Expats are More Intelligent

Moving abroad and becoming an expat ‘stimulates creative ideas and also makes life more interesting as we see new images, new people and have new experiences’ writes Helen Zhang in China Daily. Ms Zhang added ‘research has found that living an expatriate life stretches our brain.’ Her article concludes that living overseas can make a person more intelligent.

We have all met the expat who is a bore, who you wish would just go home, who is insensitive to the local population, or the expat who just simply misses the point. A well-known literary example is Graham Greene’s The Quiet American.

The Quiet American of the title is Alden Pyle. Pyle is the idealistic but naive American, who represents the 1950’s American sense of invincibility: while wearing the badge of democracy Americans believed they were the moral authority. In The Quiet American Pyle believes that democracy should be attained at any price–and he is unwilling to change his mind even when confronted by contradictory facts in the field. His inability to see anything beyond the theoretical is what destroys him. And yet, his character changes through the novel and the reader can see his mind just starting to open before the end.

‘More intelligent’ might not mean ‘more intelligent than everyone at home’ rather, it could be a value-added intelligence, expats like Alden Pyle are ‘more intelligent than if they had stayed at home.’

Intelligence

But what is intelligence? Many psychologists believe that there is no such thing as ‘intelligence’. After all, how can you prove that it exists? You can’t measure it: IQ tests do not measure intelligence, they measure aptitude. People who know how to take tests score better than those who don’t a significant number of times. And people who have learned how to perform the skills in the IQ tests will score better than those who have never performed those problems, a significant number of times.

Skills

Therefore, is the expat more intelligent because they have learned more skills by being an expat? Skills of adaptability, of necessity, of thinking on their feet are all skills that ‘stretch the brain’ as Ms Zhang says. Most people accept that skills learned in life experience are more easily transferred to other areas of life than knowledge gained in a classroom. A person who easily transfers skills and copes well with new situations is often assumed to be ‘more intelligent’ than those who do not have these traits.

Knowledge

Learning a new language or learning the subtleties of a new culture are not increasing intelligence but are increasing knowledge—but perhaps they are also increasing another thing, the brain muscle. The more we work our brain, the more we can work our brain. The one thing consistent among centenarians is a natural curiosity; if our brains are used and worked regularly then we seem to cope better with whatever comes our way—we adapt better.

In conclusion, expats may not be more intelligent, but they may be more adaptable and they may end up living longer. Both adaptability and longevity are excellent reasons to become an expat!