Farming Legacy a Factor in Modern Chinese Behavior
A customer from Beijing and one from Hong Kong walk into Starbucks. A chair blocks the path between the counter and their seats. Who of the two moves the chair?
It's not a joke. It's a psychology experiment, designed to test the long-lasting imprints of a culture's agrarian past.
A new study in the journal Science Advances says that over thousands of years, rice farmers in southern China have evolved a culture of interdependence not found in northern, wheat-growing parts of the country.
The authors say those influences persist even in China's modern cities, among people who have never farmed. And they show up in how people behave in their daily lives.
According to what the researchers call the "rice theory of culture," growing rice demands more cooperation than growing most other crops. And that, scientists believe, fosters collective, interdependent thinking.
To test their theory, University of Chicago psychologist Thomas Talhelm and colleagues went to Starbucks in five cities: Beijing and Shenyang in the wheat-growing north; and Guangzhou, Shanghai and Hong Kong in the rice-growing south.
Researchers put two chairs a hip's width apart in high-traffic aisles and watched how customers got past them. In southern China, almost everyone squeezed through them. Just 6 percent moved a chair. In the north, on the other hand, 16 percent were chair-movers.
"Previous research has found that when people in independent cultures like the United States encounter a problem, they're more likely to want to change the environment to solve that problem," Talhelm said. "But when people in interdependent cultures encounter problems, they're more likely to try to fit [themselves] into the environment."
The study also found northerners were more likely than southerners to sit alone.
Talhelm said the findings go against the common theory that "as areas become more wealthy, more modernized [and] more urbanized, people become more Western."
Even in Hong Kong, among the wealthiest, most modern and most urban cities in China, chair-movers were rare and few people sat alone.
Psychologist Andrew Ryder says that the experiment acts as an important reminder that China is not a cultural monolith. No country is, he added.
