Growing rice would make you more sociable than growing wheat…

Yes, growing rice would make us more collective, explains Hervé Poirier, but also more tolerant, more loyal, in short, more social than growing wheat. This is the striking demonstration of the “rice theory”.

Hervé Poirier, editor-in-chief of the scientific magazine Epsiloon, tells us today that it is wheat that shaped Western ways of thinking and rice that shaped Eastern ways of thinking.

franceinfo: It’s hard to believe this rice and wheat theory. Explain to us…

Hervé Poirier: It all starts from a simple observation: growing rice requires cooperation, in particular to manage the water that circulates between the rice fields. Whereas growing wheat (or corn), no. About ten years ago, an American psychologist, Thomas Talhelm, theorized that the predominance of wheat in Europe led to individualism and that of rice in East Asia to collectivism.

Wheat would also have favored universalism (by treating all others on an equal footing), and rice nepotism (by favoring those close to them). Wheat would have finally generated analytical thinking (by arranging objects into categories), and rice a holistic way of thinking (by favoring relationships, each thing being part of a whole). Vast and daring theory!

But not easy to demonstrate, is it?

No. These proven cultural differences can be linked to religion, the economic system, even genetics or climate. But the study just published by Thomas Talhelm is very convincing. He looked at two farms in Ningxia province, in northern China, created 50 kilometers apart during the Cultural Revolution, one growing rice, the other wheat.

A textbook case: the natural, cultural, political and economic environments are the same. Farmers were assigned to the two farms completely randomly. However, wheat farmers today appear to be close to the Western way of thinking…

How was this demonstrated?

By the circle test, consisting of representing yourself with your network of friends. The circle representing oneself is systematically larger on the wheat farm than on the rice farm – a test on the British and the Japanese showed the same tendency.

There is also the test of favoritism: in games, strangers are disadvantaged compared to friends on the rice farm, and not on the wheat farm – the same pattern as between Americans and Singaporeans. And there is the test of the rabbit image: in the wheat farm, it is more often associated with the image of a cat (both being animals) than in the rice farm, which mainly connects it like a carrot (privileging the relationship between things rather than their category).

The demonstration is striking: exploiting wheat makes you analytical, universalist and individualist. Whereas exploiting rice makes you holistic, nepotistic and collective. In other words, yes, agriculture precedes culture!