There are multiple ways to define wisdom (Staudinger and Glück, 2011). The person-centric approach defines wisdom as a function or characteristic of a person (Sternberg, 2019). For example, many studies have explored wisdom through autobiographic experiences of wise exemplars who were nominated by their peers (Weststrate and Glück, 2017; Weststrate et al., 2018). Moreover, scholars have also used decontextualized and global self-report scales to assess wisdom (Ardelt, 2003; Webster, 2003; Levenson et al., 2005; Glück et al., 2013). This approach has provided partial consensus concerning wisdom-related characteristics, which include openness to experiences, agreeableness, conscientiousness, extraversion, emotional stability (i.e., low neuroticism), and a greater sense of psychological and subjective well-being (Ardelt et al., 2019).

However, the person-centric perspective on wisdom has many drawbacks. Numerous well-known exemplars of wisdom (e.g., Albert Einstein, Martin Luther King, and Mahatma Gandhi) as nominated by laypeople have shown more wisdom in their professional fields than in their personal daily lives (Sternberg, 2019). This suggests that wisdom is not as stable across different situations as some personality types. Moreover, global and decontextualized self-report scales may be prone to bias, as participants tend to respond in socially desirable ways. Self-biased responding is of particular relevance when assessing wisdom, as one of the central factors of wisdom concerns intellectual humility and the absence of bias (Staudinger and Glück, 2011; Glück et al., 2013). Relying on self-report scales also inhibits scientists from exploring the processes of wisdom in everyday life (Grossmann et al., 2020). Finally, as reviewed below, increasingly many empirical studies suggest that different social-ecological contexts can significantly affect individual wisdom-related performance (Grossmann et al., 2012, 2016; Thomas and Kunzmann, 2013; Brienza and Grossmann, 2017; Zachry et al., 2018).

To overcome these drawbacks, some scholars have argued that wisdom can be better understood as a situational characteristic rather than a personal characteristic (Grossmann, 2017). They proposed characterizing wisdom from a social-ecological perspective to understand the cognitive processes underlying practical wisdom as exhibited in daily life (Grossmann et al., 2020). In this context, wisdom is best understood as wise reasoning concerning social conflicts based on the individual’s perspective-taking ability, a search for compromise and resolution, consideration of the possibility of change, and acknowledging uncertainty and the limits of one’s own knowledge (Grossmann et al., 2013). This concept predominately builds on earlier work within the Berlin Wisdom Paradigm and neo-Piagetian developmental psychology (Basseches, 1980; Baltes and Smith, 2008; Kallio, 2015). To measure wise reasoning economically using large sample sizes, Brienza et al. (2018) created the Situated Wise Reasoning Scale (SWIS), which addresses variables such as perspective taking, consideration of change and alternatives, intellectual humility, search for compromise/resolution, and adopting an outsider’s vantage point. We use this scale in the current study.

Emerging empirical evidence indicates that social-ecological factors – such as situation, region, economics, and culture – shape the development of wise reasoning. For example, one is more likely to reason wisely when the other person involved in the situation is of higher status than oneself (Brienza and Grossmann, 2017). The same study also found that wise reasoning varies across different states of United States. Specifically, state-level affluence inversely predicts the propensity for wise reasoning. In addition to differences in wise reasoning across regions within the same culture, wise reasoning also varies among cultures. As noted earlier, Grossmann et al. (2012) found that Japanese young adults showed greater use of wise reasoning concerning interpersonal conflicts than did Americans. This suggests that the American independent culture – which promotes the view of people being unique and independent from social relationships – may inhibit wise reasoning. Compared with other proximal factors, culture as a distal factor is relatively stable and is likely to influence the elements of daily situations that individuals encounter (Oyserman et al., 2002b; Oyserman and Uskul, 2008). Therefore, it is of interest to explore wise reasoning from the perspective of this distal factor.

How people subsist within their environment plays an important role in shaping their reasoning and behavior concerning daily life events (Berry, 1967; Markus and Kitayama, 1991; Nisbett et al., 2001). Researchers compared three types of communities – farming, fishing, and herding – that share language, history, and religion in Turkey’s eastern Black Sea region and found that different eco-cultural contexts had different cognitive tendencies with regards to categorization and reasoning (Uskul et al., 2008). Similarly, different ecological contexts in southern and northern China have historically led to different social patterns. Initial evidence suggests that a history of rice farming made the people of southern China more interdependent, whereas wheat farming made the people of northern China more independent (Talhelm et al., 2014). Increasingly empirical studies suggest that historical farming can affect current-day social cognition both across China and internationally (Dong et al., 2018; Talhelm et al., 2018; Thomson et al., 2018; Liu et al., 2019). The “rice theory” – which is an extension of subsistence theory – argues that, compared with dryland crops, rice farming requires irrigation systems and approximately twice the labor hours of wheat farming, such that farmers had to share and coordinate labor more than wheat farmers (Talhelm and Oishi, 2018). These circumstances may lead to rice-farming people being likely to develop wise reasoning in social conflicts, as the social-ecological context requires maintaining harmony and mitigating interpersonal conflict.

