Author: Bruce Bower / Source: Science News
Deeply ingrained cultural differences in everyday behavior between natives of northern and southern China bubble up while sipping coffee in Starbucks and other cafés.
How close people sit and whether they dodge or move chairs blocking aisles reveals whether their cultural roots go back to rice farming in southern China or wheat farming in northern China, researchers report April 25 in Science Advances.
As many as 9,000 years of neighboring families working together to cultivate rice paddies in southern China has encouraged a lasting focus on others over self, even among that region’s city folk today, say psychologist Thomas Talhelm and colleagues. Social interdependence remains a cultural value of the region, the investigators note.
That dynamic plays out in coffee shops. Middle-class city dwellers in southern China who have never farmed rice often sit with others and show deference by walking around chairs blocking aisles, Talhelm’s group says. In northern cities, people more often sit alone and move offending chairs out of the way. A long history of more individualistic wheat and millet farming in the north has promoted a focus on self over others, the scientists propose.
“Different agricultural legacies have given northern and southern China distinctive cultures of social behavior, even among people who have left farming behind,” says Talhelm, of the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business.
A lingering sense of interdependence among residents of southern Chinese cities, including Hong Kong, challenges the idea…
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