deep history matters. Just as some scholars have
connected individualism in the U.S. and elsewhere
to cowboys, my research explores how today’s
collectivistic and individualistic cultures in China
may reflect the agricultural heritage of specific
regions. Along the Yangtze River and farther south,
people have farmed paddy rice for generations.
To the north, they have farmed wheat.
Rice farming is a lot more work than wheat
farming. Anthropologists observing traditional agri-
culture in China, Malaysia and West Africa have
found that rice farmers spent about twice as many
hours working their fields as wheat farmers. That
difference led rice farmers to create labor-ex-
change systems: “You help me this week; I’ll help
you next week.” (Of course, rice villages didn’t in-
vent the idea of helping one another—my ances-
tors in Kansas’s corn fields went to communal
barn raisings—but research suggests that labor
exchanges were a more critical, binding part of
relationships in rice villages than in other farming
regions.) In addition, while wheat farmers could
rely on rainfall, paddy rice farmers needed to build
irrigation systems to get enough water. Shared
irrigation required rice farmers to work together,
sometimes filling and draining fields in sync and
splitting the system’s maintenance tasks.
The upshot is that rice and wheat farming put
southern and northern China on different cultural
paths with enduring consequences. It’s safe to say
that few (if any) of the middle school students in
the creativity study have farmed rice or wheat
themselves. Yet what many of them drew when
pen hit paper connects to their ancestors’ agricul-
tural legacy. Culture has roots that are sometimes
hidden even from the people it touches.
The findings are also a warning against cultural
chauvinism. If we zoom out, the differences be-
tween China’s individualistic north and collectivis-
tic south might offer a microcosm for ideas that
people have held about the “collectivistic East and
individualistic West” writ large. Western countries
have tended to lead the way in innovation—at
least as defined by the metrics we Westerners
have created. Perhaps we have been overlooking
China’s prowess at adaptive creativity. For exam-
ple, China didn’t invent the assembly line, but the
nation’s people improved this system in what has
become a flourishing manufacturing sector.
The scientists behind the drawing test conclude
that adaptive and boundary-breaking creativity are
two different and useful skill sets. Their results with
students in the rice and wheat regions support prior
research that has asserted that individualists break
boundaries because they are more “open to new
experiences, autonomous, self-confident, and im-
pulsive,” whereas collectivists may be better at con-
necting ideas and adapting them in the implemen-
tation stage, the researchers write. The true take-
away might be in recognizing the power of pairing
these approaches: a little rice and a little wheat.
Are you a scientist who specializes in neurosci-
ence, cognitive science or psychology? And have
you read a recent peer-reviewed paper that you
would like to write about for Mind Matters? Please
send suggestions to Scientific American’s Mind
Matters editor Daisy Yuhas at pitchmindmatters@
gmail.comOPINION
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