Commentary: Large-scale psychological differences within China explained by rice vs. wheat agriculture.

Seán G Roberts

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00950

Abstract

Commentary: Large-scale psychological differences within China explained by rice vs. wheat agriculture.

Highlights

Specialty section: This article was submitted to Cultural Psychology, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology
Talhelm et al (2014) test the hypothesis that activities which require more intensive collaboration foster more collectivist cultures. They demonstrate that a measure of collectivism correlates with the proportion of cultivated land devoted to rice paddies, which require more work to grow and maintain than other grains
Spurious correlations can occur between cultural traits that are inherited from ancestor cultures or borrowed through contact, what is commonly known as Galton’s problem (Roberts and Winters, 2013)

Summary

Introduction

Specialty section: This article was submitted to Cultural Psychology, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology. Large-scale psychological differences within China explained by rice vs wheat agriculture by Talhelm, T., Zhang, X., Oishi, S., Shimin, C., Duan, D., Lan, X., et al (2014) Science 344, 603–608. The data come from individual measures of provinces in China. While the data is analyzed carefully, one aspect that is not directly controlled for is the historical relations between these provinces.

Results

Conclusion