The Atlantic - 04.2020

20 APRIL 2020

HUMAN NATURE

y childhood

was, by most

definitions,

pretty strange.

I grew up a

Russian Jewish

immi grant in Midland, Texas,

in a region whose biggest claims

to fame are being the onetime

home of George W. Bush and

the inspiration for Friday Night

Lights. In preschool, I got in

trouble for not praying before

eating my snack; later, I didn’t

know what this “Super Bowl”

everyone kept talking about

was. I felt hopelessly different

from everyone else in our town.

Even after we moved to a

Dallas suburb, I never encoun-

tered another Russian immi-

grant kid like me. I rode the

bus alone. I spent almost every

evening alone. I began talking

to myself—a habit that has

unfortunately stuck. Once,

someone toilet-papered our

house, and I had to explain to

my parents that this is what

American kids do to losers.

Undeterred, my dad eagerly

raked the toilet paper into a

garbage bag and put it in my

parents’ bathroom for future

use. “Free toilet paper!” he said

happily over dinner.

All I wanted to be was nor-

mal. I wanted to be as Ameri-

can as my classmates; I wanted

a past that, when I explained

it to people, compelled no

one to ask “Why?” about any

part of it. But with time, I’ve

come to realize that there’s

an upside to being different

from everyone around you. In

fact, a body of social-science

research suggests that being an

oddball or a social reject can

spark remarkable creativity.

Sharon Kim, who teaches

at Johns Hopkins Univer-

sity’s business school, told

me she’d always noticed that

some people credit their cre-

ative successes to being lon-

ers or rebels. Kim wondered

whether social pariahs are

actually more creative, so she

decided to test the theory by

inviting some volunteers to

her lab to complete a cou-

ple of exercises. Before they

began, Kim and her colleagues

“rejected” some of the study

subjects by telling them they

weren’t picked to work as part

of “the group.” There was no

group—Kim and her team

just wanted to make them

feel left out. Others weren’t

snubbed in the same way.

Kim asked the participants to

perform a pair of exercises on

paper. In one, they were asked

to determine what united a

series of seemingly unrelated

words (fish, mine, and rush, for

instance—the answer is gold).

In the other, they were told to

draw an alien from a planet

very unlike our own.

The rejects, it turned out,

were better at both exercises.

For the alien task, the non-

rejected participants drew stan-

dard, cartoonish Martians. But

the rejected participants drew

aliens that looked radically dif-

ferent from humans— they had

all of their appendages sticking

out of one side of their body, or

their eyes below their nose. The

outcasts’ drawings were more

creative, as rated by three inde-

pendent judges.

So rejection and creativity

were related, Kim determined.

But with a caveat. The advan-

tage was seen only among par-

ticipants who had an “indepen-

dent self-concept”—meaning

they already felt they didn’t

belong. There appeared to be

something about being a weirdo

that could uncork your mind

and allow new ideas to flow.

For many people, that

effect starts in childhood.

When Arnold M. Ludwig, an

adjunct psychiatry professor at

Brown University, examined

the lives of more than 1,000

eminent people—including

Frida Kahlo, Jean-Paul Sartre,

and John Lennon—for his

book The Price of Greatness, he

found that creative types, such

as artists and writers, were

more likely than, say, business-

people to be considered “odd

or peculiar” as children, and

more likely than public offi-

cials or soldiers to be consid-

ered “different” as adults. In his

1962 study of architects, the

psychologist Donald W. Mac-

Kinnon similarly found that

the families of more creative

architects had moved around a

lot when they were kids, which

appeared “to have resulted fre-

quently in some estrangement

of the family from its imme-

diate neighborhood,” he said.

Not surprisingly, many of the

more creative architects said

they’d felt isolated as children.

An unusual childhood

is not the only thing that

can make you more creative.

THE PERKS OF

BEING A WEIRDO

How not fitting in can lead to creative thinking

BY OLGA KHAZAN

M