美国芝加哥大学商学院Thomas Talhelm博士专访（上篇）：我为何研究中国、大米理论和星巴克？

《心理新青年》对话美国芝加哥大学商学院Thomas Talhelm博士：

我为何研究中国、大米理论和星巴克？

1. 嘉宾简介

Dr. Thomas Talhelm is an Assistant Professor of Behavioral Science at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Thomas has lived in China for five years as a Princeton in Asia fellow, as a freelance journalist in Beijing, and as a Fulbright scholar. He researches how rice farming gave southern China a very different culture from wheat-farming northern China. Thomas also founded Smart Air, a social enterprise that makes low-cost DIY air purifiers to help people in China protect themselves from air pollution. 

2. 采访题记

Thomas Talhelm博士是一位善于观察也善于讲故事的人。从他坦诚地分享他个人经历和文化体验中我们得知，几年前，因获得普林斯顿大学福布莱斯学者项目的机会，熟练西班牙语的他本来想去南美洲地区的国家，但十分意外地被派到了中国。在中国工作和生活的几年间，他一直好奇于中国南方和北方人为什么有着截然不同的思维方式和处事风格，并希望能找出这种文化差异的源头。经过到中国多个省市、地区的调查走访，他和合作者们提出了不同于以往的文化差异理论-“大米理论”：种植大米或者种植小麦这样不同的“耕作类型”可能影响了中国南方人和北方人的文化心理差异。该研究在2014年作为封面故事发表在顶尖学术期刊《科学》杂志上，引起了学术界与公众的广泛关注，同时也引发了很多质疑。近期，Thomas因为让人眼前一亮的星巴克现场观察实验，再一次进入了行为科学家和公众的视野。趁他暑期休假期间重返中国的机会，我们很荣幸地邀请到他作为本次人物专访嘉宾，和我们分享和畅谈他所开展研究背后那些不为人知的有趣故事。

3. 采访正文

《心理新青年》: Thanks so much for interviewing with us! We are honored and glad to have you as our interviewee! First, we would like to know a bit more about your personal experiences and life trajectories. You said you were born and raised in a neighborhood in Michigan. So can you share with us a little bit about some of your most salient early memories for intercultural contacts and interactions that may lead you to become roughly interested in culture psychology?

感谢Thomas Talhelm博士接受我们《心理新青年》的专访！我们感到非常荣幸和高兴。首先非常好奇您的个人经历和生活轨迹。您曾提及您在美国密歇根州的一个社区里长大。那么，您是否能和我们分享一些人生早期哪些文化间的接触和互动可能指引了您开始对文化心理学领域感兴趣？

Thomas: When I was an undergraduate, I was actually most interested in philosophy. Why philosophy? Because I wanted to understand the real truth. I thought, if I could understand how cultures influence our thought, then I’d be able to neutralize that influence and get closer to truth, and avoid that problem. But now I’m doing something completely different from that idea [laughs]. So how did I get into psychology? I remember when I was a freshman, a classmate lent me a book in sociology. That book had a really interesting perspective. When I was in high school, I almost never thought about how culture influences us in an unconscious way. Perhaps as a more individualistic American, I would assume by default that things I believed in, my personal jobs and hobbies, were self-determined. But this book let me see how culture influenced us in so many aspects in an unconscious way. For me, that idea was profound. So when I was a sophomore, I took a sociology class, but I felt like it didn’t hit the spot. It seemed like something was missing. The next semester, I took an intro to psychology class. I felt like sociology had more ambiguity about causality, and it would be harder to reach any conclusion based on its methods. But psychology was more persuasive to me in its methods. I was at Michigan for my undergraduate, and I was a research assistant, helping a graduate student Yuri Miyamoto, she’s at UW Madison now, on her research. Culture was a component in it by default. Then I started getting more in depth in Shinobu Kitayama’s lab, and later I helped Norbert Schwarz on a project on morality and decision making. These influences are still in me now.

Aesthetics is also a subject I’m really interested in, particularly what people in different cultures see as beauty, not just paintings but also music, books, and so on. There is so many interesting ground to be covered, like whether there’s any objectivity to beauty, any explainability in beauty. But I don’t have time to go into that now, maybe when I’m older [laughs].

