Thomas Talhelm (University of Chicago Booth School of Business)

Growing rice is very different from growing wheat. Traditional paddy rice required about twice as many labor hours as wheat, which led rice farmers to share labor. Paddy rice also relied on irrigation networks, which require farmers to coordinate their water use and flood their fields at the same time. These elements gave rice villages a dense social world, with tight social ties. Across four studies, I test thousands of people’s thought style and behavior across China. The data shows that these patterns of behavioral differences fall along the historical borders of rice and wheat—even in modern day Starbucks.