Sowing the Seeds of Culture
People randomly assigned to farm rice are more collectivistic than those randomly assigned to farm wheat
Rice farming cultures tend to be more collectivistic than wheat farming cultures. Within China, for instance, people in rice-growing regions show greater interdependence than those in wheat-growing regions, and a more holistic/relational thinking style. According to the rice theory of culture, this is because rice farming is more intensive and requires closer collaboration.
Despite the theory’s intuitive appeal, demonstrating a causal link between crops and culture has proven tricky. To explore this issue, a fascinating new paper by Thomas Talhelm and Xiawei Dong takes advantage of a unique period in Chinese history where the government quasi-randomly assigned people to farm either rice or wheat on two state farms.
Sure enough, consistent with the rice theory, those assigned to farm rice developed more collectivistic tendencies than those assigned to farm wheat. As shown in the graph below, rice farmers were less individualistic, showed a greater tendency to favor friends over strangers, and exhibited a more relational thinking style.
An additional finding was that rice farmers engaged in more social comparison than their wheat-farming counterparts. Talhelm and Dong suggest that this could explain why collectivist cultures - and rice-farming regions in China - tend to report lower happiness than individualistic cultures, even at comparable levels of wealth. An intriguing speculation.
The paper is open access, so you can read the whole thing for free here.
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