I haven’t had as much on the Internet as I’d have liked this month, so apologies for having only two articles this time. The first one is an odd feature from New York Magazine that doesn’t really count as a real science article at all, but is relevant enough that I think merits inclusion. The article mentions in passing research by Kathleen Vohs of the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management on how just the act of thinking about money influences how people act and behave.

In one experiment, she found that it was possible to influence how much people were willing to collaborate on group efforts simply by switching screensavers. Eighty percent of the group who had been given screensavers of floating dollar bills to stare at chose to work alone. Eighty percent of those who were given screensavers of exotic fish chose to work together with others. The article goes on to make some not entirely scientific generalizations about how the current recession can be seen as being a plus for changing people’s priorities and making them better people, but the initial point alone is good food for thought.

The second article appeared in The Economist and explores the link between creativity and the experience of living abroad. It covers research by William Maddux of INSEAD and Adam Galinsky, of the Kellogg School of Management in Chicago who used a simple test to determine the level of creativity of their test subjects and linked that to whether or not these people had any experience in living abroad. They found that sixty percent of those who had overseas experience managed to solve the problem compared to only forty two percent of those without that experience.

A follow up experiment aimed at measuring the participants’ ability to come up with creative solutions to difficult negotiating positions also turned up similar results, suggesting that it is the experience of living abroad opens minds to new possibilities and expands their creativity. One easy criticism is that their stated problem may not be a good test of creativity, especially the sort of creativity that is associated with writers and artists like Rudyard Kipling, Pablo Picasso and Ernest Hemingway, but my personal instinct is that they’re probably right and that living abroad should tend to open up the minds of young people and enable them to think out of the box. It would particularly interesting to see student exchange programmes being organized on a widespread and systematic basis to take advantage of this but that would likely be too expensive.