A Comparative Study Of The Thinking Styles Of People From Chinese Rice-area And Wheat-area

Differences of thinking styles between the westerners and the easterners has drawn much attention in cross-cultural psychologist.Most researchers agree that t Western culture is more individualistic and analytic-thinking,whereas East Asian culture is more interdependent and holistic-thinking.Subsistence style theory is one of the most influential theories explaining the cause of cultural differences of thinking styles.Talhelm et al.have questioned about using agriculture and herd to explain the thinking styles differences between the East and the West,and proposed a new perspective--“Rice theory ”.They argue that wheat-growing and rice-growing is the primary ecological basis of thinking styles differences between the southern and the northern China.Wheat-growing has produced individualism culture and made people tend to be analytic-thinking,and rice-growing has created collectivism culture and made people tend to be holistic thinking.The goal of this study is to test the “Rice theory” further by comparing thinking style differences between people from rice and wheat agriculture in China.In this study 321 participants completed conceptual classification,conceptual structure,syllogistic reasoning and behavior attribution tasks which are reliable and sensitive measures of thinking style.The main findings were: there were no significant differences in conceptual classification task,conceptual structure,syllogistic reasoning and behavior attribution tasks between people from rice and wheat agriculture area in China.People from rice area did not more prefer holistic-thinking to analytic-thinking,the results do not support the “Rice theory”.