The Relationship Between Multicultural Experience And Creativity In The Context Of Chinese Culture

With the rapid development of economic globalization, more and more countries and cultures joined into this trend. This phenomenon built many channels for individuals to expose foreign culture which may be distinct from their own culture. Correspondingly, this process is bound to affect many facets of the individuals, collectives and countries. For the individuals, this effect may be embodied in many aspects of cognition, emotion and behavior. Creativity is an important aspect of cognition, this article will focus on the impact of multicultural trends brought to the individual creativity.This research used three creative tasks, borrowing three research paradigms, and conducting research on the subjects under the Chinese cultural context. The purpose is to investigate whether the multicultural exposure or multicultural learning can improve individuals’creativity in the Chinese cultural context, and whether the relationship between them will be affected by openness, values orientation. The whole research concluded three studies. Study1, using questionnaire method and test method, conducted on a sample of168Junior High School students, was aimed to examine the experience of studying or traveling abroad will enhance individuals’creativity on " Alien Drawing Test " and "the Unusual Uses Test ", whether openness and value orientation will affect the relationship between multicultural experiences and creativity. Study2used multicultural learning paradigm and regarded60ordinary Chinese college students as subjects, examined the differences of creativity on "Rewriting the Cinderella Story" task between the multicultural learning group and the single cultural learning group. Study3borrowed the Cultural Priming paradigm to explore whether priming the multicultural experiences can enhance the creative scores on "Alien Drawing Test". The results indicated that:(1) On the Alien Drawing Test, junior high school student who had experiences of studying or traveling abroad got significantly higher scores than their counterparts on Creativity, Appropriateness, Technical Quality, the Level of Imagination, Artistic Level, the Degree of Elaboration, and Comprehensive Impression. Otherwise, there was no difference on the Unusual Uses Test.(2) After controlling for the effect of openness, the multicultural experiences can positively predict the creative scores on the Alien Drawing Test, but cannot on the Unusual Uses Test.(3) Openness to multicultural experience moderated the relationship between studying or traveling abroad experience and creativity. When people were in state of moderate openness, theirs multicultural experience can significantly positively predict the creative scores on Likeability, Technical Quality, Artistic Level, the Degree of Elaboration, and Comprehensive Impression.(4) Values Orientation played a moderating role in the relationship between studying or traveling abroad experience and creativity. Among the group of holding individualism, theirs multicultural experience can significantly positively predict all creative indexes on Alien Drawing Test. However, multicultural experience can only significantly positively predict four creative indexes among the group of holding collectivism.(5) The single Chinese culture learning group got significantly higher scores than the juxtaposition of Chinese-USA culture learning group on creativity test. This result indicated that short multicultural learning does not promote creative achievement.(6) Cultural priming paradigm can be used to explore the relationship between multicultural experience and creativity. When multicultural experiences were primed, the foreign students in China can gain higher creative scores, that is, people can obtain creative benefit from living or studying abroad. Based on these conclusions, this paper supported the promoting role of multicultural experience on creativity to some extent, but in the future we need further research on Chinese cultural context.