Cultures in Water-Scarce Environments Are More Long-Term Oriented.

Why do some cultures invest more for the long term, whereas others emphasize living in the moment? We took advantage of a natural experiment in Iran to test the theory that long-term water scarcity is an important cause of differences in long-term orientation and indulgence. We found that Iranians in a water-scarce province reported more long-term orientation and less indulgence than did Iranians in a nearby water-rich province (Study 1, N = 331). In a field study, Iranians in the water-scarce province sent more résumés for a long-term job ad we posted, whereas Iranians in the water-rich province sent more résumés for a short-term, flexible job (Study 2, N = 182). College students in Iran primed to think about increasing water scarcity in the environment endorsed long-term orientation more and indulgence less (Study 3, N = 211). Across 82 countries, long-run water scarcity predicted long-term orientation (Study 4). In sum, cultures in water-scarce environments value thinking for the long term more and indulgence less.

People from the U.S. and China think about their personal and collective future differently.

We investigated how people think about their personal life and their country by testing how participants in the U.S. and China think about personal and collective events in the past and future. Using a fluency task, we replicated prior research in showing that participants in the U.S. had a positivity bias toward their personal future and a negativity bias toward their country's future. In contrast, participants in China did not display a positivity or negativity bias toward either their personal or collective future. This result suggests that the valence dissociation between personal and collective future thinking is not universal. Additionally, when people considered the past in addition to the future, they displayed similar valence patterns for both temporal periods, providing evidence that people think about the past and the future similarly. We suggest political and cultural differences (such as dialectical thought) as potential explanations for the differences between countries in future thinking and memory.

Historically rice-farming societies have tighter social norms in China and worldwide.

Data recently published in PNAS mapped out regional differences in the tightness of social norms across China [R. Y. J. Chua, K. G. Huang, M. Jin, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 116, 6720-6725 (2019)]. Norms were tighter in developed, urbanized areas and weaker in rural areas. We tested whether historical paddy rice farming has left a legacy on social norms in modern China. Premodern rice farming could plausibly create strong social norms because paddy rice relied on irrigation networks. Rice farmers coordinated their water use and kept track of each person's labor contributions. Rice villages also established strong norms of reciprocity to cope with labor demands that were twice as high as dryland crops like wheat. In line with this theory, China's historically rice-farming areas had tighter social norms than wheat-farming areas, even beyond differences in development and urbanization. Rice-wheat differences were just as large among people in 10 neighboring provinces (n = 3,835) along the rice-wheat border. These neighboring provinces differ sharply in rice and wheat, but little in latitude, temperature, and other potential confounding variables. Outside of China, rice farming predicted norm tightness in 32 countries around the world. Finally, people in rice-farming areas scored lower on innovative thinking, which tends to be lower in societies with tight norms. This natural test case within China might explain why East Asia-historically reliant on rice farming-has tighter social norms than the wheat-farming West.

Ingroup vigilance in collectivistic cultures.

Collectivistic cultures have been characterized as having harmonious, cooperative ingroup relationships. However, we find evidence that people in collectivistic cultures are more vigilant toward ingroup members, mindful of their possible unethical intentions. Study 1 found that Chinese participants were more vigilant than Americans in within-group competitions, anticipating more unethical behaviors from their peers. Study 2 replicated this finding by comparing areas within China, finding that people from China's collectivistic rice-farming regions exhibit greater ingroup vigilance than people from the less collectivistic wheat-farming regions. The rice/wheat difference was mediated by greater perceived within-group competition. Study 3 found that Chinese participants were more likely than Americans to interpret a peer's friendly behavior as sabotage in disguise. We also manipulated within-group competition and found that it increased ingroup vigilance in both cultures. Finally, study 3 identified two boundary conditions where cultural differences in ingroup vigilance decrease: an unambiguously competitive win-lose situation where Americans also exhibit vigilance, and an unambiguously cooperative win-win situation where Chinese participants relax their vigilance. This research contributes to a more balanced view of collectivism, revealing its interpersonal tensions in the forms of within-group competition and ingroup vigilance.

Relational mobility predicts social behaviors in 39 countries and is tied to historical farming and threat.

Biologists and social scientists have long tried to understand why some societies have more fluid and open interpersonal relationships and how those differences influence culture. This study measures relational mobility, a socioecological variable quantifying voluntary (high relational mobility) vs. fixed (low relational mobility) interpersonal relationships. We measure relational mobility in 39 societies and test whether it predicts social behavior. People in societies with higher relational mobility report more proactive interpersonal behaviors (e.g., self-disclosure and social support) and psychological tendencies that help them build and retain relationships (e.g., general trust, intimacy, self-esteem). Finally, we explore ecological factors that could explain relational mobility differences across societies. Relational mobility was lower in societies that practiced settled, interdependent subsistence styles, such as rice farming, and in societies that had stronger ecological and historical threats.

