Roughly 4 billion people live in cultures with a legacy of rice farm. Recent studies find that rice cultures are more interdependent than herding cultures and wheat-farming cultures. In China, people from rice-farming areas think more holistically and show less implicit individualism than people...

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...