Those who’d already lived abroad reported greater self-concept clarity as well as greater self-discerning reflections to question such as, “I have come to understand which beliefs and assumptions about life define who I am and which ones are just the result of my cultural upbringing.” To rule out the possibility that people with a higher sense of self are simply more likely to live abroad, the researchers then polled another 261 people, half of whom planned to live abroad and half who’d already lived abroad. Respondents graded themselves from one to five on questions such as, “In general, I have a clear sense of whom I am and what I am.” Those who’d lived abroad reported greater self-concept clarity. But it could also be peak “self-realization” season for those who venture abroad and absorb themselves in a different culture, with benefits for personal confidence, career aspirations, and job salaries.įor the first of their six studies, the researchers polled 296 people – half of whom had lived abroad – on a 12-item Self-Concept Clarity Scale. Summer is peak travel season and normally a time when we’re less focused on school or work and more interested in seeing the world outside our windows. This new research suggests that the bestselling author of Jurassic Park was more right than he realized. In his memoir Travels, Michael Crichton wrote, “Often I feel I go to some distant region of the world to be reminded of who I really am.” From Jack Kerouac’s On The Road to Mark Twain’s Innocents Abroad, travel literature is infused with stories of finding oneself through going outside one’s comfort zone. The idea that you can find yourself through deep experiences abroad is as old as The Odyssey. “Such reflections can ultimately enhance self-concept clarity.” “Living abroad triggers self-discerning reflections in which people grapple with the cultural values and norms of their home and host cultures and decide which ones are truly part of their self-concept and which ones are not,” Galinsky wrote with co-authors Hajo Adam and Otilia Obodaru of Rice University, Jackson Lu of MIT, and William Maddux of the University of North Carolina. In a new paper, “The shortest path to oneself leads around the world: Living abroad increases self-concept clarity,” published earlier this year in the journal Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Galinsky provides evidence across six studies involving 1,874 participants that living abroad clarifies your perception about youself. “Living abroad triggers self-discerning reflections in which people grapple with the cultural values and norms of their home and host cultures.” “It also gave me a lot more confidence about myself.” “I felt less boxed in by habit and expectation and got to consider who I really was and who I wanted to be,” he says. It was also a time when Galinsky, who has published numerous studies over the past decade on the effects of cross-cultural immersion, was coming to better understand himself by escaping his old routine. It was an example of how Galinsky, who is now chair of the Management Division, was learning about the fluidity of cultural norms outside his North Carolina hometown. Pandit Professor of Business, “but much of it was too spicy for me! The six-year-old son of the family I stayed with would taunt me by eating chili peppers in front of me.” “I do remember doing my best to eat the food,” says the Vikram S. Meanwhile, he’d heard that his peers in China should leave food on their plates, as it would signal they were satiated. He’d been warned that to do otherwise would be disrespectful to his Indonesian host family, as it would suggest the food was bad. As a teenager living abroad in Indonesia, Adam Galinsky always tried to eat all the food on his dinner plate.
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