Does Travel Make You Smarter?
The benefits of travel are seemingly endless.
Taking all your available vacation time each year can help land you a promotion, while sharing vacation photos with friends and followers can make you a happier person, and taking trip to the beach can reduce your levels of “psychological distress.”
Just in case you needed one more reason to book your next flight, a new study finds that traveling can make you smarter and lead to more job opportunities.
According to a study conducted by William W. Maddux, associate professor of organizational behavior at INSEAD, a graduate business school in Fontainebleau, France, individuals who take time to travel and engage with new communities will have a higher number of job offers thanks to their multicultural learnings.
As Forbes explained, the study proved a link between a person’s “multicultural engagement,” which is their ability to adapt to and learn from new cultures, and their “integrative complexity,” which is a person’s willingness to acknowledge competing perspectives on an issue.
“When individuals are exposed to the same multicultural environment,” the study states, “it is their psychological approach and engagement with different cultures that determines growth in integrative complexity and tangible increases in professional opportunities.”
And Maddux’s study isn’t the only one showing travel’s cognitive benefits. A 2009 study from the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that students who lived abroad were 20 percent more likely to solve a computer task than those who simply stayed in their home country, Buzzfeed reported. Moreover, a 2015 study showed that those who simply looked at a photo of nature for 40 seconds had drastically improved performance on their next task so you can only imagine the compound effect of actually traveling to a nature-filled destination.
In essence, the more you travel the more cultures you experience, the more lessons and viewpoints you will be able to take to every job offer that will inevitably come your way. So let this inspire you to fly off to somewhere new right now.
The benefits of travel are seemingly endless.
Taking all your available vacation time each year can help land you a promotion, while sharing vacation photos with friends and followers can make you a happier person, and taking trip to the beach can reduce your levels of “psychological distress.”
Just in case you needed one more reason to book your next flight, a new study finds that traveling can make you smarter and lead to more job opportunities.
According to a study conducted by William W. Maddux, associate professor of organizational behavior at INSEAD, a graduate business school in Fontainebleau, France, individuals who take time to travel and engage with new communities will have a higher number of job offers thanks to their multicultural learnings.
As Forbes explained, the study proved a link between a person’s “multicultural engagement,” which is their ability to adapt to and learn from new cultures, and their “integrative complexity,” which is a person’s willingness to acknowledge competing perspectives on an issue.
“When individuals are exposed to the same multicultural environment,” the study states, “it is their psychological approach and engagement with different cultures that determines growth in integrative complexity and tangible increases in professional opportunities.”
And Maddux’s study isn’t the only one showing travel’s cognitive benefits. A 2009 study from the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that students who lived abroad were 20 percent more likely to solve a computer task than those who simply stayed in their home country, Buzzfeed reported. Moreover, a 2015 study showed that those who simply looked at a photo of nature for 40 seconds had drastically improved performance on their next task so you can only imagine the compound effect of actually traveling to a nature-filled destination.
In essence, the more you travel the more cultures you experience, the more lessons and viewpoints you will be able to take to every job offer that will inevitably come your way. So let this inspire you to fly off to somewhere new right now.
