these people What am I doing In front of all of them I began playing They started asking questions I got excited Then I asked them to join And play And then we ended up That evening All dancing a Galicia Muñera That I coached them How to dance And that moment Really changed my life In every possible direction And in that moment I didn't even realize How much that moment Is the point Christina joined the Silk Road Ensemble She embraced the vision For the collective A vision that began With a simple question What could happen When strangers meet What could happen When strangers meet This is the question Yo-Yo-Ma had asked What could musicians From many different cultures Create when they come together It turns out Something extraordinarily beautiful Yo-Yo-Ma describes The work of the collective As something he calls The edge effect Christina says it's an idea That stuck with her The edge effect Is the point in which Two ecosystems meet Like the forest and the savannah And apparently inequality And this edge effect Is where the most New life forms are created And somehow Silk Road Is some sort of his recreation Of this edge effect For Christina Working in that zone Where new life forms emerge That changed the way She saw music She began to question Why Christina the backpike player And Christina the classical pianist Had to live in different worlds It's true The music was different The traditions were different Even the audiences seemed different But so what?

All of a sudden Working with Silk Road I found the connections Between the two worlds I've been living all my life That were not even connected In my hometown And you have to understand also That in Orense Where I come from The backpike school And the conservatory For classical music Were two buildings Next to each other This backpike school Had in a city of 100,000 people Had more than 10,000 Somehow involved With the backpike school And I could count With the fingers of my hands The people that would Actually go to both Got trained in classical music But also got trained as a backpiper Christina says that what drew her Was the possibility For connections and conversations Between different musical forms In Silk Road You also have to keep going And meeting new strangers Meeting new communities Meeting communities of people That you have never imagined Of working with And maybe putting together Instruments that you would never think They would work together Like a Galician backpike And a Japanese sakuhachi Somehow to me Silk Road is the metaphor Of the 21st century society Or at least To the wish I have For the 21st century society The Silk Road musicians Have discovered in music What Richard Freeman discovered In science The interesting stuff happens When people from different groups Come together Work together Collide When we come back We'll take a look at the science That explains why diversity And creativity Often go hand in hand Stay with us At D.I.D. Electrical We know getting a new appliance Is genuinely exciting A fridge with more space Thrilling A washing machine That's actually quiet Even better This weekend only At D.I.D. Electrical Buy selected Samsung large appliances And get 10% back On a D.I.D. Rewards card Plus enjoy 5 euro delivery And half price installation On all large appliances Right now D.I.D.

Electrical For everything you Most travel insurers See your lost bag As a lost bag But B.I.MultiTrip Sees the head melt The lost party dress With coverage of all your trips All year from 63 euro There'll be less melted heads And more melted ice cream B.I.MultiTrip That's at B.I.S. Travel Insurance Terms of conditions applied Prices for adults 18 to 64 B.I. Health Care Trading is B.I. Health Care Is regulated by the Central Bank of Barland And inside Conson Insurance Europe membership For B.I.MultiTrip Travel Insurance Hi Adam, I'm Shankar Nice to meet you Not long ago when I was in New York I stopped by the apartment Of social psychologist Adam Galinsky When my producer Jenny Schmidt And I got there Adam and his family Were waiting for us at the front door Adam lives with his wife Jen a lion His two young sons Asher and Aiden And his mother-in-law Vicky a lion As we walked into the apartment Adam made a quick request We slipped off our boots And Adam and Jen pointed To a selection of house shoes They kept on her bench Adam admits that having A shoe-free house Wasn't something he'd done growing up I've never taken my shoes off In my own house before You know dating Jen And Jen even doesn't want us To put our clothes on Outside clothes on Sitting on the bed So I really integrate this Like I go to hotels now And I take off my pants Before sitting on the bed Jen has strong ideas About keeping the inside of a home Separate from the outside world Over time Adam has made those ideas His own I think that You know that's really Made me think about Space in a totally different way And sort of how People construct their worlds And their interior environments And you know I have much better Interior design now in my house Than I ever had when I was single Adam grew up in a secular Jewish family in North Carolina Jen grew up in Connecticut With parents who demigrated From the Philippines They held on to their Filipino culture Part of that culture Included deep respect for the home A respect they passed on to Jen Jen in turn Passed on that cultural belief To Adam I still actually own my apartment In Chicago And I went back to it recently And I'm like I think that The bedroom now is like, it does feel a little bit more like a sanctuary.

Like, it's almost like you're stepping across into this different portal, if you will. Jen has also adopted some of Adam's values. Adam has taught me through his Jewish tradition about embracing, opening up of feelings, labeling, identifying feelings. I tend to mute those things or don't like real conflicts.

So I'll see you. Now, you might be asking, what's the big deal? Anytime a couple gets together, they blend their lives, embrace some things, let go of others. But here's the difference.

When people from different countries or cultures come together, it seems to affect their creativity. Adam has studied this topic. We caught up for a longer chat when Jen and the kids weren't around. I wanted to know how he'd gotten interested in the link between diversity and creativity.

