Event

Cross-cultural psychologists often contrast East Asia with the West, but this study shows large psychological differences within China.

We propose that a history of farming rice makes cultures more interdependent, while farming wheat makes cultures more independent, and these agricultural legacies continue to affect people in the modern world. We tested 1,162 Han Chinese participants in six sites and found that people who grew up in rice-growing southern China are more interdependent and holistic-thinking than people from the wheat-growing north. To control for confounds like climate, we tested people from neighboring counties along the rice-wheat border and found differences that were just as large. We also show that modernization and pathogen prevalence theories do not fit the data

* Issues in Contemporary East Asia Colloquium Series