How Moving Countries Changed the Way I Think: A Cognitive Perspective

Living abroad doesn’t just change your address. It changes your mind.

There is growing psychological evidence for something that expats and TCKs have always known intuitively: living in a different culture changes the way you think. Not just the things you think about — the way the thinking itself works. The frames through which you interpret experience, the categories you use to organize the world, the default assumptions you make about how humans behave and what they value. Living abroad restructures cognition in ways that are measurable, lasting, and broadly positive. Here is what the research says — and what the experience confirms.

Creativity and Multicultural Experience

A landmark study by psychologists Adam Galinsky and William Maddux found that people who had lived abroad performed significantly better on creativity tests than those who had not — and that the key variable was not travel but genuine immersion: actually engaging with another culture rather than simply visiting it. The mechanism appears to be the expansion of conceptual categories that happens when you are forced to reconcile multiple different ways of doing the same thing. When you have lived in a country where personal space norms are different, where directness is valued differently, where time is structured differently — you develop a more flexible cognitive toolkit.

Perspective-Taking

Living in a different culture develops perspective-taking capacity — the ability to understand a situation from multiple simultaneous viewpoints — in ways that are difficult to achieve through any other means. When you have lived inside a worldview different from the one you were raised in, you gain access to it in a way that is qualitatively different from studying it academically. You know how it feels from the inside. This experiential knowledge makes you better at understanding people who are different from you — not because you agree with them but because you can genuinely imagine their perspective.

Identity Complexity and Cognitive Flexibility

Multicultural individuals consistently show higher levels of integrative complexity — the ability to hold multiple, competing perspectives simultaneously without needing to resolve them into a single conclusion. This cognitive style is associated with better decision-making under uncertainty, more creative problem-solving, and greater resilience in the face of change. It is also, for many TCKs and expats, the natural consequence of having lived a life in which contradictions were the baseline rather than the exception.

The DRFTID Mind

DRFTID is for the people who think this way. Who have been shaped by multiple worldviews and carry all of them simultaneously. Who find monocultural certainty slightly claustrophobic. Who see complexity not as a problem but as the most accurate description of reality available. You are not complicated. You are just seeing more than most people.

For the people who see more — follow @drftid for a community that gets you and visit drftid.com for pieces that celebrate your identity. 🖤

Everywhere. Nowhere. Yours.