我上大学的时候，其实我最感兴趣的是哲学。为什么是哲学呢？因为我想了解什么是真正的真理。如果能了解文化对我们思维的影响，那么我就能取消这个影响，也许就能更加靠近真理。但是我现在做的和当时的想法很不一样（笑）。后来我是怎么和心理学结缘的呢？我记得大学一年级的时候，有个同学借了我一本社会学的书。当时觉得书里的角度很有意思。我高中的时候几乎从来没有考虑过文化会无意识的影响我们，可能作为一个比较个体主义的美国人，我可能默认假设，我相信的东西、我个人的工作和喜好，这些都是我自己决定的。但是，这本书其实让我意识到，文化会无意识的影响我们的很多东西。这对我来说，感觉非常神奇和深奥。所以我大二的时候，上了社会学课，但却感觉社会学不是非常到位，好像缺少了些什么。下一学期，我上了一门心理学导论。我感觉社会学对因果关系比较模糊、很难下结论，而心理学的方法更加有说服力，更能建立确定的因果关系。我在密歇根上本科的时候，当时是研究助理，帮助当时还是研究生、现在在UW Madison的Yuri Miyamoto做研究，其中就涉及到了文化元素，后来开始和Shinobu Kitayama做更深入的文化心理研究，以及协助Norbert Schwarz做关于道德和决策的研究。这些经历到现在还在影响着我。审美学是一个我曾经非常感兴趣但没机会研究的科目。我当时特别感兴趣不同文化下的人们认为什么是美的，不仅仅是绘画，还包括音乐、书籍等等、以及是否存在客观的、可以被剖析的美。不过也许只有等一段时间才能有机会去研究这些有趣的论题了（笑）。

《心理新青年》：We’re also interested in how your multicultural experiences shaped and reshaped your research pipeline? 

我们还很感兴趣你的个人多元文化经历是如何造就、重塑了你的研究路径？

Thomas: When I was leaving Michigan, I knew I wanted to go to graduate school. I was kind of interested in going to China, but I was a little worried taking time off would hurt my chances of getting into graduate school. I remember Norbert telling me that as long as you’re not sitting on a beach reading books, then you’re fine [laughs]. And now I have a different idea. Now that I’m a professor, I really look for people who have experiences when students apply to work with me. It doesn’t have to be in another culture. For instance, if you do Teach for America, which is a program that sends people outi nto the world to teach – do stuff like that! Especially for psychology, where so much of the cool stuff that’s been done has some sort of inspiration in life, so go out and live a little bit! It’s so hard to get cool ideas just from books or just from journals… go out there and do stuff.

I’m not saying: don’t read books. The best starting point for a theory for me is observation in life, things that’d been on my mind for several years, and then the books and the research came and developed it and pushed it into a direction that never would’ve gone. Building on something interesting in life is valuable to me. Getting experience, whether in another culture or not, is super helpful.

从密歇根毕业的时候，我打算去读研。我有点想去中国，但担心这会影响我的研究生申请。我记得当时Norbert跟我讲，只要你不是坐在海滩上看书就没事（笑）。我现在想法已经不同了。作为一个教授，我会很希望看到向我申请的学生有很丰富的社会阅历。不需要一定是在另一个文化里，你可以去参加Teach for America这种项目。尤其对于心理学这个需要从生活中汲取灵感的学科，我会建议走出房门，去外面的世界看看吧！只是读书读文献是很难得到有趣的想法的。我并不是说让大家不要读书。对我来说正确的理论应该是：在生活中观察，在心中沉淀想法，之后再在书籍中和研究中寻求答案、不断发展、然后把想法推向一个不同的方向。所以对我来说，社会经历是非常重要的，极其有帮助的。

《心理新青年》：On this note, you mentioned that you had life experience in Guangzhou, Beijing, and Hong Kong, maybe also India and Singapore, but we are curious to know why it was in mainland China that you formulated and tested out your rice theory of culture. What cultural observation or experience that made you really into studying China?