Adam says it started long ago when he was in high school. Before leaving for a semester abroad, he'd attended a mandatory orientation. And I still remember to this day, they said, look, some of you are going to go to China, and in China, it is a sign of respect if you leave food on your plate because it says that you've got enough to eat. But in Indonesia, where I was going, it's a sign of disrespect to leave food on your plate because it basically says the food wasn't very good.

And so that was an eye-opening, transformational experience for me to recognize the same object. Food on a plate could have very different meanings and have very different implications depending on the culture. The same thing means different things depending on your background and perspective. It made Adam wonder how different cultures can help us see the world differently and spark creativity and innovation.

Years later, he decided to explore these ideas in a research project. The whole project is a great story because it's a good example of both scientific discovery and scientific collaboration. Adam and some colleagues tracked a group of students at a business school. The researchers hypothesized that the students who showed the most creativity at the end of their school years would also be those who had the most interactions with people from different countries.

They collected a vast amount of data, crunched the results. They were about to publish when another group of researchers had actually even a better design than we did and scooped our idea and published the paper. That should have been the end of it. Their goal had been to publish, and they'd gotten beat.

So even though they had a lot of data, they put it all away and moved on. A couple years later, I had a first-year doctoral student, Jackson Liu, and I said, hey, we have this whole data. We can't publish it in a great journal because someone already scooped us on it, but we could publish it as a replication, so we're good. Why don't you go through the data?

What happened next might be an example of the phenomenon Richard Freeman noticed that it helps a research project to have scientists from different ethnicities. Jackson Liu saw something exciting in Adam's data that Adam himself had overlooked. And I said, what's that? And he said, I found this finding that people who had dated someone from another culture became more creative during their business school career, but those who just had friends from another culture didn't seem to become more creative.

So there's something unique and wonderful about intercultural romantic relationships. Jackson's enthusiasm made Adam and his colleagues sit up. They realized they had stumbled on something important. So we started thinking again about this idea of deep or the depth and the closeness of those intercultural connections might make a difference.

They designed an experiment to test whether the finding was real. This time, they reached out only to students who had both dated someone from a different country and dated someone from their own country. The students were then randomly split into two groups. In one condition, we'll ask them to recall their experience they had with their dating someone from their own culture and just describe their experience.

Now, in the other condition, we said, recall a time when you dated about one year relationship with someone from another culture. What was that experience like? Afterwards, the researchers asked the students to reflect on how much they'd learned about their own and the other culture. And then they were given a test for creativity.

If there was no connection between intercultural romance and creativity, asking the students to reflect on different kinds of encounters should have made no difference. But that's not what the researchers found. We found that there was a boost in temporary creativity just by reflecting on the intercultural relationship. And that was really driven by the fact that people felt that they had learned more about another culture.

And that sort of cultural learning then led to that reflection and that cultural learning led to increased creativity. Psychology researcher at Tufts University has found something similar. When you introduce racial diversity into a group, all the people in the group begin to broaden the scope of their thinking and to explore more options. Now, creativity can be difficult to measure, but scientists have devised ways of doing it.

Typically, they analyze what they call divergent thinking and convergent thinking. And convergent creativity tasks are ones in which there's a single right answer. And one of the most famous examples of a single right answer that we didn't actually use in this particular project but have used in many of our other studies is the dunker candle problem. And the dunker candle problem, you ask people to, you give them a candle, a box of tacks, and a book of matches.

You tell them, affix the candle to a wall in such a way that the candle when lit doesn't drip wax onto the wall, table, or floor. Adam says that when he tried this with a group of smart undergrads at Princeton, only a small percentage of the students solved the problem within 15 minutes. The reason is that the test requires you to think about familiar objects in a new way. A box of tacks can be a repository for tacks but can also be a stand.

And the solution is you dump out all the tacks out of the box, you tack the box to the wall, and then you put the candle inside. Diversion tasks don't ask for a single right answer. They require you to produce lots of different ideas. In our study, we asked people at time one when we first measured their creativity to generate as many creative uses as they can for a brick.

And then at time two, when they graduated from business school, we asked them to think about as many creative uses as they could for a box. And then you can code these uses for the number of uses they come up with, but you can also code them for the number of different categories they come up with. So for a brick, someone might say, oh, it could be used as a piece of furniture, so that's one category. Or it could be used as a weapon, you could throw it at someone, that's another category.

Or it could be used as part of a house, that's another category. Again, generating lots of good ideas is a sign of a creative brain. In the study of business school students, Adam and his colleagues gave the volunteers one final task. It's called the remote associates test.

Where you give people three words, and then you ask them basically to find the one word that connects them. And one of the classic examples that people give is you're given these three words, manner, round, and tense. And you've got to come up with the one word that connects all three of them. And in this case, the answer is table.

Why? You can have table manners, you can have round tables, and you can have table tennis. What Adam and his colleagues found is that in every one of these tests, the group of volunteers randomly selected to reflect on their experience dating someone from another country outperformed those asked to reflect on their experience dating someone from their own country. They increased in their flexibility and novelty of their ideas.

