<p>In fact, people who don't fit neatly into a particular group have been found, over and over, to perform better at outside-the-box thinking. Foreigners are often considered strange, but there are psychological advantages to feeling like a stranger. Children who are exposed to multiple languages-perhaps because, like me, they were raised in a country far from where they were born-are better able to understand an adult's perspective, and they may go on to become better communicators overall. In one experiment, <a href="https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/psp9651047.pdf">people who had lived abroad were especially good </a>at finding hidden solutions to word and conceptual problems. That might help explain why Pablo Picasso began experimenting with Cubism in Paris, and George Frideric Handel composed his <i>Messiah </i>while living in England. </p>

Chris Crandall, a psychology professor at the University of Kansas, told me that people who are on the periphery of society tend to be freer to innovate and change social norms. "Fashion norms come from the bottom up," he said. Outsiders are less concerned with what the in-crowd thinks of them, so they have more leeway to experiment.

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