Psychology | An explanation for the cultural differences: rice cultivation creates community, wheat cultivation creates individuality

Eastern in rice-growing cultures, interdependence between people is emphasized, while in western countries focused on wheat and rye cultivation, people are more individualistic.

Even within China, in the rice-growing areas of the south, people are more group-oriented than in the wheat lands of the north.

According to the rice theory of culture, the differences stem from differences in farming methods.

Rice farming requires a lot of cooperation. In fields covered with water, complicated irrigation systems are needed to direct the water to the fields.

Farmers must take care of the irrigation system together and agree on water dosing. All this cooperation draws them together much more than what happens between wheat farmers.

Is the theory correct? It would be ideal if a group of people could be randomly divided into two groups, one of which would be made to cultivate wheat and the other rice. Then, after a suitable time, it would be found out how group-oriented or individualistic the farmers would have become.

China’s history offers a situation similar to a test setup. University of Chicago Thomas Talhelm and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology Xiawei Dong seized the opportunity and found the journal Nature Communications in his publication strong support for the theory.

After the end of the Chinese Civil War, large numbers of soldiers were out of work, the population grew and food was needed. In the 1950s, the communist government created new state farms in new farming areas and sent people to work on them.

Two such state farms were established about 60 kilometers apart in the remote Ningxia province of northwestern China. In one they began to cultivate wheat and in the other rice.

When the administration assigned people to the farms to work, it did not take into account their background and placed them arbitrarily on the farms.

Tel and Dong assigned tasks to the farmers of both farms to measure people’s collectivity and individuality. In the same tests, southern Chinese have proven to be more group-oriented than northern Chinese.

Farmers were first asked to describe their collection of relatives and friends with balls drawn on paper.

In fact, the researchers were interested in how big people drew the balls representing themselves compared to those representing friends and relatives. In rice farmers, the meenapallukka was smaller in relation to relatives than in wheat farmers.

In the second test, the participants were asked to imagine a situation in which a friend or complete stranger betrayed their trust.

The participants could punish the cheating person with the loss of money. In collective cultures, strangers are punished more than acquaintances, and the same pattern was repeated among rice farm farmers.

In the third test, the farmers were shown pictures of a rabbit, a cat and a carrot, from which they had to choose which two belong together.

In community culture one more often chooses hare and carrot, which have a functional connection, while in more individualistic cultures one chooses cat and hare, which belong to the same abstract category of animals. Again, rice farmers chose hare and carrot more often.

The differences between the farmers were not as great as between the southern and northern Chinese. You have only had time to live on the farms for 70 years, and there has been quite a bit of time for psychological differentiation.

Published in Tiede magazine 7/2024.