New paper in @PsychScience! 🚨 Here's the one-minute version. ⏱️ There are two cities in Iran. One has water, so it has gardens, grapes, and the famous Shiraz wine.
Then there's Yazd. Yazd is bone dry.
Yazd has a reputation for restraint, thrift, hard work, and strict religion. Shiraz is known for poetry, art, enjoying life, and wine. 🍷
My co-author Hamid wondered, is that a coincidence, or is there a climate connection here? Water scarcity encourages long-term thinking? So we tested college students in Yazd and Shiraz with surveys on indulgence and long-term orientation.
Bingo! Dry Yazd = long-term thinking is important. Rainy Shiraz = indulgence is important.
But are these just things people say, or is this really in people's behavior? We posted an ad for a long-term stable job and ad for a fun, flexible startup on Divar (Iran's version of Craigslist).
Then we waited for resumes to come in. Shirazis were attracted to the startup job, and Yazdis were attracted to the safe, stable job (despite similar levels of wealth in the two cities). So it seems real!
But is this just an Iran story? Iran's a dry place. Maybe water is more important for people's psychology there? To the World Values Survey! 🦸♂️
In countries with a history of more plentiful water, people value indulgence more...
...and thinking for the long term less.
But what about confounds? Water scarcity predicts long-term orientation even after taking into account lots of potential confounds, like wealth, education, and religion.
So cultures' history of water scarcity shapes their psychologies, but that got us to thinking about climate change. Water is changing drastically right NOW.
So we tested it! We brought students to the lab and showed them articles about climate change. One predicted more dire water scarcity. The other predicted more plentiful water.
After reading about water scarcity, people rated long-term thinking MORE important and indulgence LESS important. The opposite happened after reading about plentiful water.
Maybe this is a shred of hope for humanity in the face of climate change? Our brains seem to respond instinctively to water scarcity with exactly the sort of mindset we'll need to fight climate change.
These results are another piece of evidence on how cultures seem to be adapted to our long-term historical environments.
I hope we'll be increasingly using that adaptive mindset to respond to the changes in our environment now.
The paper is now out in Psychological Science. Much credit to Hamidreza Harati. It's great to see psychological theory starting based on experiences outside the US! journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.11…
I flubbed the graph here! 😬 Here's the indulgence graph.
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🚨 New paper! 🚨 Rice theory = labor and irrigation networks of rice farming causes collectivism, but causality is hard to nail down in the pesky real world. Then THIS happened... nature.com/articles/s4146…
It was the 1950s. WWII and China's civil war had ended. The government wanted to put former soldiers to work and boost food production. So they started building collective state farms.
Important: The govt created many farms from "wasteland"--areas on the periphery that **weren't farms before**. Some lands needed irrigation. Some were swamps and needed draining.
🚨 New study in @NatureHumBehav! 🚨 It's a showdown of psychology vs. money. 💵 I'm calling it "psychologists run studies in the places they're LEAST likely to find effects."
It all started in a meeting room at U Chicago. I listened to my colleague Devin Pope present his mega study. He asked **10,000** people on MTurk to push the "A" and "B" buttons as many times as they could for 10 minutes. academic.oup.com/restud/article…
He tried 18 different ways to influence people. Some were money. Some were psychology.
Neuroticism is a puzzle for evolution. Worrying seems to be pretty bad for humans! Studies have linked it to lots of bad outcomes. But neuroticism is a good early warning alert! 🚨 New study found neurotic areas of Germany suffered fewer Covid cases.
Openness to experience was the opposite, at least in the US. Open-minded regions got hit harder at first. Could be all because openness entails more social mixing, more travel.
But here's the twist: The harm of openness switched off after a few months. By September 2020, open-minded places in the US had FEWER cases on average. Upsides of open-mindedness could be openness to masks, Zoom, and other adjustments.
New paper out! I was in China when COVID-19 broke out, and I was dumb enough to walk counting how many people were wearing masks.
With a research team, we observed 1,300 people in seven cities in a radius around Wuhan.
Cases got really bad. Cities locked down. But that was later! These were the EARLY, ambiguous days--before people knew whether this was a real threat or needless panic. The US @Surgeon_General was still telling people masks don't work.
New paper just out in PNAS! Rice-farming societies have tighter social norms than wheat-farming and herding societies. Open access: pnas.org/content/early/…
Why? Rice farmers shared labor and faced commons problems with shared irrigation networks. Strong social norms helped farmers coordinate labor, water, repairing channels.
Using survey data from ~11,000 people across China, historical rice farming predicted tighter social norms in the present day. China is a great place to test the effect of rice because it has rice and wheat areas with similar ethnicity, religion, government, etc.