Arctic instincts: The personality of East Asians
Is Confucianism a cause or a consequence of Chinese psychology?
Written by David Sun.
I never thought I’d be involved in science. I assumed you needed a lab coat and years of certification. My strange and accidental journey into science began on a hike in the Andean mountains of Peru when I was 17.
It was my first solo trip to South America, and after arriving in Cuzco I noticed that some of the local native people had an uncanny resemblance to East Asians – the appearance, the tense, braced, hardy gait, the reservedness and introversion, the stoicism. I thought nothing of it other than “how convenient that I might blend in and have some rapport with the locals” (I have a Manchu Chinese background). Fate had other plans for me.
On a hike through the mountains, I passed by a native Quechua woman who looked almost exactly like my own mother. I was shocked – imagine meeting your own mother or her identical twin in a distant foreign land. That brief moment remains clearer in my memory than the epic sights of Machu Picchu, wild sloths, giant tarantulas, and pink dolphins in the Amazon.
Later at an internet cafe, I found some discussions of Bering Strait theory, which postulates that the ancestors of Native Americans migrated from Siberia to the Americas via the Bering Strait during the late Pleistocene – around 15–25,000 years ago. The ancestors of East Asians also lived in Siberia, I discovered, before back migrating southwards during the Holocene, Ah, so that’s why we look so much alike! I proceeded to think nothing of it for several years.
While finishing up my undergrad in an unrelated field, I found myself daydreaming in class one day. My thoughts drifted back to that native Quechua woman. All of a sudden, I had an epiphany – an unshakable feeling that my own personality, and that of East Asians more generally, was a perfect fit for our ancestral Siberian environment. To further explore this hypothesis, I decided I should get into a PhD program and slowly chew through it with the help of mentors and advisors.
However, it was the peak of the “Great Awokening”, and there was a blackout in the English-speaking world on any academic exploration of psychological group differences. Many scientists were slandered, and some even lost their jobs. I feared that my prospects of getting into a decent program were bleak. When I reached out to various programs, my fear was confirmed. I was told that I was “engaging in outdated notions of environmental determinism,” that I was “playing with fire by suggesting evolved cognitive differences,” that “the political climate on our campus is highly unfavorable for these areas of research,” that “this is probably the worst time in history to be studying such topics,” and that “you will likely encounter extreme difficulties in securing grants.”
I had no choice but to pursue my studies alone: I would publish my findings in a peer reviewed scientific journal, and skip the PhD. I cashed out my savings and bought myself a year or two of runway time. A few weeks ago, the paper I wrote was finally published in the journal Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences.
Arctic instincts
My paper falls within the discipline of cultural psychology, which seeks to understand people’s culture and personality by examining the socioecological factors that they experienced over the last 10,000 years. Many interesting findings have been made already, as a recent literature review documents: population density predicts collectivism, tightness and future orientation; frontier regions are characterized by individualism and high agency; pathogen prevalence predicts collectivism; rice farming is associated with tightness and higher nepotism.
The exact mechanisms by which socioecology affects culture and personality are not always clear: they may be purely cultural; they may result from selective migration; they may be the product of natural selection acting on genes; or they may represent some mix, as in gene-cultural coevolution. However, humans did not parachute into their various homelands precisely 10,000 years ago. The 60,000 year migratory period that began when humans left Africa has been sorely neglected in psychology.
Ancient Siberian extreme-cold adaptation is already frequently invoked to explain East Asian genomics and physiology. I therefore examined whether it could explain their culture and personality, and found that it could.
My paper documents that, in terms of psychology, East Asians bear a striking resemblance to indigenous Inuit and Siberians. All three groups exhibit high emotional suppression, in-group cohesion/unassertiveness, introversion, indirectness, self-consciousness, social sensitivity, cautiousness, perseverance and visuospatial abilities – traits that would have enhanced their ancestors’ survival in the unforgiving environment of Ice Age Siberia.
My paper also documents that Arctic environments necessitate these very traits in polar workers and expeditioners. Scouring the literature on personnel psychology revealed that the relevant traits are so consistently predictive of success in polar environments that they have been refined into the personnel selection criteria for many countries’ polar research programs. Here we see human “selection” conveniently mirroring natural selection.
What are polar environments like? Basically all the threats that typical hunter-gatherers face are exacerbated in the Arctic – where the average temperature is lethally cold, the visual landscape is blank and featureless, the ecology is devoid of vegetation, and where the ground might suddenly collapse underneath you, or drift away via ice floe. Mistakes are severely punished by the environment. Meanwhile, poor visuospatial ability, lack of group cohesion and reckless emotional behavior can be instantly fatal for the group.
