AMERICANS and Europeans stand out from the rest of the world for our sense of ourselves as individuals. We like to think of ourselves as unique, autonomous, self-motivated, self-made. As the anthropologist Clifford Geertz observed, this is a peculiar idea.
People in the rest of the world are more likely to understand themselves as interwoven with other people — as interdependent, not independent. In such social worlds, your goal is to fit in and adjust yourself to others, not to stand out.
..In May, the journal Science published a study, led by a young University of Virginia psychologist, Thomas Talhelm, that ascribed these different orientations to the social worlds created by wheat farming and rice farming. Rice is a finicky crop. Because rice paddies need standing water, they require complex irrigation systems that have to be built and drained each year. One farmer’s water use affects his neighbor’s yield. A community of rice farmers needs to work together in tightly integrated ways.
.. As we enter a season in which the values of do-it-yourself individualism are likely to dominate our Congress, it is worth remembering that this way of thinking might just be the product of the way our forefathers grew their food and not a fundamental truth about the way that all humans flourish.
No Black Republicans in House
As David Wasserman, of FiveThirtyEight, has pointed out, the average Republican House district is now three-quarters white. There are no black Republicans in the House.
The Most Republican Company? The Makers of Wonder Bread
Most corporations involved in national politics don’t operate this way. Many take the approach often attributed to the former N.B.A. star Michael Jordan, who, when asked why he did not endorse a Democratic candidate in his home state of North Carolina, replied that “Republicans buy shoes, too.” (Whether he actually said it is in question.)
Do Children Just Take Their Parents’ Political Beliefs? It’s Not That Simple
A recent study shows that children who are raised to have strong beliefs are also more likely to rebel against those views as they age.
.. Children who come from homes where politics is a frequent topic of discussion are more likely to talk about politics once they leave home, exposing them to new viewpoints—which they then adopt with surprising frequency.