Publication Date:
2014-05-09
Description:
Cross-cultural psychologists have mostly contrasted East Asia with the West. However, this study shows that there are major psychological differences within China. We propose that a history of farming rice makes cultures more interdependent, whereas farming wheat makes cultures more independent, and these agricultural legacies continue to affect people in the modern world. We tested 1162 Han Chinese participants in six sites and found that rice-growing southern China is more interdependent and holistic-thinking than 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 find that modernization and pathogen prevalence theories do not fit the data.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Notes: 〈/span〉Talhelm, T -- Zhang, X -- Oishi, S -- Shimin, C -- Duan, D -- Lan, X -- Kitayama, S -- New York, N.Y. -- Science. 2014 May 9;344(6184):603-8. doi: 10.1126/science.1246850.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Author address: 〈/span〉Department of Psychology, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA 22904, USA.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Record origin:〈/span〉 〈a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24812395" target="_blank"〉PubMed〈/a〉
Keywords:
*Agriculture
;
Asian Continental Ancestry Group/*psychology
;
China
;
Female
;
Humans
;
*Individuation
;
Male
;
*Oryza
;
*Triticum
Print ISSN:
0036-8075
Electronic ISSN:
1095-9203
Topics:
Biology
,
Chemistry and Pharmacology
,
Computer Science
,
Medicine
,
Natural Sciences in General
,
Physics
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