It matters whether you grow rice (needs irrigation funded and controlled by a larger group, and coordination of when you drain your fields) or wheat (more suitable for family farms), as studies have shown (including quasi-experimental work).
The “quasi experimental” study is in my opinion very silly. Here are their descriptions of the tests of cultural differences they ran
To test individualism:
Participants drew circles to represent the self and their friends in a diagram of their social network. Later, we measured the size of the self circle and the average of the friend circles.
To test loyalty/nepotism:
The task asks people to imagine going into a business deal with a friend, who then lies during the deal, which causes the participant to make less money in the deal. Participants can punish the friend for their dishonesty by paying a small amount of money to delete money from their bank account (paying 0–100 RMB to delete 0–1000 RMB [US$148]). In another scenario, the friend is honest, and they can reward the friend by paying to add money to their bank account. Crucially, participants completed two identical scenarios with a stranger. Thus, participants completed four scenarios in total (reward/punish friend/stranger). We analyzed whether participants treated the friend better than the stranger, even though the friend and the stranger acted the same. Treating the friend better could be seen positively as loyalty or negatively as nepotism.
To measure categorical vs relational thought style:
We measured holistic thought with the 14-item picture version of the triad task. In each triad, farmers saw a target object, such as the rabbit in Fig. 2. Then they chose one of two other objects to pair with it, such as a dog or carrot. One pairing belongs to the same abstract category (rabbits and dogs are mammals), and one pairing shares a functional relationship (rabbits eat carrots). We calculated the percentage of relational pairings as a measure of holistic thought.
I’d expect (and Claude agrees) there have been extensive & rigorous study made of each of these properties in the field of psychometrics, which makes their use of these tests unnecessary & strange. If one was charitable they could say that they wanted to use tests which had previously been correlated with rice-dominated/wheat-dominated farming areas, or that the relevant psychometric tests perhaps weren’t translated to Chinese.
The “quasi experimental” study is in my opinion very silly. Here are their descriptions of the tests of cultural differences they ran
To test individualism:
To test loyalty/nepotism:
To measure categorical vs relational thought style:
I’d expect (and Claude agrees) there have been extensive & rigorous study made of each of these properties in the field of psychometrics, which makes their use of these tests unnecessary & strange. If one was charitable they could say that they wanted to use tests which had previously been correlated with rice-dominated/wheat-dominated farming areas, or that the relevant psychometric tests perhaps weren’t translated to Chinese.