People quasi-randomly assigned to farm rice are more collectivistic than people assigned to farm wheat.

The rice theory of culture argues that the high labor demands and interdependent irrigation networks of paddy rice farming makes cultures more collectivistic than wheat-farming cultures. Despite prior evidence, proving causality is difficult because people are not randomly assigned to farm rice. In this study, we take advantage of a unique time when the Chinese government quasi-randomly assigned people to farm rice or wheat in two state farms that are otherwise nearly identical. The rice farmers show less individualism, more loyalty/nepotism toward a friend over a stranger, and more relational thought style. These results rule out confounds in tests of the rice theory, such as temperature, latitude, and historical events. The differences suggest rice-wheat cultural differences can form in a single generation.

The motivating effect of monetary over psychological incentives is stronger in WEIRD cultures.

Motivating effortful behaviour is a problem employers, governments and nonprofits face globally. However, most studies on motivation are done in Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic (WEIRD) cultures. We compared how hard people in six countries worked in response to monetary incentives versus psychological motivators, such as competing with or helping others. The advantage money had over psychological interventions was larger in the United States and the United Kingdom than in China, India, Mexico and South Africa (N = 8,133). In our last study, we randomly assigned cultural frames through language in bilingual Facebook users in India (N = 2,065). Money increased effort over a psychological treatment by 27% in Hindi and 52% in English. These findings contradict the standard economic intuition that people from poorer countries should be more driven by money. Instead, they suggest that the market mentality of exchanging time and effort for material benefits is most prominent in WEIRD cultures.

Psychological well-being in Europe after the outbreak of war in Ukraine.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, has had devastating effects on the Ukrainian population and the global economy, environment, and political order. However, little is known about the psychological states surrounding the outbreak of war, particularly the mental well-being of individuals outside Ukraine. Here, we present a longitudinal experience-sampling study of a convenience sample from 17 European countries (total participants = 1,341, total assessments = 44,894, countries with >100 participants = 5) that allows us to track well-being levels across countries during the weeks surrounding the outbreak of war. Our data show a significant decline in well-being on the day of the Russian invasion. Recovery over the following weeks was associated with an individual's personality but was not statistically significantly associated with their age, gender, subjective social status, and political orientation. In general, well-being was lower on days when the war was more salient on social media. Our results demonstrate the need to consider the psychological implications of the Russo-Ukrainian war next to its humanitarian, economic, and ecological consequences.

People in historically rice-farming areas are less happy and socially compare more than people in wheat-farming areas.

Using two nationally representative surveys, we find that people in China's historically rice-farming areas are less happy than people in wheat areas. This is a puzzle because the rice area is more interdependent, and relationships are an important predictor of happiness. We explore how the interdependence of historical rice farming may have paradoxically undermined happiness by creating more social comparison than wheat farming. We build a framework in which rice farming leads to social comparison, which makes people unhappy (especially people who are worse off). If people in rice areas socially compare more, then people's happiness in rice areas should be more closely related to markers of social status like income. In two studies, national survey data show that income, self-reported social status, and occupational status predict people's happiness twice as strongly in rice areas than wheat areas. In Study 3, we use a unique natural experiment comparing two nearby state farms that effectively randomly assigned people to farm rice or wheat. The rice farmers socially compare more, and farmers who socially compare more are less happy. If interdependence breeds social comparison and erodes happiness, it could help explain the paradox of why the interdependent cultures of East Asia are less happy than similarly wealthy cultures. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

When Interdependence Backfires: The Coronavirus Infected Three Times More People in Rice-Farming Areas During Chinese New Year.

Interdependent cultures around the world have generally controlled COVID-19 better. We tested this pattern in China based on the rice theory, which argues that historically rice-farming regions of China are more interdependent than wheat-farming areas. Unlike earlier findings, rice-farming areas suffered more COVID-19 cases in the early days of the outbreak. We suspected this happened because the outbreak fell on Chinese New Year, and people in rice areas felt more pressure to visit family and friends. We found historical evidence that people in rice areas visit more family and friends for Chinese New Year than people in wheat areas. In 2020, rice areas also saw more New Year travel. Regional differences in social visits were correlated with COVID-19 spread. These results reveal an exception to the general idea that interdependent culture helps cultures contain COVID-19. When relational duties conflict with public health, interdependence can lead to more spread of disease.

How Rice Fights Pandemics: Nature-Crop-Human Interactions Shaped COVID-19 Outcomes.

