Traditional paddy rice farmers had to share labor and coordinate irrigation in a way that most wheat farmers did not. We observed people in everyday life to test whether these agricultural legacies gave rice-farming southern China a more interdependent culture and wheat-farming northern China a...

Evidence across several studies leads to the conclusion that having moved and living in an unstable community are associated with some of psychology’s most central variables: happiness, self-concept, and altruism. We review evidence that mobile communities and mobile people have more...

Ecological psychology has boomed from a rare form of psychology to a flourishing field, including psychologists, sociologists, and economists. We review the development of the field from early studies to more recent advances in subsistence theories, environmental challenges, human environments,...

Previous studies have found that Westerners value high intensity positive emotions more than people in China and Japan, yet few studies have compared actual rates of smiling across cultures. Particularly rare are observational studies of real-time smiling (as opposed to smiling in photos). In...

Why are megachurches (at least 2,000 attendees in weekend services) and Meetup groups (www.meetup.com) more popular in some cities or states than others? Our answer: residential mobility (when people move a lot, they like groups that are easy to join and easy to leave; they might move again soon,...

Henrich and colleagues (2010) summarized cultural differences in psychology and argued that people from one particular culture are outliers: people from societies that are Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD). In this study, we show that liberals think WEIRDer than...

Cross-cultural psychologists have mostly contrasted East Asia with the West. However, this study shows that there are psychological differences within China almost as large as differences between East and West. We propose that a history of farming rice makes cultures more interdependent, while...