一个相关的问题是，你曾在广州、北京、香港等地区都生活过，包括印度和新加坡等。我们很好奇为什么你选择了中国来形成和检验你的理论假设？比如说大米理论。是什么样的文化观察或文化体验让你尤其想要聚焦中国大地开展文化心理学研究呢？

Thomas: Why China? There’re lots of different aspects. For one, it was an accident. I never chose to come to China. Instead, I was sent to China on a research program. There have been a few times where very important decisions that were decided by other people ended up being very fortunate. If I were to choose where to go in undergrad, I would have gone to South America, because I had studied Spanish, and my life would be really different right now. I’m really happy now that somebody else in an office made some decision to send me to China, because now I'm doing something that I think is super interesting. When I came back from China, after that first time, I asked to go back again in this other program, Princeton in Asia. I asked to go back to Beijing because I knew Beijing, but then they sent me to Guangzhou. And I was like, “ahh, I wanted to go to Beijing! Guangzhou’s going to be so hot, and I can't speak Cantonese.” But then, that helped lead to this theory, because I was in this place that felt very different from Beijing to me. So having those sorts of accidents was super interesting and fortunate to me. I think sometimes if we give up control a little bit and don't let our own preferences decide everything, it can actually lead to some good things.

But back to the topic of what’s interesting about China. I remember as an undergrad, I studied Japanese for a little while because I studied Spanish and Portuguese, and I wanted to try something different. I got really frustrated with Japanese because you have to say things differently depending on who you're talking to. For instance, the word “look” as in “look at that” is different when I'm talking to a professor versus when I'm talking to a friend. But “look” is just an action, why does that have to change? I stopped studying Japanese partly because I was impatient with that.

Chinese was not like that. Instead, Chinese had tones, and I've never heard of tones before. That was really interesting. Another cool thing about China is that it's so big, with so much changing right now. Nobody knows what's going on at times. People are still figuring things out. There’s so much changing and excitement, whereas in Japan it's more settled and systematic. That just didn't excite me quite as much as China.

为什么选择中国呢？有很多不同方面的原因。首先，它是一场意外。我一开始没有选择来到中国，而是被一个研究项目分配过来的。在我的人生中，有那么几个非常重要的决定，是被别人决定的，但却导致了非常幸运的结果。如果当时大学时由我自己来选择的话，我会选择去南美，因为我学过西班牙语。如果那样的话，我现在的生命轨迹会非常不同了。我现在很高兴当时有人决定让我来到了中国，因为我现在在做我觉得非常有趣的事情。

当我第一次从中国回去之后，我在另一个项目Princeton in Asia中再一次申请回到中国。我本来要求去北京，因为我了解北京，但却被分到了广州。我当时想，为什么要让我到那儿啊？那里很热，我又不会说广东话。但却正因为我来到了这个和北京大相径庭的地方，我才开始思考和得出了现在的大米理论。所以这些意外把我引向了非常有趣、也非常幸运的结果。我想，如果我们试着不要那么努力的控制我们生活的走向、让自己的喜好主导一切，也是能够得到非常好的结果的。

说到中国哪里有趣的问题，我记得我在本科时学了一段时间日语。我当时学过西班牙语，葡萄牙语，所以想学点不一样的东西。然而日语让我感到很沮丧，因为对不同的人说话的时候，同样一个词要有不同的说法。比如「看」这个词，对着一个教授说和一个朋友说几乎完全不同。但「看」只是一个动作，为什么要搞得如此不同呢？我停止学日语的一部分原因是不耐烦这样的细节。而中文就不同了。中文会有声调。声调我以前从来没听说过，感觉非常有趣。

中国还有一个很酷的点在于，她太大了，又有太多事情正在发生巨大的变化。感觉没人知道怎么回事，大家都在努力弄懂发生了什么。所以我觉得中国有如此多改变、激动人心的事情正在发生，而日本是一个更加沉淀下来的、有系统的地方。这对我来说没有中国令人激动。

《心理新青年》：We're also curious that why did you choose the ecological perspective and subsistence theory to explain psychological differences between the North and the South? And what do you see as the advantages and disadvantages of this perspective and approach?

