Put your village into it, people. Rice farming takes long-term team work (Image: Michael S. Yamashita/Corbis)

It is a cliché to say that East Asians think in terms of the group, while Westerners think in terms of the individual. But there is some truth to it, and part of the explanation may lie in what our ancestors ate. Rice farming seems to have fostered collective thinking while wheat farming favoured individualism.

The popular image of Americans and Europeans as individualist and innovative, versus Asians as collectivist and conforming, is partly true. People from the West and Far East can and do think in both ways, but these peoples’ cognitive styles divide broadly along those lines.

Researchers have proposed many possible explanations for these cultural habits, including differences in prosperity and rates of infectious disease.


Thomas Talhelm of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville wondered if a region’s long-term way of life is what matters: specifically, whether its people grow rice or wheat. “The rice-growing regions of East Asia are less individualistic than the Western world or northern China, even with their wealth and modernisation,” says Talhelm.

Rice-minded

Talhelm spotted a natural experiment in China. Its heartland south of the Yangtze river depends on rice farming, while the colder, drier country north of the Yangtze has always relied on wheat.

Growing rice is hard work. Many people must work together to maintain communal irrigation canals, and transplanting and harvesting are also labour-intensive. By contrast, while rain-fed wheat produces less food per hectare, it needs less labour. A family can support itself growing wheat, while paddy rice literally takes a village.

It has long been suggested that China’s reliance on rice fostered collectivist attitudes, and the Confucian emphasis on group allegiance and conformity. Such attitudes are even cited as explaining why Europe, rather than China, was the home of the industrial revolution: the revolution was based on scientific thinking, which is held to rely on individualism and openness to innovation. But the idea that growing rice promotes a group mentality remained speculation.

Talhelm and his colleagues in China decided to test it. They gave standard tests for cognitive style, individualism, and in-group loyalty to 1162 students in six cities across China, in wheat or rice-growing areas. All were Han Chinese, China’s dominant ethnic group, so other differences were hopefully minimal.

Thought styles

Nevertheless, they found many differences in cognitive style. For instance, students from all-wheat areas were 56 per cent more likely to think analytically than students from all-rice areas. For example, when asked to match the two closest of sheep, dog and grass, they grouped sheep and dog, which appear most similar. Students from rice-growing areas grouped sheep and grass, as these have the closest relationship to each other in real life, and to them this relationship mattered more than physical resemblance.

The difference held for students from adjoining wheat and rice-growing counties in the same province along the wheat-rice divide, who were otherwise very similar. “Rice provides economic incentives to cooperate, and over many generations, those cultures become more interdependent,” says Talhelm. He found that when students were asked to draw a diagram of their relationship to others, those from rice-growing communities minimised self but those from wheat-growing communities did not.

Rice-growing areas also have fewer patents, and fewer divorces, than wheat regions, which may reflect lower innovation and higher conformity.

None of the variables tested for tied in with historical rates of infectious disease or differences in prosperity, suggesting those factors were not responsible for differences in thought styles.

The findings may help explain why an incipient industrial revolution in 11th-century China fizzled out, says Joseph Henrich of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. Invasions by northern horsemen drove the centre of Chinese government south, moving it from wheat to rice culture. Meanwhile, wheat farming was the mainstay of Europe.

Journal reference: Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.1246850