Sage Journals: Discover world-class research

Abstract

China’s smallest province Ningxia sits in North Central China. Surrounded by herding cultures to the north and wheat farmers to the south, Qingtongxia is a small outpost of rice farming fed by the Yellow River. We test the hypothesis that rice-farming cultures are more interdependent by comparing high school students from Qingtongxia (N = 190) to students in a nearby wheat district, Yuanzhou (N = 223). Comparing two nearby counties provides a natural test case that controls for third variables. Students in the rice county thought more holistically, treated a close friend better than a stranger, and showed lower implicit individualism. Students in the rice area showed more relative perception than students from the wheat areas on the practice trials of the framed line task, but differences were nonsignificant on the main trials. Differences between teenagers—born after the year 2000—suggest that rice–wheat differences continue among China’s next generation.

Keywords

rice culture China farming agriculture

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Alesina

Giuliano

Nunn

(2013). On the origins of gender roles: Women and the plough. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 128, 469–530.

Barkow

J. H.

Cosmides

Tooby

(2015). The adapted mind: Evolutionary psychology and the generation of culture. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Bray

(1986). The rice economies: Technology and development in Asian societies. New York, NY: Blackwell.

Buck

J. L.

(1935). Land utilization in China. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Fei

(1945). Earthbound China: A study of rural economy in Yunnan. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Fincher

C. L.

Thornhill

Murray

D. R.

Schaller

(2008). Pathogen prevalence predicts human cross-cultural variability in individualism/collectivism. Proceedings Biological Sciences, 275, 1279–1285.

Food and Agriculture Organization/International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis. (2010). Global agro-ecological zones. Laxenburg, Austria: Author.

Goldschmidt

(1971). Independence as an element in pastoral social systems. Anthropological Quarterly, 44, 132–142.

Greenfield

P. M.

(2009). Linking social change and developmental change: Shifting pathways of human development. Developmental Psychology, 45, 401–418.

10.

Guyuan Local Chronicles Office. (1993). Guyuan chronicles. Yinchuan, China: Ningxia People’s Publishing House.

11.

Hakim

Simons

D. J.

Zhao

Wan

(2016). Do easterners and westerners differ in visual cognition? A preregistered examination of three visual cognition tasks. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 8, 142–152.

12.

Halevy

Bornstein

Sagiv

. (2008). “In-group love” and “out-group hate” as motives for individual participation in intergroup conflict: A new game paradigm. Psychological Science, 19, 405–411.

13.

Heine

S. J.

Lehman

D. R.

Peng

Greenholtz

(2002). What’s wrong with cross-cultural comparisons of subjective Likert scales? The reference-group effect. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 82, 903–918.

14.

Inglehart

Baker

W. E.

(2000). Modernization, cultural change, and the persistence of traditional values. American Sociological Review, 65, 19–51.

15.

Inglehart

Norris

(2003). Rising tide: Gender equality and cultural change around the world. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

16.

L. J.

Zhang

Nisbett

R. E.

(2004). Is it culture or is it language? Examination of language effects in cross-cultural research on categorization. Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, 87, 57–65.

17.

Kitayama

Duffy

Kawamura

Larsen

J. T.

(2003). Perceiving an object and its context in different cultures: A cultural look at new look. Psychological Science, 14, 201–206.

18.

Kitayama

Park

Sevincer

A. T.

Karasawa

Uskul

A. K.

(2009). A cultural task analysis of implicit independence: Comparing North America, Western Europe, and East Asia. Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, 97, 236–255.

19.

Grossmann

Varnum

M. E.

Kitayama

Gonzalez

Nisbett

R. E.

(2010). Cultural differences are not always reducible to individual differences. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 107, 6192–6197.

20.

Nisbett

R. E.

Cohen

(1996). Culture of honor: The psychology of violence in the south. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

21.

Norenzayan

(2006). Evolution and transmitted culture. Psychological Inquiry, 17, 123–128.

22.

Peng

Nisbett

R. E.

Wong

N. Y.

(1997). Validity problems comparing values across cultures and possible solutions. Psychological Methods, 2, 329–344.

23.

Qingtongxia Local Chronicles Office. (2004). Qingtongxia chronicles. Beijing, China: Fangzhi Press.

24.

Richerson

P. J.

Boyd

(2005). Not by genes alone. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

25.

Schaller

Park

J. H.

(2011). The behavioral immune system (and why it matters). Current Directions in Psychological Science, 20, 99–103.

26.

Statistical Bureau of Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region. (1985). Ningxia statistical yearbook 1985. Beijing, China: China Statisitics Press.

27.

Statistical Bureau of Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region. (1994). Ningxia statistical yearbook 1994. Beijing, China: China Statisitics Press.

28.

Statistical Bureau of Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region & National Bureau of Statistics Ningxia Investigation Team. (2014). Ningxia statistical yearbook 2014. Bejing, China: China Statisitics Press.

29.

Talhelm

Haidt

Oishi

Zhang

Miao

F. F.

Chen

(2015). Liberals think more analytically (more “WEIRD”) than conservatives. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 41, 250–267.

30.

Talhelm

Oishi

(2018). How rice farming shaped culture in southern China. In Uskul

A. K.

Oishi

(Eds.), Socioeconomic environment and human psychology (pp. 53–76). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

31.

Talhelm

Zhang

Oishi

Shimin

Duan

Lan

Kitayama

(2014). Large-scale psychological differences within China explained by rice versus wheat agriculture. Science, 344, 603–608.

32.

Uskul

A. K.

Kitayama

Nisbett

R. E.

(2008). Ecocultural basis of cognition: Farmers and fishermen are more holistic than herders. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 105, 8552–8556.

33.

Van De Vliert

Yang

Wang

Ren

X. P.

(2012). Climato-economic imprints on Chinese collectivism. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 44, 589–605.

34.

Vaughan

D. A.

B. R.

Tomooka

(2008). Was Asian rice (Oryza sativa) domesticated more than once? Rice, 1, 16–24.

35.

Wang

C. S.

Leung

K. Y.

See

Y. H. M.

Gao

X. Y.

(2011). The effects of culture and friendship on rewarding honesty and punishing deception. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 47, 1295–1299.

Supplementary Material

Please find the following supplemental material available below.

For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.

For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.

0.00 MB

1.00 MB

Teens in Rice County Are More Interdependent and Think More Holistically Than Nearby Wheat County

Abstract

Keywords

Get full access to this article

References

Supplementary Material