And basically, in our final data, what we did is we basically created a single composite creativity score which really collapsed across all these. But the same effect actually emerges on each of the individual problems, which shows how robust and powerful the effect was. The findings were intriguing. The researchers decided to go a step further.

They wanted to know if the results would hold up in the real world. They were wondering how to do that when one day, Adam went to a presentation given by his colleague, Dan Wong. And he was presenting this great, amazing data set of everyone who had a J-1 visa to visit the U.S. and he was able to survey them.

J-1 visas allow people to work in the United States for a defined period of time, usually between three months and two years. At any given time, there are about 300,000 J-1 visa holders. So that means that we have tons of people who have come to the U.S. for a relatively short period of time, but up to 24 months, almost two years, and then return back to their home country.

After the talk, Adam went up to Dan and asked him if by any chance he had any data you have with your American friends since you have returned to your home country. The survey also asked the former visa holders what kind of work they've been doing since returning home. Adam asked Dan to take a look at this data and see if there was a correlation between those who had maintained the closest contact with their American friends and whether they became an entrepreneur when they got home and founded their own company and whether they had created new practices in their company when they got home. Indeed there was.

He said, oh my God, the data are exactly as you predicted and so that was really the icing on the cake of this paper. You know, we already had this great data from laboratory-based paper and pencil creativity measures, but now we have the core of our hypothesis that the depth of intercultural relationships, which the frequency which they had contact predicts these real-world consequential creativity measures, the probability that they became an entrepreneur and started their own business and how much they changed and transformed and innovated in their own companies. This time, Adam and his colleagues did not get scooped. They got published.

Adam says he sees more and more links between creativity and cultural diversity. You better work. In one of his favorite projects, he looked at fashion lines presented by major fashion houses over 21 seasons. Milan, Paris, London, and New York.

He found that there appeared to be a connection between creativity and the time that fashion creators had spent immersed in a different culture. And what we found was something really interesting which is that the amount of time that the creative director had worked abroad predicted their entire fashion line and creativity but not the number of countries that they worked abroad. That didn't have near as much of an impact as the amount of time that they worked abroad. All these examples have a common thread.

The fashion designers look a lot like the students at business school who dated someone from another country. The students look a lot like the scientists who spend time collaborating with partners from different ethnicities. The musicians who work with someone from a different tradition have something in common with the entrepreneurs who make broad connections and spend time maintaining them. What all these cross-cultural relationships have is depth.

There's something about deeply understanding and learning about another culture that's transformative. We can get that from living abroad. We can get that from dating if we really learned and understood and embraced and adapted to that other culture while we were traveling abroad. And so I think the big scientific conclusion that is very robust is that it's about really truly deeply understanding another culture is the key to enhancing your own creativity.

Adam Belinsky and his wife Jen say they want their children to see the world in this expansive way. And Adam says the beauty of his research is that it suggests the benefits of broad collaboration are within easy reach especially in the United States. You don't have to go abroad to get some of the creativity benefits of having that intercultural contact. You can get that same benefit here in the United States by embracing, engaging with people from other cultures.

But again, there's the catch. You can't just be superficial. You've got to more deeply connect to people from other cultures to have that transformational impact in that experience. You could argue there are limitations in some of the examples we've discussed today.

It's possible that scientists who collaborate with diverse teams or musicians who team up with performers from other traditions, these people might just be risk takers. In other words, it's not the musical collaborations that make you more creative, it's just having an open outlook. It's very difficult to explore questions like this scientifically. We can't conduct experiments where we dictate who people date or who scientists should collaborate with.

But I would argue that even in studies where you can't prove cause and effect, you can still see the effects that diversity has on creativity. And this is not just at the level of individuals, it's at the level of communities, even nations. Consider this. The United States, a country that accounts for about 5% of the world's population, has won about 60% of all the Nobel Prizes ever awarded.

From the motor car and the airplane to Facebook and Google, from the telephone and the internet to Hollywood and Wall Street, scientists, entrepreneurs, and entertainers from the United States have powerfully shaped the world in which we live. Could some of this outsized creativity have to do with the extraordinary diversity of America, the waves of immigrants who have arrived here over the centuries? I'd like to think the answer is yes. Today's episode was produced by Janie Schmidt and Parth Shah and edited by Tara Boyle.

Our team includes Raina Cohen, Thomas Liu, Laura Querell, and Kat Shuknick. The song you're listening to right now is Voyo. It's composed by Christina Pado and Kujira Umazaki. It blends the Japanese Sakohachi with the Galician Blacklight.

Thanks to the team at WNYC Soundcheck for sharing this recording with us. This week, our unsung hero is Lynette Clementson. Lynette is currently director of the Knight Wallace Fellowships program for journalists, but before that, she was a beloved colleague here at NPR. She believes, with every bone in her body, in the link between diversity and creativity.

Lynette was an early and ardent supporter of Hidden Brain. We literally would not exist without her. In fact, I can't believe we haven't previously called her out as an unsung hero. Of course, that is precisely what makes her an unsung hero.

If you like today's show, please share it with one friend who comes from a different cultural background. Tell us about your conversation on Facebook and Twitter. I'm Shankar Pithanthan and this is NPR. At D.I.D.

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