Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will

by Robert M. Sapolsky

Force an American to tell you about times that other people influenced them, and they secrete glucocorticoids; someone East Asian will secrete the stress hormone when forced to tell you about times they influenced other people.[50]

Where do these differences come from? The standard explanations for American individualism include (a) not only are we a nation of immigrants (as of 2017, ~37 percent immigrants or children of), but it’s not random who emigrates; instead, immigrating is a filtering process selecting for people willing to leave their world and culture behind, sustain an arduous journey to a place with barriers impeding their entry, and labor at the most shit jobs when granted admission; and (b) most of American history has been spent with an expanding western border settled by similarly tough, individualist pioneers. Meanwhile, the standard explanation for East Asian collectivism is ecology dictating the means of production—ten millennia of rice farming, which demands massive amounts of collective labor to turn mountains into terraced rice paddies, collective planting and harvesting of each person’s crops in sequence, collective construction and maintenance of massive and ancient irrigation systems.[*],[51]

Another literature compares cultures of rain forest versus desert dwellers, where the former tend toward inventing polytheistic religions, the latter, monotheistic ones. This probably reflects ecological influences as well—life in the desert is a furnace-blasted, desiccated singular struggle for survival; rain forests teem with a multitude of species, biasing toward the invention of a multitude of gods. Moreover, monotheistic desert dwellers are more warlike and more effective conquerors than rain forest polytheists, explaining why roughly 55 percent of humans proclaim religions invented by Middle Eastern monotheistic shepherds.[53]