Jennifer Tapias Derch
Jonas Salk, who developed one of the first successful polio vaccines, once observed that “our greatest responsibility is to be good ancestors.” His suggestion echoes the well-known Seventh Generation principle that some Native American tribes use to judge decisions by how they will affect our descendants far into the future.
One of the outstanding puzzles in social science is what disposes people to invest more thought in the future. Research by University of Queensland’s Hamidreza Harati and Chicago Booth’s Thomas Talhelm homes in on one possible factor: water access. People who live in water-rich areas tend to prioritize indulgence, while people who live in areas that suffer from water scarcity more often embrace a culture of conservation and long-term thinking, they find.
The work by Harati and Talhelm started with a comparison between two Iranian cities: Shiraz and Yazd. The cities are demographically and climatically similar, with one exception. Shiraz, known for its wine, is a garden-rich metropolis with plenty of rain. Yazd, 275 miles to the north, is one of the driest cities in Iran. Harati and Talhelm exploited this difference in two studies.
In the first, they recruited university students in the regions for a survey in which they asked respondents their thoughts about long-term orientation and indulgence. How much does persistence pay off, for instance? Or, how important is it to set time aside for having fun? The researchers find that students from water-scarce Yazd were inclined toward long-term thinking and downplayed the importance of indulgence; while students from Shiraz were the opposite.
For the second, a field study, the researchers posted job openings for a computer programmer, a customer-service agent, and an office assistant. There were two postings for each job, identical but for one attribute: whether they emphasized stability at a well-established company or excitement at a startup. The researchers find that students in Yazd favored the stable job while those from Shiraz were more likely to apply to the startup.
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What Rice Farming Can Teach Us about HappinessA third study did not compare people from Shiraz and Yazd but instead primed students at the University of Tehran to think about water becoming more abundant or scarce in the future. Students read scientific articles predicting that climate change would make water more abundant or more scarce. Using questions similar to those in the first study, they find that participants nudged to feel water is scarce reported more of a long-term orientation than those in the abundance group.
To generalize and reinforce the findings, Harati and Talhelm merged data on long-term orientation from the World Values Survey with per capita freshwater availability from the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization. Looking across nearly 100 countries, they find a consistent relationship between water availability and cultural disposition: more water meant more indulgent attitudes.
This work is part of a growing line of investigation in academic literature into the connection between environment and behavior—the way in which local ecology refracts and echoes in local culture. As the researchers note, there is something striking about the subtle but pervasive influence of people’s environments. Though modern infrastructure that didn’t exist previously allows the residents of Yazd to get water at their kitchen sink, the history of water scarcity persists in deep cultural currents.
A clearer understanding of the cultural origins of long-term orientation, Harati and Talhelm argue, is important given its relationship to many societal outcomes. One study of students in the same school system in Florida, conducted by University of Rochester’s David Figlio, University of California at Los Angeles’ Paola Giuliano, RAND Corporation’s Umut Özek, and Northwestern’s Paola Sapienza, finds that those whose parents were from cultures with a long-term orientation had better test scores, fewer absences, and higher graduation rates. Similarly, cultures that look ahead are known to save more money. Harati and Talhelm’s data fit this narrative: people in Yazd saved 46 percent more than those in Shiraz in 2020 as a share of GDP. Yazd also has a higher literacy rate and a higher percentage of university-age residents attending college.
Finally, emerging evidence from Norwegian University of Science and Technology’s Erik Saether, Ann Eide, and Øyvind Bjørgum suggests that groups that value the long run invest more in strategies to combat climate change. As Talhelm notes, there is hope in the fact that “the cultural value that helped humans adapt to environmental threats of our long-term past might help us adapt to the world’s biggest environmental threat of the future.”
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