Ongoing Voluntary Settlement and Independent Agency: Evidence from China

Abstract

Voluntary frontier settlement leads to independent agency. Since this type of research has not yet been implemented in ongoing voluntary settlement frontiers, we conducted several cultural tasks to investigate Shenzhen, known as China’s ongoing “South Frontier,” which is composed mostly of people that have emigrated from other Chinese provinces within the past 30 years. We hypothesized that residents of Shenzhen are more independent than those in other regions of Mainland China. As predicted, residents of Shenzhen scored higher than China inland residents in self-reported independent beliefs and scored lower in nepotism. The results indicate that, even in a short-term ongoing frontier, voluntary settlement is associated with independent agency.

Outside the “Cultural Binary”: Understanding Why Latin American Collectivist Societies Foster Independent Selves

“…They proposed that frontier settlement will likely attract independently minded individuals, that independence will be adaptive for survival in the harsh and unprotected circumstances of frontier life, and that those who are attracted to and survive frontier life will likely pass on their beliefs and values to subsequent generations. The frontier-settlement hypothesis has been used to explain cultural differences between sedentary and settler societies in Europe, North America, and Australasia ( Varnum & Kitayama, 2011 ) and between regions that were more or less recently settled within Japan ( Ishii et al, 2014 ; Kitayama et al, 2006 ), China ( Feng et al, 2017 ), the United States, and Canada ( Varnum & Kitayama, 2011 ).…”

Physical topography is associated with human personality

“…Over time, these processes may have led to an elevated prevalence of independent traits and social norms that were most conducive to survival 7 . Eventually, individualist values defined the local culture, continuously reproducing and cementing the ethos of independence 7 , characterized by toughness, self-reliance 26 , low levels of conformity 27 , increased independent agency 7,28 , and independence-related normative beliefs 29 . Even today the mountain states continue to exhibit the strongest individualist tendencies in the country 30 and have cultivated a cultural narrative as the "land of 'Don't fence me in', Gary Cooper in 'High Noon', and the Marlboro man" 26 .…”

An Integrated Ecological Approach to Mapping Variations in Collectivism Within China: Introducing the Triple-Line Framework

“…Given the complexity of China, the observation of regional variations in cultural orientations is unsurprising. These variations have been observed through self-report values (Feng et al, 2017;Van de Vliert et al, 2013), experimental tasks such as symbolic self-inflation (Dong et al, 2019;Luo & Ren, 2018;Ma et al, 2016;Talhelm et al, 2014), cultural products (Hou et al, 2016), and online behaviors (Ren, Xiang, Zhou & Zhu, 2017). A few potential ecological factors have been tested.…”

“…Furthermore, climate variation has been found to explain psychological differences such as personality; specifically, it has been linked to regional-level personality trait differences in which the southern Chinese score higher than the northern Chinese on the Big Five personality traits of agreeableness, conscientiousness, extraversion, emotional stability, and openness (Wei et al, 2017). Some ecological factors have been shown to predict province-level variation in collectivism, such as climate demand (Van de Vliert et al, 2013), mode of agriculture (Talhelm et al, 2014), and voluntary settlement (Chen, et al, 2016;Chen, et al, 2019;Feng et al, 2017).…”