Perhaps one of the most enjoyable things to come out of North America hosting the World Cup has been watching Europeans experience “real” America firsthand via their social media. Their posts have expressed awe at how big the United States actually is, the selection of products in our large supermarkets, and free tortilla chips at Mexican restaurants, as well as the sights, tastes, and sounds at places like Buc-ee’s and Waffle House.
But perhaps most importantly, Europeans have been quick to point out how kind, friendly, and hospitable Americans are. One user wrote, “Everyone told me Americans were unfriendly but they hold doors open, stop when you’re crossing the road, say hello in the street etc.” Another wrote, “All the jokes aside Americans are actually some of the friendliest and most welcoming folks I have ever met.”
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International World Cup fans’ surprise and excitement about their American experiences suggest a disconnect between how the United States is portrayed in foreign media and what America is actually like, and that the only way Europeans can truly understand the latter is by experiencing it firsthand. As a frequent traveler myself, I’ve found travel has undermined some of my own misconceptions.
But the lesson isn’t that America is somehow exceptional. It’s that travel can be a powerful liberalizing force. It does much to make people more open, pluralistic, and cosmopolitan. While this might seem intuitive to some, a growing body of research suggests that the dispositions that underlie a free and open society—trust in strangers, comfort with differences, and the view of foreigners as people rather than abstractions—come from the kind of direct exposure that many people, both foreign and American, can get from immersive international travel.
In his novel The Innocents Abroad, Mark Twain wrote, “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”
People who travel certainly believe Twain was right. In a 2016 representative survey of 7,200 people from 18 countries conducted by the travel search engine momondo.co.uk, 76 percent of respondents said they believed travel has given them a more positive outlook on diversity and other cultures in general. A 2023 Pew Research Center survey found that Americans who had traveled to at least five countries (“globe-trotters”) were more likely to be interested in and knowledgeable about foreign affairs. Globe-trotting Americans were also more likely to report feeling closer to people around the world. Pew found similar data from 24 other countries.
Of course, this data relies heavily on self-reported surveys, which don’t control for the fact that people who travel internationally tend to be more educated and have higher socioeconomic status than those who don’t. In other words, people who travel may already be more open to new cultures and ideas.
It's also possible, as the philosopher Agnes Callard argues in her provocative New Yorker essay “The Case Against Travel,” that travelers who describe their trips as transformative are simply deluding themselves:
The single most important fact about tourism is this: we already know what we will be like when we return. A vacation is not like immigrating to a foreign country, or matriculating at a university, or starting a new job, or falling in love. We embark on those pursuits with the trepidation of one who enters a tunnel not knowing who she will be when she walks out. The traveler departs confident that she will come back with the same basic interests, political beliefs, and living arrangements. Travel is a boomerang. It drops you right where you started.
If you think that this doesn’t apply to you—that your own travels are magical and profound, with effects that deepen your values, expand your horizons, render you a true citizen of the globe, and so on—note that this phenomenon can’t be assessed first-personally. Pessoa, Chesterton, Percy, and Emerson were all aware that travelers tell themselves they’ve changed, but you can’t rely on introspection to detect a delusion.
So does rigorous academic research support Twain’s optimism—or Callard’s skepticism?
In 1954, psychologist Gordon Allport hypothesized that, under the right conditions, contact between members of different groups reduces prejudice. In 2006, Thomas Pettigrew and Linda Tropp tested Allport’s hypothesis with a meta-analysis of 515 studies involving more than 250,000 participants. They found that intergroup contact typically reduces prejudice, with the findings holding across different groups and settings. In a follow-up 2008 study, Pettigrew and Tropp found that the mechanism behind this change is that contact changes minds less by teaching facts about other groups than by reducing anxiety and building empathy.
But it’s worth calling out an obvious objection to nearly all research connecting travel to open-mindedness. People who are already curious, trusting, and open to other cultures are far more likely to book a trip overseas than those who aren’t. So it’s important to keep this critique about causal direction in mind as we look at the additional research.
A 2024 study surveying over 14,000 people across nine European countries set out to explain what drives “cosmopolitan orientations,” which the authors break into cultural, interpersonal, and political openness. Their central finding was that “what really matters for cosmopolitanism is the opportunity to learn about and engage with content and people from other cultures.” Direct personal exposure to other cultures mattered more than demographic factors such as age, education, or income. This is consistent with the idea that firsthand exposure cultivates openness.
A 2009 Swedish study of the national labor force offers more targeted evidence. Comparing frequent international travelers with non-travelers, it found that frequent travel was significantly associated with “good knowledge of foreign languages and cultural openness”—the latter measured by whether people preferred, when abroad, to “meet people from the place that I visit and get to know the local culture.”
Strikingly, this association held “even when controlling for sex, age, birthplace, place of residence, education, and socio-economic classification,” suggesting the openness wasn’t simply a byproduct of travelers being wealthier or better educated to begin with.
Similar results emerge for attitudes toward specific issue areas, such as immigration. Drawing on two large Eurobarometer surveys, each covering more than 26,000 EU respondents, a 2022 study found that “studying abroad may play an important role in having positive attitudes toward immigrants and immigration, even after controlling certain socio-demographic factors.” Those who had studied in another EU country were more likely to agree that immigrants contribute to their country and to feel positively about immigration, both from within and outside the EU.
Notably, the association appeared in two separate survey waves six years apart (2012 and 2018), among different respondents, and in both wealthier and newer member states. However, these were snapshots, not before-and-after measurements, and the authors are candid that they cannot distinguish an effect of studying abroad from an overrepresentation of people who were already tolerant.
