This article provides direct evidence of appearance discrimination in Chinese context based on an experimental approach. We perform a field experiment to study if people with more attractive faces are more likely to be contacted after submitting a resume on the job search website. We find...

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...

Traditional paddy rice farmers had to share labor and coordinate irrigation in a way that most wheat farmers did not. We observed people in everyday life to test whether these agricultural legacies gave rice-farming southern China a more interdependent culture and wheat-farming northern China a...

Data recently published in PNAS mapped out regional differences in the tightness of social norms across China. 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. Pre-modern...

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...

Cross-cultural psychologists have mostly contrasted East Asia with the West. However, this study shows that there are psychological differences within China almost as large as differences between East and West. We propose that a history of farming rice makes cultures more interdependent, while...