Wealthy nations led health preparedness rankings in 2019, yet many poor nations controlled COVID-19 better. We argue that a history of rice farming explains why some societies did better. We outline how traditional rice farming led to tight social norms and low-mobility social networks. These social structures helped coordinate societies against COVID-19. Study 1 compares rice- and wheat-farming prefectures within China. Comparing within China allows for controlled comparisons of regions with the same national government, language family, and other potential confounds. Study 2 tests whether the findings generalize to cultures globally. The data show rice-farming nations have tighter social norms and less-mobile relationships, which predict better COVID outcomes. Rice-farming nations suffered just 3% of the COVID deaths of nonrice nations. These findings suggest that long-run cultural differences influence how rice societies-with over 50% of the world's population-controlled COVID-19. The culture was critical, yet the preparedness rankings mostly ignored it.

People in Tight Cultures and Tight Situations Wear Masks More: Evidence From Three Large-Scale Studies in China.

Studies have found large differences in masks use during the pandemic. We found evidence that cultural tightness explains mask use differences and this association was more robust in tight situations like subways. In Study 1, we observed 23,551 people's actual mask use in public places around China. People wore masks more in tight situations; however, differences did not extend to outdoor streets and public parks, where norms are looser. We replicated this finding using a data from 15,985 people across China. Finally, in a preregistered study we observed mask use with the removal of COVID-19 restrictions, people still wore masks more in tight situations like subways than in loose situations of parks. These findings suggest that norm tightness has a lasting association with people's health-protective behaviors, especially in tight situations. It provides insight into how different cultures might respond with future pandemics and in what situations people adopt health-protective behaviors.

Historical rice farming explains faster mask use during early days of China's COVID-19 outbreak.

In the early days of the coronavirus outbreak, we observed mask use in public among 1,330 people across China. People in regions with a history of farming rice wore masks more often than people in wheat regions. Cultural differences persisted after taking into account objective risk factors such as local COVID cases. The differences fit with the emerging theory that rice farming's labor and irrigation demands made societies more interdependent, with tighter social norms. Cultural differences were strongest in the ambiguous, early days of the pandemic, then shrank as masks became nearly universal (94%). Separate survey and internet search data replicated this pattern. Although strong cultural differences lasted only a few days, research suggests that acting just a few days earlier can reduce deaths substantially.

How do humans group non-rigid objects in multiple object tracking?: Evidence from grouping by self-rotation.

Previous studies on perceptual grouping found that people can use spatiotemporal and featural information to group spatially separated rigid objects into a unit while tracking moving objects. However, few studies have tested the role of objects' self-motion information in perceptual grouping, although it is of great significance to the motion perception in the three-dimensional space. In natural environments, objects always move in translation and rotation at the same time. The self-rotation of the objects seriously destroys objects' rigidity and topology, creates conflicting movement signals and results in crowding effects. Thus, this study sought to examine the specific role played by self-rotation information on grouping spatially separated non-rigid objects through a modified multiple object tracking (MOT) paradigm with self-rotating objects. Experiment 1 found that people could use self-rotation information to group spatially separated non-rigid objects, even though this information was deleterious for attentive tracking and irrelevant to the task requirements, and people seemed to use it strategically rather than automatically. Experiment 2 provided stronger evidence that this grouping advantage did come from the self-rotation per se rather than surface-level cues arising from self-rotation (e.g. similar 2D motion signals and common shapes). Experiment 3 changed the stimuli to more natural 3D cubes to strengthen the impression of self-rotation and again found that self-rotation improved grouping. Finally, Experiment 4 demonstrated that grouping by self-rotation and grouping by changing shape were statistically comparable but additive, suggesting that they were two different sources of the object information. Thus, grouping by self-rotation mainly benefited from the perceptual differences in motion flow fields rather than in deformation. Overall, this study is the first attempt to identify self-motion as a new feature that people can use to group objects in dynamic scenes and shed light on debates about what entities/units we group and what kinds of information about a target we process while tracking objects.

Distinguishing the neural mechanism of attentional control and working memory in feature-based attentive tracking.

Surface features are an important component in attentive tracking. However, the neural mechanisms underlying how features affect attentive tracking remain unknown. The present fMRI study addressed this issue by manipulating the intragroup feature complexity and intergroup feature similarity. In particular, this study distinguished the different neural mechanisms of intragroup feature complexity and intergroup feature similarity by investigating the roles of attentional control and working memory in dynamic feature-based attentive tracking. Behavioral and neuroimaging evidence showed that when targets are distinct from distractors, the intragroup feature complexity of the targets, rather than that of the distractors, mainly increases the visual working memory load and significantly activates the frontoparietal cortical circuit. Thus, the involvement of working memory in feature-based attentive tracking is modulated by goal-directed attention control. In addition, when targets are similar to distractors, the intergroup feature similarity (i.e., target-distractor similarity) mainly affects the allocation of attention. Specifically, target-distractor similarity affects the goal-directed attention toward the targets in a stimulus-driven way and induces an interaction between the ventral and dorsal attention networks.

