Jonah Lehrer recounts the upsides of travel beyond pleasure:

THE GOOD NEWS…is that pleasure is not the only consolation of travel. In fact, several new science papers suggest that getting away – and it doesn’t even matter where you’re going – is an essential habit of effective thinking. It’s not about a holiday, or relaxation, or sipping daiquiris on an unspoilt tropical beach: it’s about the tedious act itself, putting some miles between home and wherever you happen to spend the night.

The article goes on to discuss studies on temporal and spatial construal and the effects of living abroad on creativity. The article makes it sound like anyone who travels will be more creative without wondering whether there is something different about people who like to travel which is…exactly what the studies controlled for.

The study by Jia where participants were told that either a task was devised by students in Greece or by students in Indiana provided a randomization that allows us to ignore individual differences of the participants. The other study on the Duncker problem and living abroad conditioned on Openness to experience, the personality dimension linked to creativity and divergent thinking.

So, it isn’t just that people who think different are prone to wander. Travel really does change the way you think.

I am all for individual differences but they can be overcome by the main effects of treatment. But because individual differences occur everywhere in psychology, properly conveying research results needs to attend to how traits like personality and intelligence were handled.

• Lile Jia, Edward R. Hirt, Samuel C. Karpen, Lessons from a Faraway land: The effect of spatial distance on creative cognition, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Volume 45, Issue 5, September 2009, Pages 1127-1131, DOI: 10.1016/j.jesp.2009.05.015
• Maddux and Galinksy. Cultural Borders and Mental Barriers: The Relationship Between Living Abroad and Creativity. J Pers Soc Psychol. 2009, Vol. 96, No. 5, 1047–1061 (pdf)

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