Other studies have measured people before and after they travel. Research on the EU’s Erasmus exchange program tracked students before departure and after they returned, alongside a control group that did not travel abroad. Compared to a control group, those who lived abroad were more likely to identify as EU citizens, believe they had more in common with other Europeans, and express pride in being European when they returned. The greater effects were driven not just by traveling to those places, but by social interaction with people in their host countries.
But critics could easily point out that these studies still fall prey to the self-selection objection since they all compare people who chose to travel with people who didn’t. There is, however, randomized evidence that seeks to control for this bias.
Across five studies using trust games and longitudinal tracking, researchers found a positive relationship between the number of countries someone visited and their “generalized trust,” that is, their basic disposition to view other people as trustworthy. Because they manipulated travel focus experimentally and tracked trust before and after trips, they found that “broad foreign experiences led to greater generalized trust” rather than merely accompanying it.
In another study, three economists exploited the lottery Pakistan uses to allocate visas for the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca. Because winners and losers were randomly selected, comparing them isolates the effect of the journey itself. They found that pilgrims returned with a greater belief in equality and harmony across ethnic groups and Islamic sects, more favorable attitudes toward women’s education and employment, and greater tolerance even toward non-Muslims.
This research shows what surveys alone cannot, since attitudes were measured before and after travel and compared with those of control groups who stayed home. And the Pakistan study seems to address Callard’s sharper point about self-delusion as well. Callard’s argument is not that travelers fail to change but that they cannot tell when they have—introspection cannot detect one’s own delusion. But the pilgrims were never asked to introspect. Instead, their attitudes were measured and compared with those who had entered the same lottery and lost. Whatever the pilgrims believed about their own transformation didn’t matter because the change showed up in the data.
But traveling internationally itself does not automatically lead people to be more tolerant, and the reason has less to do with the distance traveled than with what happens when you arrive. Allport’s theory rests on the idea that positive intergroup contact only works when certain conditions are met. Parties must meet as rough equals, cooperate toward shared goals, and must not be competing for advantage.
The arrangements matter because contact does not work by simply supplying information. As mentioned above, Pettigrew and Tropp found that contact changes minds less by teaching facts than through interactions that lower anxiety and build empathy. This is why travel, with its meaningful interactions, can do something that reading about a place cannot. Of course, no study has sorted travel by Allport’s criteria and measured the results, and the research would be difficult to do.
What follows is an extrapolation of these conditions rather than a finding. Consider how Allport’s criteria might apply to the modern traveler. The resort and the cruise port will probably not meet those conditions because the encounters with locals usually don’t extend far beyond guided excursions, where the visitors are merely learning facts rather than having meaningful interactions on equal footing with locals. Staying at a resort that you never leave, or on a cruise excursion where you only interact with a tour guide, will likely not generate enough meaningful contact to reduce anxiety or build empathy, per Pettigrew and Tropp’s mechanism.
Business travel could meet more of those conditions since, although there might be some competition when it comes to business negotiations, establishing business partnerships or even trying to close a deal may create a material incentive for the commercial traveler to try to understand what his counterpart wants and to investigate and participate in the cultural norms that encourage cooperation.
The traveler who stays with a family, such as a foreign exchange student, the undergrad who studies abroad, the volunteer who works alongside people, or the digital nomad who spends enough time in one place will likely meet most of Allport’s conditions to create meaningful change and contact.
Even a more in-depth immersion in another culture still has to be humane. A study of Chinese students in the United States found that while studying abroad was associated with warmer views of liberal democracy, experiencing discrimination sharply reversed this effect, increasing their support for authoritarian rule back home.
Of course, none of these studies measured whether travelers came home and changed their voting behavior or core political beliefs. What they do suggest, however, is that travel builds trust in strangers, openness toward immigrants, and identification and empathy with people beyond one’s own borders. These are dispositions on which a free society depends.
Markets require trusting people you will never meet. Pluralism requires believing that differences aren’t inherently dangerous. In other words, liberalism involves a set of habits of one’s mind, and travel appears to be one of the few interventions that could reliably cultivate those habits.
Further, none of this is to suggest that international travel is the only method for people to become more liberal, cosmopolitan, or open-minded. For instance, people who live in cities with diverse populations also tend to be more cosmopolitan, welcoming of foreigners, and open to new ideas. Indeed, experimental research suggests that engaging with multiple cultures reduces stereotyping more broadly, even extending to groups not involved in the original encounter—evidence that cross-cultural exposure can cultivate "a generalized tendency for a more tolerant mind."
International travel definitely comes with higher costs than seeking out diverse cultures closer to home, and visiting the closest urban center is a good first step to broadening one’s mind. But international travel can be a more reliable mechanism. At home, you meet differences on your own terms, in neighborhoods and workplaces sorted by class and choice. When traveling immersively abroad, you are the outsider, dependent on the goodwill of strangers to find your way, engage in commerce, and understand the local norms and culture.
The literature appears to support that Twain’s intuitions were largely correct. The main takeaway isn't simply that you should seek out new cultures, whether in your own city or one across the ocean, although you should. It's that meaningful interactions with different people and cultures can genuinely open your mind, and it works best when both sides are on equal footing, cooperate toward shared goals, treat each other with dignity, and extend a humane welcome to each other.
This research may also explain why the experiences of America’s international visitors at the World Cup have been so different. They weren’t just visiting major cities like New York or Los Angeles. The locations of the early matches generally required fans to travel to smaller cities and parts of middle America less frequented by tourists, often relying on the kindness of strangers to find their way around our vast country.
As liberals, we should be encouraging and highlighting what we are seeing on social media as America holds the door open for World Cup fans from around the world.
