Credit to Alex English, who led this massive data collection of 1,400 students at 18 sites all over China longitudinally! 👏 @aenglishpsy.bsky.social

People who moved to wheat-farming areas dropped in relational thinking (more WEIRD). People who moved to rice areas retained it.

I'm not talking about just small towns. There are giant cities in both areas. For example, Shanghai is rice, and Beijing is wheat.

What DID explain people's change in thought style? Oddly enough, it was the history of rice farming and wheat farming in the area.

What if we look at GDP? Again, nothing. (If anything, the pattern is in the opposite direction—more developed = more relational pairings.)

But here's the actual data. Nothing!

We surveyed 188 psychology students and professors, and they thought so! We explained our study setup and asked them to guess the results. They thought students moving to cities would start to think much less relationally (also called "holistic").

People have the intuition that cities are individualistic, so maybe city people are WEIRD? Some have made that argument. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Why am I talking about being WEIRD? Because people in Western, individualistic cultures tend to choose more of these abstract pairings. @joehenrich.bsky.social @stevenheine.bsky.social www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Each time, students categorized objects in the triad task. Two belong to the same abstract category (train – bus). Two share a functional relationship (train – tracks).

We tested their cultural thought style right when they moved, again after one semester, and then after three years.

Do cities make people think WEIRD? Our answer might surprise you. We tracked 1,400 teenagers as they moved across China—some to giant cities like Shanghai, others to small towns like Zhoukou, Henan. bpspsychub.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...