Does Traveling Make You Smarter? What the Research Shows for IQ
Does traveling make you smarter? No study shows travel raises IQ. Living abroad is linked to more creativity and openness, partly because of who goes.
Dr. Russell T. WarneChief Scientist
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No study has shown that traveling raises IQ, and no trial has sent people abroad and then measured their intelligence. What research does show is that people who have lived abroad tend to score higher on creativity tasks and become more open to new experiences. Short trips matter much less, and the people who go abroad were already different before they left.
This page covers what the studies behind the "travel makes you smarter" idea actually measured, and why selection explains much of the pattern. The most cited findings concern creativity and personality, which are related to intelligence but are not the same thing.
Where the idea that travel makes you smarter comes from
The belief is old. Writers and artists have long spent a year in Paris or Rome to broaden their minds, and companies send managers on foreign postings partly in the hope that they will return with new ideas. Much of the modern research traces back to a 2008 article by Leung and colleagues, who argued that "multicultural experience" can enhance creativity.
Headlines that say travel makes you smarter usually rest on that line of research. The word "smarter" is doing a lot of work. Almost none of these studies gave an intelligence test. They mostly measured creativity and personality.
Living abroad and creativity
The best-known study is by Maddux and Galinsky. In five studies of business school and undergraduate students in the United States and Europe, the longer people had lived abroad, the better they did on creativity tasks. One was Duncker's candle problem, an insight puzzle in which you must fix a candle to a wall using a box of tacks and a book of matches.
Two details matter for travel. In their first two studies, time spent living abroad was related to creativity, while time spent traveling abroad was not. The link was also strongest for people who had adapted to the host culture, which suggests that the deeper experience of fitting into another society is what counts. Brief experimental "priming" (asking people to recall a time they lived abroad) raised creative performance only in people who had actually lived in another country.
Other studies point the same way.
• Professional experience abroad: Godart and colleagues studied the creative directors of major fashion houses. The longer directors had worked abroad, the more creative their houses' collections were judged to be, though working in too many different countries, or in very distant cultures, helped less.
• A holiday: De Bloom and colleagues gave 46 Dutch workers the "alternative uses" task (listing unusual uses for everyday objects) before and after a three-week summer vacation. The range of their ideas increased after the trip, but the ideas were no more original. That is a modest, short-term change on one creativity measure.
• Controlling for intelligence: Fürst and Grin tested whether the link survives when cognitive ability is held constant. In their sample, multicultural experience and multilingualism were both still associated with creativity after controlling for divergent thinking and intelligence. That supports a real association, and it also shows that the creativity measure is not a stand-in for IQ.
A 2021 systematic review by Maddux and colleagues concluded that deeper experiences abroad, such as long stays and close friendships with locals, are the ones most tied to creativity. It also noted that several studies found the benefits mainly in people who were already high in openness to experience. Our page on whether a high IQ makes a person more creative explains why the two abilities overlap only partly.
Does going abroad change your personality?
The best evidence on whether time abroad changes people comes from a study of students who spent a semester or a year abroad. Zimmermann and Neyer followed 527 German university students who went abroad and 607 who stayed at home, measuring their personalities three times over an academic year, starting before departure.
Two findings stand out. First, the students who chose to go were already different: higher extraversion and conscientiousness predicted a short stay, and higher extraversion and openness predicted a long one. Second, even after accounting for those starting differences, studying abroad was followed by increases in openness and agreeableness and a decrease in neuroticism. Making new international friends accounted for much of the change.
Openness is the personality trait most closely tied to intelligence. A meta-analysis by Anglim and colleagues of 272 samples found a correlation of about 0.20 between openness and intelligence, stronger for crystallized intelligence (knowledge and vocabulary) than for fluid reasoning. A correlation that size is modest, and a change in a personality questionnaire is a long way from a change in IQ. For more on this trait, see our page on curiosity and IQ.
Why selection explains much of the travel and IQ link
People who travel widely do differ from people who do not, but most of that difference comes before the first trip.
• Money and education: Long trips and years abroad cost money, and they are easier for people with more education. Netz and Finger found that studying abroad in Germany was socially selective throughout 1991 to 2012, with students from high-status families more likely to take longer and scholarship-funded stays. Education and family background are also related to IQ.
• Personality: As the student study showed, people high in openness and extraversion are more likely to go abroad in the first place.
• Language learning: Long stays abroad often involve learning another language. Our page on bilingualism and IQ reviews what the evidence shows about the claimed cognitive benefits of a second language.
