CANCELED: The Rice Theory of Culture: Subsistence May Affect Personality After All

This event has been canceled.

Rice is very different from wheat. Traditional paddy rice required about twice as many labor hours as wheat, which led rice farmers to set up tight labor-sharing customs. What's more, paddy rice’s irrigation networks required farmers to coordinate their water use and flood their fields at the same time. These elements gave rice villages a dense social world, with tight social ties. Across four studies, I test thousands of people’s behavior and thought style across China. Data shows that people from rice-farming areas are more interdependent and think more holistically than people from wheat-farming areas. Evidence from how people behave in Starbucks around China suggests that these differences are living on in modern China's big cities—even among the new middle class. Is this environmental determinism? I explain how rice does not have to lead to interdependence and why initial environment conditions get shuttled through human institutions.