Does Exposure to Multicultural Experience Enhance All Individuals’ Creative Problem-Solving Ability?

Abstract

Today’s diverse community often includes culturally rich environments that contain cues pertaining to more than one culture. These cultural cues can shape cognitive processes, such as creativity. This study aims to investigate the interactive effects of Openness to Experience, Extroversion and Multicultural Experience (including the real and desired experiences) on creative problem-solving ability using the quantitative method on a diverse sample of international students (N= 102). The findings indicate that the interactive effect of extensive multicultural experience and Openness to Experience predict the creative solution. It means the multicultural experience is beneficial for individuals to foster creative ability when they are highly open to experience, whereas, among those who are not open, more extensive multicultural experience do not lead to enhancement of creating the correct solution. Furthermore, this interaction term was not pronounced among the extroverted individuals. Implications of these findings for promoting creativity in learning environments are discussed.