[經濟廣角]生活在海外可以提升創造力

盧迪亞德·基普林，巴勃羅·畢加索，歐內斯特海明威，提到這些著名的藝術家和詩人，你第一個想到的是什麼呢？是的，他們都是時代的巨人，還有呢？是的，他們都曾經在海外生活過。或許你還不清楚我說的意思，然而近來有專家通過實驗指出在海外生活的人明顯比其他人的創造力要強，並有較高的應變能力。

Living abroad gives you a creative edge

ANECDOTAL （軼事的，趣聞到）evidence has long held that creativity in artists and writers can be associated with living in foreign parts. Rudyard Kipling（盧迪亞德·基普林）, Pablo Picasso（巴勃羅·畢加索）, Ernest Hemingway（歐內斯特海明威）, Paul Gauguin（保羅·高更）, Samuel Beckett（塞繆爾·貝克特） 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（《個性與社會心理雜誌》）, William Maddux of INSEAD, a business school in Fontainebleau, France（法國楓丹白露）, 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（燭臺） 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 （繼續的，重複的）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（談判代表） 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（馬克達斯和加林斯基） identified and measured personality traits（特點）, 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: 中國學生海外留學情況

英國廣播公司報道，中國留學生選擇某一國家出國的原因呈現多樣性，其中，留學國的“教學、科研質量”以及“學位的認可程度”成爲廣大中國出國留學生選擇某一國家的最重要的原因。

美國依然是中國學生的首選留學目的地。超過半數的留學生將美國作爲出國留學的“第一選擇”(佔51.8%)，這一比例大大高於英國(佔10.4%)、加拿大(佔6.8%)、澳大利亞(佔6.8%)和德國(佔6.6%)。此外，在“第一選擇”中排名前5的國家中，母語爲英語的國家佔了四席。出國留學目的地“第二選擇”中，加拿大、英國受到了留學生的廣泛青睞。

出國前，留學生最擔心“語言”、“融入國外當地的文化”和“與外國學生的溝通”中可能遇到的困難。