Prior research found that people from rice-farming areas of China showed more loyalty (or nepotism) toward friends over strangers (Talhelm et al., 2014). The loyalty and nepotism task was used to assess whether the participants drew a clear distinction between how they treated strangers and how they treated friends. Participants were asked to read about someone (friend or stranger) who behaved either honestly or dishonestly, which caused the participant to gain or lose certain money. They could then spend their own money to reward or punish the other person (Wang et al., 2011). The loyalty/nepotism value was obtained by subtracting the amount they punished their friend with from the amount they awarded to their friend. People with greater loyalty/nepotism are more willing to preserve relationships with honest friends and to forgive dishonest friends. When faced with conflict with a friend or a colleague in the workplace, these people may tend to take the other’s perspective and search for compromise. Bao Shuya maybe the most famous one in Chinese history. He and Guan Zhong (also known as Guanzi) were paragons of friendship, much like David and Jonathan in the Bible. They were business partners and very close companions when they were young. Guanzi invested little money in their business ventures but insisted on receiving more of the profit. When the members of Bao’s family complained, Bao simply said, “Guan Zhong’s family is poor, he needs more money than I do.” Bao also recommended Guanzi to the king, saying that Guanzi would make an excellent prime minister. Under Guanzi’s administration, Qi attained the height of its wealth and power. Later generations praise Bao’s wisdom in dealing with the relationship with Guanzi, rather than crediting Guanzi’s wise administration (Si, 2006).

Based on the information above, we proposed two hypotheses: (i) People in the rice-farming regions of southern China are wiser about interpersonal conflicts with friends or colleagues in the workplace than are people in the northern wheat-farming regions. (ii) Loyalty/nepotism explains the cultural differences in wise reasoning between southern rice farmers and northern wheat farmers.

We recruited 885 participants from a Chinese survey platform similar to MTurk¹. The participants were instructed to complete “a survey of daily life” on the website. At the end of the survey, we asked participants to state where they grew up. This let us identify from which provinces they originated. To assess their attentiveness to the study while participating, we included two questions (Huynh et al., 2017). One question was the statement “I conscientiously attempted to follow instructions to the best of my ability,” which was rated on a Likert-type scale from 1 “none of the time” to 5 “all of the time.” We excluded those who indicated that they were inattentive “some of the time” or less frequently (n = 212). We also excluded those who were in conflict with their family members and those who indicated that the conflict started over a year ago, as they were asked to recall recent experiences in daily life and specifically with a friend or colleague (n = 172). Finally, we excluded participants from the historically herding provinces (Talhelm et al., 2014) and provinces that only had five members or fewer in the study group (n = 14; Tibet, Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang, and Hong Kong). The final sample consisted of 487 participants from 25 provinces (355 males, see Table 1 for details). Participants’ average age was 25.37 years (SD = 6.75). According to the website, the average time required to complete the survey was 8 min and 28 s. Each participant received 3 Yuan when they finished the survey.

This research was approved by the Ethics Board of Nanjing Normal University, and the questionnaire was completed voluntarily.

As shown in Table 2, loyalty/nepotism was positively associated with wise reasoning (r = 0.31, p < 0.001), whereas gender (r = −0.08, p = 0.07), age (r = 0.07, p = 0.15), and social class (r = 0.07, p = 0.12) had negligible associations with wise reasoning among individuals. Among provinces, wise reasoning was positively associated with the percentage of rice farming (r = 0.45, p = 0.04) and GDP per capita (r = 0.46, p = 0.04).

Following the rice theory (Talhelm et al., 2014), we performed a hierarchical linear model analysis that considered participants (level 1) nested within provinces (level 2). The results in Table 3 show that rice farming predicted wise reasoning (model 1; Figure 1). The effect remained significant after we accounted for social class (model 2) and age (model 3). To disentangle the subcomponents of wise-reasoning strategies whose endorsement was best predicted by rice farming, we also ran several analyses with the subcomponents of the scale. We found that rice farming predicts all subcomponents except the outsider’s vantage point subcomponent (γ = 0.34, SE = 0.18, P = 0.08). The largest effect was observed for the search for compromise/resolution subcomponent (γ = 0.52, SE = 0.12, P < 0.001).

Similar to the rice-theory study, we included GDP per capita as a measure of modernization (model 4) and pathogen prevalence measures (model 5) to test modernization (Greenfield, 2016) and pathogen theory (Fincher et al., 2008). Historical GDP was used in present study since several studies have found that there’s a lag time between economic change and cultural change (Grossmann and Varnum, 2015; Thomson et al., 2018). Our study found that rice farming explained regional differences in wise reasoning, whereas modernization (γ = 0.20, SE = 0.11, P = 0.08) and pathogen prevalence (γ = −0.05, SE = 0.06, P = 0.39) did not.

We subsequently examined whether loyalty/nepotism mediated the relationship between rice farming and wise reasoning using the mediation package in R (Tingley et al., 2015). As Figure 2 shows, rice farming was positively related to loyalty/nepotism and wise reasoning. The effect of rice farming on wise reasoning was significant after adjusting for loyalty/nepotism. Moreover, the indirect effect of rice farming on wise reasoning via loyalty/nepotism was significant (see Figure 2 for 95% confidence intervals, simulation replications = 5,000).