What Drives Immigrant Genius? Marginality

New research challenges the long-held notion that immigrant geniuses— Einstein, Freud, Marie Curie, Victor Hugo, W.H. Auden, Vladimir Nabokov, Nikolas Tesla— succeeded due to outsized ambition. The key is “cognitive flexibility”— the ability to see things as others do not. A provocative Wall Street Journal article reports research showing that “it isn’t the immigrant’s ambition that explains her creativity but her marginality. Many immigrants possess what the psychologist Nigel Barber calls ‘oblique perspective.’ Uprooted from the familiar, they see the world at an angle, and this fresh perspective enables them to surpass the merely talented. To paraphrase the philosopher Schopenhauer: Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see.” Read more here.