Break the rules: how foreign experiences increase nonconformist attitudes and behaviours

Research finds that going far from home has many positive psychological outcomes such as enhanced creative thinking, and research on creativity reveals that nonconformity can be a useful tool to stimulate innovation. Merging these findings, we theorise that foreign experiences increase nonconformist attitudes and behaviours. In Studies 1 and 2, surveys of Chinese university students and non-student adults consistently showed that multicultural experiences were negatively related to conformity tendencies. Study 3 found that American students who were studying in China demonstrated a lower conformity tendency than American students without multicultural experiences, which suggests that the multicultural experience – conformity link cannot be accounted for by the effects of culture. Results from Study 4 indicated that compared with participants who had planned to go abroad but had not left their home country yet, participants who had lived abroad reported lower levels of conformity. Lastly, experimentally manipulating a focus on foreign experiences (vs. home experiences) facilitates non-conforming ways of thinking in terms of product preference (Study 5). Together, these findings provide evidence that exposure to diverse cultures not only produces divergent psychological consequences as have been found by other researchers, but also leads to the emergence of nonconformity attitudes and behaviours.