People in rice-farming cultures perceive emotions more accurately

Abstract

Are people in interdependent cultures more accurate at perceiving people's emotional expressions? One problem with testing this question is that people tend to be more accurate at perceiving emotions of people of their own ethnic group. That makes it impossible to test East-West cultural differences using the same emotion pictures. We got around this problem by testing for cultural differences between southern and northern China. Southern China traditionally farmed rice, which requires more interdependence than the wheat farming of northern China. Paying more attention to people's emotions may have been useful in rice cultures because farmers had to manage shared irrigation networks and exchange labor more than wheat farmers. In Study 1, students who had grown up in rice-farming provinces guessed people's emotions in the Mind in the Eyes test more accurately than people who had grown up in wheat-farming provinces. In Study 2, we tested students from 13 prefectures (similar to US counties) in a single province along China's rice-wheat border. People from the rice side of the border perceived emotions more accurately than people from the wheat side. These results connect a long-term ecological cause (rice farming) to a modern psychological outcome (emotion perception). These results also offer an explanation for broader cultural differences in emotion perception.