Interesting theory. The Chinese are fully aware of the "north-south" differences themselves, although they often attribute it to other reasons, such as legacy effects of numerous mongol/manchu/other "barbarian" invasions from the north through out China's history, which often times were stopped around the Yangtze River. This resulted in the north under "barbarian rule" for long period of time, while the south held refugees of original ethnic Han chinese from the north.

It annoys me a little that

a) Someone thinks so many people can be divided into just two groups

b) the idea that validating an assumption should also automatically validate the reason. People in the north might be more individualistic than in the south, and yes they grow wheat and not rice but that doesn't mean one depends on the other. It just doesn't seem all too scientific to confuse correlation with cause.

I know that Malcolm Gladwell comes in for pretty harsh criticism in HN (and that also applies to comments that might be supportive of Gladwell :)

However, I think it is worth pointing out that the "rice theory" in the virginia.edu post isn't particularly new.

In 'Outliers' (which came out six years ago) Gladwell writes extensively about the "rice theory" (and Gladwell may have relied on prior research by other folks)

He writes about rice farmers in southern China who value hard work, co-operation with each other, planning etc and attributes that to the "rice theory"

Gladwell also contrasts these rice farmers with European farmers. Chinese farmers typically were entrepreneurial, but European peasants were generally low-paid slaves/workers of some aristocratic landlord.

He also contrasts them with French farmers who did virtually nothing in winter, Russians who came up with proverbs like "If God doesn't bring it, the earth will not give it" etc.

We changed the url from [1], which was more sensational and not as close to the original source.

1. http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn25538-how-your-ancesto...

about the same type of difference is between western europe and slavic people, and even inside the slavic people themselves there is the same gradient - the more eastern ones, like Russians, are more "communal"/less "individualized" than say Polish. And my personal impression is that further east you go, beyond slavic part of Russia, an individuality gets even less respect/recognition, and in particular North Chinese being more individualistic than South, still noticeably less so even than Russians.

A theory that something requires more cooperation in the east vs. west and what applies gradually and across the whole Eurasia continent - what can it be?. I think there must be something else beyond mere cooperation behind the phenomenon of the "a person is nothing" principle getting stronger with move toward the east.

In the case of cultural differences, sunshine does more work than rice.

In the north, you are locked in home in winter, while in south you get to go around and meet more people.

Social "science."