New Residents Adopt Old Cultures
Research finds evidence that moving to a new cultural region influences people’s thought style.
- By
- March 30, 2026
- CBR - Behavioral Science
As globalization transforms life around the world, some people worry that local cultures are disappearing. But a study of college students in China shows deep-rooted cultures can live on, even through new residents.
Chicago Booth’s Thomas Talhelm and an international team of 18 other researchers gave psychological tests to students who moved across regions for college. Their work demonstrates that newcomers tended to adopt cultural traits that are rooted in the agricultural histories of their adopted region.
“We still have these overriding intuitions where we think modernization is going to make people more individualistic and more Western, that modernization is erasing culture,” says Talhelm. “And it really seems like that’s not the case. Historical culture is still somehow preserved in the modern world.”
In a 2014 paper, Talhelm argued that even as modernization and urbanization are supplanting the sickle and plow with skyscrapers and subway lines, cultural ways of thinking in China can be traced to regions’ agricultural histories. People in southern China traditionally cultivated rice, while those in the north mostly grew wheat. According to what Talhelm calls the rice theory of culture, these differences gave rise to distinctive traits. Rice farming encouraged more cooperation, while wheat farming fostered more individualism. (For more, read “What Rice Farming Can Teach Us about Happiness.”)
In the newly published study, Talhelm and his coauthors followed nearly 1,500 students who moved from areas associated with one type of farming to the other. Between 2015 and 2018, the researchers had the students complete a test designed to tease out their cultural thought styles right after they arrived at college, at the end of their first semester, and three years later. The tests measured holistic thought, which emphasizes relationships and context and tends to be more common in interdependent cultures such as those associated with rice farming.
Participants completed a categorization task asking which two of three things they would group together. For example, if the three items were a mitten, a scarf, and a hand, grouping the mitten with the hand would suggest holistic thought by emphasizing the relationship, as the hand wears the mitten. Pairing the mitten and the scarf would indicate more analytical or individualistic thinking, as the two garments are items of winter clothing.
Overall, the students thought less holistically over time, consistent with the idea that college education can promote more-analytic thought styles. But that change was less pronounced for those who moved from wheat-farming areas to rice-growing regions, hinting that the more community-oriented culture of rice areas may have softened some of the broader shift away from holistic thinking during college.
How history shapes thinking
Relationship-focused “holistic” thinking among Chinese college students declined over time but much more so for students who moved to regions historically shaped by wheat farming. Wheat is traditionally farmed more independently, while rice is grown and harvested more cooperatively.
Students who moved from rice-growing areas to wheat-farming regions, by contrast, experienced much larger declines in holistic thinking, which points to the strong pull of individualistic wheat culture toward more analytical thinking.
The researchers ruled out other factors that might have influenced the students’ thought styles over time, such as whether they moved from a rural area to a big city and how well they scored on college entrance exams. Crossing the “rice-wheat border” was key, they find. This is surprising because the sample included students who moved to modern megacities such as Beijing (in the wheat region) and Shanghai (rice region), which seem disconnected from histories of farming.
“They’re moving to these areas that have these cultural traits and, basically, fitting in with the people there,” Talhelm says. He notes that this dovetails with findings from a 2003 study that found US exchange students in Japan think more holistically than US students at home but less holistically than people born in Japan. The recent findings, he says, provide stronger evidence that moving to a new cultural region actually influences people’s thought style (as opposed to the alternative, which is that people who already thought holistically had decided to move to holistic cultures).
That said, he cautions against applying the findings to modern immigration more broadly, noting the study looked only at movement among young people within a single country and mostly a single ethnicity. Acculturation, he says, might look different among older people, whose habits tend to be more firmly entrenched, or among people moving across ethnic lines.
But as his prior research has established, culture has deep roots. It appears to be sticky and self-sustaining. The recent study suggests that it is also transferrable: While culture at the group or regional level is stable and enduring, individuals are flexible, adopting new thought styles within just a few months. “Societies seem to have this remarkable power of legacy,” he says. “But if you take an individual from one society to another, they’ll adapt pretty quickly.”
- Alexander Scott English, Thomas Talhelm, Rongtian Tong, Liuqing Wei, Xingyu Li, Jianhong Ma, Haitao Yu, Shihou Zhou, Wei Zhang, Tianhai Lin, Meng Zhang, Li-Juan Hu, Peng Cui, Evan Hacker, Bin Ling, Brooke Logterman, Zhijia Zeng, Cheng Huang, and Zhongya Liu, “Moving to Wheat-Farming Regions Increases Analytic Thought, but Moving to Cities Does Not: A Three-Wave Longitudinal Study,” British Journal of Psychology, September 2025.
- Shinobu Kitayama, Sean Duffy, Tadashi Kawamura, and Jeff T. Larsen, “Perceiving an Object and Its Context in Different Cultures: A Cultural Look at New Look,” Psychological Science, May 2003.
- Thomas Talhelm, Xuemin Zhang, Shigehiro Oishi, Shimin Chen, Dongyuan Duan, Xuezhao Lan, and Shinobu Kitayama, “Large-Scale Psychological Differences Within China Explained by Rice Versus Wheat Agriculture,” Science, May 2014.
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