RUAN Jianqing, associate professor of the School of Management, Zhejiang University, publishes a paper entitled “Does Rice Farming Shape Individualism and Innovation?” in Food Policy to challenge the rice theory proposed in the May 9 issue of the journal Science in 2014.
In May 2014, Science published “Large-Scale Psychological Differences Within China Explained by Rice Versus Wheat Agriculture”, which put forward an immensely fascinating theory in accounting for the origin of the distinctions between collectivism and individualism in contemporary society. In this paper, it is suggested that this can be explained by the differences between rice and wheat farming. The findings of the paper stress that psychological differences between the people of northern and southern China mirror the differences between community-oriented East Asia and the more individualistic Western world—and the differences seem to have come about because southern China has grown rice for thousands of years, whereas the north has grown wheat. The authors of this paper employ the rice theory to account for the differences in innovation and why the Industrial Revolution took place first in the West.
RUAN Jianqing and his co-authors point out that this theory does not accord with the actual reality in China. They find that the findings in the rice theory are subject to the problems of sample bias, measurement error, and model misspecification. After rectifying these problems, most findings in the original paper no longer hold water. They also collect data on collectivism from other sources and link them with rice areas but fail to find any relationship as predicted by the rice theory. Thus, the role of rice farming in shaping cultural psychology and innovations seems to be much more muted.