• Measurement: Most of the studies relied on self-reported experience abroad and on short creativity tasks, which capture a narrower set of abilities than a full IQ test. Priming experiments show short-lived effects in the lab.
A convincing test of the claim would look different from the studies above. Researchers would need people who wanted to go abroad, a lottery deciding who actually went, and a full IQ test given to both groups before departure and again a year or more after return. Scholarship and exchange programs that allocate places by lottery could make such a study possible, but to my knowledge no one has published one. Until then, the honest summary is that travelers and expatriates differ from stay-at-homes in several ways, and only a small part of that difference has been shown to be caused by time abroad.
Traveling can be rewarding and can build friendships across cultures. Neither benefit depends on travel raising IQ, and no study has shown that it does.
Frequently asked questions
Does traveling make you smarter?
No study has shown that travel raises IQ. Living abroad is linked to better scores on creativity tasks and to increases in openness, but people who go abroad also start out different.
Does living abroad make you more creative?
Studies of business students and fashion designers found that more time living or working abroad went with more creativity, especially for people who adapted to the local culture. Short trips showed little or no link in those studies.
Is traveling a sign of intelligence?
Not directly. Frequent travel tracks income and education, and people high in openness are more likely to go abroad. Those traits are modestly related to IQ, so any gap between travelers and non-travelers would be hard to attribute to travel itself.
Does studying abroad change your personality?
A German study found increases in openness and agreeableness and a drop in neuroticism after a semester or year abroad, beyond the differences students already had before leaving.
Can a vacation boost your brain?
One study of 46 workers found that the range of ideas on a creativity task increased after a three-week vacation, while originality did not change. That is a short-term effect, not a gain in intelligence.
The takeaway
Traveling does not make you smarter in the sense of raising IQ, and no study has tested that directly. Deep experience abroad, such as living and working in another culture, is linked to more creative thinking and a more open personality. Much of the link reflects who chooses to go, and the outcomes measured are creativity and personality, not intelligence. To see where your reasoning ability stands, take the RIOT IQ test.
References
1. Leung, A. K.-y., Maddux, W. W., Galinsky, A. D., & Chiu, C.-y. (2008). Multicultural experience enhances creativity: The when and how. American Psychologist, 63(3), 169-181. [doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.63.3.169](. doi.org
2. Maddux, W. W., & Galinsky, A. D. (2009). Cultural borders and mental barriers: The relationship between living abroad and creativity. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 96(5), 1047-1061. [doi.org/10.1037/a0014861](. doi.org
3. Godart, F. C., Maddux, W. W., Shipilov, A. V., & Galinsky, A. D. (2015). Fashion with a foreign flair: Professional experiences abroad facilitate the creative innovations of organizations. Academy of Management Journal, 58(1), 195-220. [doi.org/10.5465/amj.2012.0575](. doi.org
4. de Bloom, J., Ritter, S., Kühnel, J., Reinders, J., & Geurts, S. (2014). Vacation from work: A 'ticket to creativity'? The effects of recreational travel on cognitive flexibility and originality. Tourism Management, 44, 164-171. [doi.org/10.1016/j.tourman.2014.03.013](. doi.org
5. Fürst, G., & Grin, F. (2023). Multilingualism, multicultural experience, cognition, and creativity. Frontiers in Psychology, 14, 1155158. [doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1155158](. doi.org
6. Maddux, W. W., Lu, J. G., Affinito, S. J., & Galinsky, A. D. (2021). Multicultural experiences: A systematic review and new theoretical framework. Academy of Management Annals, 15(2), 345-376. [doi.org/10.5465/annals.2019.0138](. doi.org
7. Zimmermann, J., & Neyer, F. J. (2013). Do we become a different person when hitting the road? Personality development of sojourners. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 105(3), 515-530. [doi.org/10.1037/a0033019](. doi.org
8. Anglim, J., Dunlop, P. D., Wee, S., Horwood, S., Wood, J. K., & Marty, A. (2022). Personality and intelligence: A meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 148(5-6), 301-336. [doi.org/10.1037/bul0000373](. doi.org
9. Netz, N., & Finger, C. (2016). New horizontal inequalities in German higher education? Social selectivity of studying abroad between 1991 and 2012. Sociology of Education, 89(2), 79-98. [doi.org/10.1177/0038040715627196](. doi.org
Hero image: Suitcase with luggage labels (178491614), by Bryan Ledgard, CC BY 2.0. Via Wikimedia Commons.
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