Frequent blizzards and lethal windstorms necessitate prolonged group confinement – traditionally in igloos or tents, now in small polar stations. Indoor adaptive challenges include staying emotionally stable, controlling aggressive impulses, and being able to complete complex tasks in extremely adverse conditions – as evacuation is not possible during the deep winter, and social expulsion into the outdoors is fatal. A recent news story about South African scientists trapped in Antarctica with a violent team member illustrates the importance of the adaptive traits listed earlier.
Those traits – which are shared by East Asians, the Inuit and polar workers of all ethnicities – appear to be critical for staying alive and accomplishing tasks in harsh Arctic environments. This provides the basis for a parsimonious Arcticism theory of East Asian psychology, which posits that psychological adaptations to Ice Age Siberia predate and likely influence later ideologies like Confucianism.
Arcticism theory has already yielded some successful predictions, such as the observation that East Asian polar expeditioners have an easier time and are more psychologically stable than their North American counterparts. Another successful prediction is that in Singapore, East Asians have significantly lower rates of claustrophobia than South and Southeast Asians, when accounting for national culture and farming ancestry. I plan to test novel predictions in future studies by comparing Mongolians to Cossacks, Berbers and Somalis (thereby controlling for Holocene pastoralism) and by comparing Southern Chinese, Japanese and Koreans to Malays, Indians and North Italians (thereby controlling for Holocene rice farming).
Methods of study
Cultural psychologists must expand their scope of inquiry beyond just the Holocene and all the way back to 70,000 years ago when humans left Africa. I have dubbed this approach the Total Evolutionary Ecologies (TEE) model – the idea being that to understand a local population, one must examine all the environments and selective pressures their ancestors faced, instead of arbitrarily limiting oneself to the Holocene. It seems obvious in hindsight, but prior to recent advances in archaeogenetics and paleoecology, the pre-Holocene period was mostly handwaved away by psychologists – due to lack of data, methods and interest.
Evolutionary psychology traditionally had all the limitations of a historical science. There was no time machine one could use to go back to Pleistocene Africa to observe the long process of natural and sexual selection for universal human cognitive mechanisms. There was also no way to get a control group and an experimental group, as the process of universal human evolution takes far too long (although Janet Song’s lab is doing some interesting work on genetic brain evolution).
These limitations apply far less to the TEE model – that is, when investigating psychological traits that represent local adaptations to environments humans have inhabited since we left Africa. Ironically then, the most taboo area of cultural psychology is the most epistemically robust.
Take my analysis of personnel psychology data. Here we do have the luxury of control groups and experimental groups (civilians, pre-winter personnel versus polar veterans, post-winter personnel). This allows us to track psychological changes throughout a winter-over or polar trek, and to use the resulting successes and failures to learn about the process of natural selection in the past (although some expeditioners actually die or get severely injured, most failures result in evacuation or being rated low by peers and supervisors). Polar psychologists have also conducted extensive psychological testing of personnel, and by using their traits to predict successes and failures, they have identified selection criteria for ideal polar candidates. This has greatly enhanced our understanding of the kind of personalities polar environments select for.
Evolutionary explanations for human behaviour are often dismissed as “just so stories”. Yet the methods I have outlined are not susceptible to this charge, as the process of natural selection in polar environments can be observed in real time by personnel psychologists. I used these methods in my paper about the Arctic, but they could be applied to many other environments, such as tropical jungles, hot deserts and isolated mountains.
Will more credentialed practitioners of evolutionary psychology come to embrace these methods? The famous Santa Barbara school seems to focus on the (pre-Out of Africa) origins of certain universal features among humans, and has little to say about the (post-Out of Africa) origins of certain features that vary among human groups. These latter features, which represent local “tweaks” to preexisting traits, are often ignored in mainstream evolutionary psychology. This is partly due to the taboo surrounding the topic of evolved psychological differences, and partly because they appear “trivial” when compared to universal cognitive mechanisms. However, they may be far from trivial.
A local trait like lactose tolerance in Europeans, the genes for which make up an unnoticeable fraction of human genetic variation, has arguably altered the course of history by increasing survival rates during famines. These “trivial” traits can have an outsized impact on civilisational outcomes. Indeed, they may contribute to certain longstanding sociocultural practices that stunt development or flourishing in certain societies. Some of the Arcticist traits in my paper may underlie habits like stifled expression and social rigidity among East Asians, which many people say affect their quality of life.
Could studying all the ancient environments that shaped our local psychologies help us to resolve sociocultural problems, not only in East Asia but globally? Future studies will tell – once we dare to ask.
David Sun is a fellow at Seeds of Science. He is exploring ecological and climatic influences on personality and culture. You can follow him on Twitter and check out his Substack.
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Very interesting. I think there is a biological basis to the variation in personality traits among the races. I think the historical inventiveness and interest in exploration of the European people arises from personality characteristics like independence and individuality, which are more common in that group. It's unfortunate that it is so verboten to study the biological basis for racial behavioral differences, but that could be changing.
Interesting article. Thanks