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Culture and psychology 文化与心理 You are what you eat 吃什么你就是什么 Or, rather, what you grow to eat 或者说，种什么来吃你就是什么 May 10th 2014 | From the print edition of The Economist 译者：Wesyman 中文音频： 英文音频： THAT orientals and occidentals think in different ways is not mere prejudice. Many psychological studies conducted over the past two decades suggest Westerners have a more individualistic, analytic and abstract mental life than do East Asians. Several hypotheses have been put forward to explain this. 说东方人和西方人思维方式不一样，这可不只是偏见。过去的二十年里，许多心理学研究都显示西方人比东亚人更个人主义、更擅长分析和抽象思维。为了解释这个现象，研究者们提出了若干种假说。 One, that modernisation promotes individualism, falls at the first hurdle: Japan, an ultra-modern country whose people have retained a collective outlook. A second, that a higher prevalence of infectious disease in a place makes contact with strangers more dangerous, and causes groups to turn inward, is hardly better. Europe has had its share of plagues; probably more that either Japan or Korea. And though southern China is notoriously a source of infection (influenza pandemics often start there), this is not true of other parts of that enormous country. 一假说认为现代化发展促进了个人主义，但过不了第一关：日本，该国极度现代化，但其国民保持了集体主义的观念。假说二认为如果一个地方有传染病肆虐，与陌生人交流的风险就会更大，便导致当地族群变得内向，这说法也比第一个强不到哪。欧洲是有经历过瘟疫，大概比日本和韩国都多。尽管中国南部也是臭名昭著的传染病之源（流感大流行常常从那里开始），但在这个庞大国家的其他地区却不存在这种现象。 That led Thomas Talhelm of the University of Virginia and his colleagues to look into a third suggestion: that the crucial difference is agricultural. The West’s staple is wheat; the East’s, rice (see article). Before the mechanisation of agriculture a farmer who grew rice had to expend twice as many hours doing so as one who grew wheat. To deploy labour efficiently, especially at times of planting and harvesting, rice-growing societies as far apart as India, Malaysia and Japan all developed co-operative labour exchanges which let neighbours stagger their farms’ schedules in order to assist each other during these crucial periods. Since, until recently, almost everyone alive was a farmer, it is a reasonable hypothesis that such a collective outlook would dominate a society’s culture and behaviour, and might prove so deep-rooted that even now, when most people earn their living in other ways, it helps to define their lives. 于是，弗吉尼亚大学的托马斯-塔尔赫姆和他的同事决定研究第三个假说：差异关键在农业。西方的主食是小麦，东方是水稻（见文）。在农业机械化之前，种水稻的农民必须比种小麦的多花一倍的时间劳作。为了有效调度劳作时间，尤其在种稻和收割的时节，相隔千里的各水稻种植社会（印度，马来西亚和日本）都发展出了合作劳动交换机制，让邻里可以错开彼此的务农日程，以便在非常时期互相帮助。因为在近代以前几乎每个活人都是农民，所以假说认为这种集体观念会支配一个社会的文化和行为是有道理的，而这种观念可能已深深扎根于文化，以至于直到今天，尽管大部分人不以农业为生，但还是多少决定了他们的生活。 Mr Talhelm realised that this idea is testable. Large swathes of China, particularly in the north, depend not on rice, but on wheat. That, as he explains in a paper in Science, let him and his team put some flesh on this theory’s bones. 塔尔赫姆意识到这个假说是可以测试的。中国有大片地带，尤其在北方，是以小麦而不是水稻作为主要作物。如他在《科学》杂志的论文所说，他和他的团队借此得以为理论的骨架添一些肌肉。 The team gathered almost 1,200 volunteers from all over China and asked them questions to assess their individualism or collectivism. The answers bore little relation to the wealth of a volunteer’s place of origin, which Mr Talhelm saw as a proxy for how modern it was, or to its level of public health. There was a striking correlation, though, with whether it was a rice-growing or a wheat-growing area. This difference was marked even between people from neighbouring counties with different agricultural traditions. His hypothesis that the different psychologies of East and West are, at least in part, a consequence of their agriculture thus looks worth further exploration. And such exploration is possible—for India, too, has rice-growing and wheat-growing regions. 该团队从中国各地聚集了近1200名志愿者，向他们提问并评估他们的个人主义或集体主义程度。志愿者的答案与他们来源地的富裕程度（塔尔赫姆用该因素来衡量这些地区的现代化程度或公共医疗水平）几乎没有关联。然而，答案却与来源地种植水稻或小麦的问题表现出显著的相关性。这种差异甚至在有着不同农业传统的邻县间也有体现。他的假说认为，东西方的心理学差异至少部分可归因于农业差异，因此值得进一步探索。而这样的探索是可行的——因为印度也同时拥有水稻和小麦的地区。 How resilient Asia’s collectivist cultures will be as they lose their rural roots remains to be seen. But the message from Japan, and also from more recently modernised places such as Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore, seems to be “quite resilient”. For some, Asian values—with their tenets of solidarity and collective action—are cause for celebration. For others, they are stifling and a barrier to social progress. But whichever side you take, if Mr Talhelm is correct they are only “Asian” because, back in the neolithic, farmers in many parts of that continent found Oryza a more congenial crop to grow than Triticum. 随着去农业化，亚洲各国的集体主义文化弹性有多强还有待观察。但从日本，以及其他新近现代化地区（韩国，台湾，香港和新加坡）传达的信息来看，还是“颇有弹性”的。对一些国家来说，亚洲的价值观——团结和集体行动的信条——是值得庆祝的。但对其他国家来说，又是社会进步的阻碍。但不论你站在哪一方，如果塔尔赫姆是对的，亚洲的价值观只是“亚洲的”而已，因为早在新石器时期，许多在这块大陆上的农夫们就已发现稻属植物比小麦属植物更适宜种植。 From the print edition: Science and technology |
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