Why Eastern Cultures Are More Cooperative : The Salt : NPR

Ask Americans to describe themselves, and chances are you’ll get adjectives like “energetic,” “friendly” or “hard-working.”

In Japan, reactions will likely be very different. Studies have shown that “dependent on others” and “considerate” may come to the fore.

Psychologists have long known that people in East Asia think differently, on average, than people in the US and Europe. Eastern people are actually more collaborative and intuitive, while Westerners lean toward individualism and analytical thinking.

Psychologists now have evidence that our ancestors caused some of these cultural differences Hundreds of years ago when they chose which grains to plant.

“We call it the Rice principle,” says Thomas Talheim, a graduate student at the University of Virginia who led the study. “Rice is really a special type of farming.”

The idea is simple. Talheim and his colleagues report Thursday in the journal Rice that growing rice helps foster cultures that are more cooperative and interconnected. Science.

Why? Because cultivating rice fields requires the cooperation of your neighbors, Talheim tells The Salt. Self-reliance is dangerous.

“Families have to flood and drain their fields at the same time,” he says. “So there are penalties for being too individualistic. If you flood too early, you’ll really annoy your neighbors.”

Rice fields also require irrigation systems. “This cost falls on the village, not just the individual family,” he says. “So the villages have to figure out a way to coordinate, pay, and maintain this system. It motivates people to cooperate.”

On the other hand, wheat, as well as barley and corn, generally do not require irrigation or much cooperation. A family can single-handedly plant, grow, and harvest a field of wheat, without the help of others.

Talheim and his colleagues say that wheat farming therefore fosters cultures with greater individualism, independence, and innovation. Self-reliance and innovation are rewarded.

Of course, this rice theory is easy to propose. Demonstrating that farming styles actually produce cultural change is very difficult.

To do this, Talheim and his colleagues turned to a country that historically cultivated both wheat and rice: China.

For generations, people in the northern part of China have generally grown wheat, while people in the southern part have focused on rice.

And guess which people think more like Westerners? Northerners whose ancestors used to cultivate wheat.

Talheim and his colleagues gave simple psychological tests to about a thousand college students from both parts of China. Students in the North answered the questions like Americans and Europeans: they were more individualistic and used more analytical thinking. The people of the South are more similar to the cultures of Japan and Korea.

For example, one test asked a person to draw his own social network, consisting of circles representing himself and his friends. Americans consider themselves about a quarter of an inch taller than their friends. But a previous study found that Japanese draw themselves slightly smaller on average than their friends.

“America is No. 1 when it comes to self-inflation,” says Telheim. “We think of ourselves as much bigger than our friends. We take this as a measure of self-inflation.”

When Talheim gave the same social network test to Chinese students, the amount of self-inflation depended on where the students lived. People in wheat-growing areas found themselves, on average, slightly older than their friends. Students from rice-growing areas described themselves as younger than their friends. Like Westerners, people whose ancestors cultivated wheat tend to overestimate its importance.

Of course, the Rice theory is not the only hypothesis for why Easterners and Westerners think differently.

Some scientists have limited these differences to wealth and modernization: as societies become wealthier and more educated, people become more individualistic and analytical.

But this idea doesn’t explain the cooperative cultures in Japan, Hong Kong, and South Korea—which, in some ways, are more prosperous than the U.S.

And the studies supporting this modernization idea, so far, are not as strong as current studies Science, says Joseph Heinrich, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia, who was not involved in the work.

“The [rice theory] This idea has been around for a while,” he told The Salt. “This is actually the first study that I’m aware of that has systematic data supporting it. Other theories mostly stem from much smaller studies on nationalities. The quality of this study is better than those.”

But Heinrich says there is still a lot of work to be done before the hypothesis is accepted. “This is only the first study and we would like more evidence before declaring victory.”

And Rice’s theory does not explain all the psychological differences observed in students from the north and south of China.

“Many other things in the environment [besides rice farming] That’s what patterns can create,” Heinrich says. “These things can last for generations. They become the right way to do things. And it takes a while to find your way out of them.”