Relationship between rice farming and polygenic scores potentially linked to agriculture in China.

Following domestication in the lower Yangtze River valley 9400 years ago, rice farming spread throughout China and changed lifestyle patterns among Neolithic populations. Here, we report evidence that the advent of rice domestication and cultivation may have shaped humans not only culturally but also genetically. Leveraging recent findings from molecular genetics, we construct a number of polygenic scores (PGSs) of behavioural traits and examine their associations with rice cultivation based on a sample of 4101 individuals recently collected from mainland China. A total of nine polygenic traits and genotypes are investigated in this study, including PGSs of height, body mass index, depression, time discounting, reproduction, educational attainment, risk preference, ADH1B rs1229984 and ALDH2 rs671. Two-stage least-squares estimates of the county-level percentage of cultivated land devoted to paddy rice on the PGS of age at first birth (b = -0.029, p = 0.021) and ALDH2 rs671 (b = 0.182, p < 0.001) are both statistically significant and robust to a wide range of potential confounds and alternative explanations. These findings imply that rice farming may influence human evolution in relatively recent human history.

Emerging evidence of cultural differences linked to rice versus wheat agriculture.

Roughly four billion people live in cultures with a legacy of rice farm. Recent studies find that rice cultures are more interdependent than herding cultures and wheat-farming cultures. In China, people from rice-farming areas think more holistically and show less implicit individualism than people from wheat-farming areas. These differences are mirrored in micro-level comparisons of neighboring counties differ in rice versus wheat. Research has also found evidence of cultural differences based on rice farming within Japan and around the world. However, we know little about the mechanism of how rice culture is transmitted in the modern world. More research is needed on the mechanisms, as well as other subsistence styles, such as corn farming and cash crops like sugar.

Family Matters: Rethinking the Psychology of Human Social Motivation.

What motives do people prioritize in their social lives? Historically, social psychologists, especially those adopting an evolutionary perspective, have devoted a great deal of research attention to sexual attraction and romantic-partner choice (mate seeking). Research on long-term familial bonds (mate retention and kin care) has been less thoroughly connected to relevant comparative and evolutionary work on other species, and in the case of kin care, these bonds have been less well researched. Examining varied sources of data from 27 societies around the world, we found that people generally view familial motives as primary in importance and mate-seeking motives as relatively low in importance. Compared with other groups, college students, single people, and men place relatively higher emphasis on mate seeking, but even those samples rated kin-care motives as more important. Furthermore, motives linked to long-term familial bonds are positively associated with psychological well-being, but mate-seeking motives are associated with anxiety and depression. We address theoretical and empirical reasons why there has been extensive research on mate seeking and why people prioritize goals related to long-term familial bonds over mating goals. Reallocating relatively greater research effort toward long-term familial relationships would likely yield many interesting new findings relevant to everyday people's highest social priorities.

Who smiles while alone? Rates of smiling lower in China than U.S.

Previous studies have found that Westerners value high intensity positive emotions more than people in China and Japan, yet few studies have compared actual rates of smiling across cultures. Particularly rare are observational studies of real-time smiling (as opposed to smiling in photos). In Study 1, raters coded student ID photos of European American and East Asian students in the U.S. In Study 2, observers coded people's smiles as they walked outside in the U.S. and China. Both studies found that people from East Asia smiled much less-about 50% less. These differences could reflect differences in happiness across cultures, norms of smiling, or differences in ideal affect. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

The effects of colour complexity and similarity on multiple object tracking performance.

Surface features can be used during multiple object tracking (MOT). Previous studies suggested that surface features might be stored in visual working memory to assist object tracking, and attentive tracking and visual working memory share common attentional resources. However, it is still unknown whether features of both the target and distractor sets will be stored, or features of the target and distractor sets are processed differently. Moreover, how feature distinctiveness and similarity between the target and distractor sets affect tracking and allocation of attentional resources are still not clear. First, we manipulated the colour complexity of the target set (CT) and the colour complexity of the distractor set (CD), respectively, in two experiments, where colours of the target and distractor sets were always distinct, to test their effects on tracking performance. If features of the target and distractor sets are stored, manipulating feature complexity of the target and distractor sets would significantly affect tracking performance. Second, this study tested whether tracking performance was affected by different levels of distinctiveness between the target and distractor sets (DTD) and explored how distinctiveness affected tracking and allocation of attentional resources. Results showed that DTD and CT significantly affect tracking performance and allocation of attentional resources, but not CD. These results indicated that when targets and distractors have distinct features, only the surface features of the targets are maintained in visual working memory. And when targets have the same colour with the distractors, they are more difficult and consume more attentional resources to track.