我们还很好奇，为什么你会选择生态学视角和生存理论取向来解释中国南北方心理与行为差异，你认为这个角度有哪些优势和劣势呢？

Thomas: At a deeper level, I think culture and humans are - and I want be careful about this – rational. In other words, we respond to outcomes. When something bad or something good happens, we pay attention.Therefore, I generally like to think of cultures as: what were the incentives in people's lives for them to act one way or the other? What were the consequences of your behavior? I think that tends to work. For example, Chinese have the habit of drinking boiled water, and I think there's probably a logical reason for that. I think for a long time people didn't have safe water. If you boil it first, it kills the bacteria. They probably didn’t realize that, but it worked out that way. Maybe people found that they felt better after drinking boiled water, or maybe nine out of ten of us had boiled water, but the one person who didn’t got sick, so they stopped drinking regular water. If you want to understand why cultures might be different in a rational way, I think the environment is the place to look.

从深层来讲，我认为文化和人类是，我希望谨慎用词，在一定程度上是理性的。或者说，我们是基于后果而行动的。当一件坏事或好事发生的时候，我们就会关注到它。所以，我思考文化问题的方式是，人们的生活中有什么样的动机导致他们这样或那样做？你的行为的后果是什么？这样的思考方式一般来说是有效的。以中国人喝开水的习惯为例，我认为这个现象背后是有一个符合逻辑的理由的。可能很长时间以来，人们没有安全的水源。如果你先把水烧开，就能消除细菌。当时的人也许并不知道其中的道理，但是结果就变成这样了。也许人们发现喝了开水以后他们感觉更好一点了，也许十个人里九个人喝了开水，而另一个人没喝开水以后就病了，人们就总结，我们不应该喝生水。如果你想从理性的角度理解文化差异的存在，我认为可以从环境入手去探究。

《心理新青年》：You raised a few points that were really debatable and thought provoking in your talk, and people mentioned quite a lot of confounding factors that you haven't covered. Would you highlight one or two points that you think is constructive for the debate and can also point to very promising future directions about the rice theory?

你在演讲时提到了一些非常值得讨论、引人深思的观点，听众当时也提出了不少研究中尚未涉及的干扰因素。你能在这里强调几个你认为对大米理论的争论最富有建设性、也能够成为大米理论未来颇有前景的发展方向的观点吗？

Thomas: Yeah, I think the biggest thing that I have not talked about in the papers, but I talked about it a little bit today in the talk, is what comes before rice historically? I did these analyses that showed that you need this particular type of environment, which is mostly rain and water, beside soil and some other things. And I did these analyses on the correlation between the rice farming and the ability to grow rice because ofthe environment. The result was about r =.86, meaning that almost anywhere in China that can grow rice is growing rice, or at least historically. 

But there’s a problem, because there are different types of rice that you can grow more intensively and less intensively. Rice can grow on dry land, but I think that would influence culture less, because it’s less intensive. There are other parts of the world, for instance, in Southeast Asia, Thailand, or some parts of Vietnam, that grow rice where it floods naturally, and nature does the work for you. In that case, we don’t need to flood the fields ourselves with irrigation systems. That’s why rice plant exists in the first place. But why did certain areas, particularly in China, develop this very intensive rice farming? I think the answer is about population density, having lots of labor, having government stability, having not so much war, because when people are constantly unsettled, it wouldn’t make sense to invest in an irrigation system. That to me is a really interesting question, partly a confound with rice, because in a sense, all the places I’ve studied so far have those factors. I haven’t compared any places that didn’t have enough stability and population density to begin with. I also think that growing rice on hills is evidence of stability, population density, and having enough labor available, so that it makes sense to flatten parts of hills into fields. If you have low population density and lots of land, you’re not going to farm on a hill, right? So I think there’s a lot more where that could be developed.

我觉得我在论文中没能谈到，但是今天在演讲中稍微提到了的最大的一点，是在大米之前人们如何种植呢？我做的一个分析说明种植大米需要这样的环境，主要的刚需就是水，当然还包括一些别的条件比如土壤等。我又做了能够种植大米的环境和实际的大米种植行为，发现相关大约是.86。也就是说，在中国，几乎所有能种植大米的地方都在种植大米，或者起码在历史上曾在山坡上开地种米。但问题来了，因为大米有不同的种类，需求密集型的和需求不密集型的。大米可以在更干旱贫瘠的土壤上生长，但我认为这可能不会对文化造成那么大的影响，因为不那么密集。世界上很多其他地方比如东南亚地区，泰国，越南，是自然灌溉条件比较好的，会更自然地生长大米。这样，就不需要人类去劳作提供灌溉系统。这也是大米本身存在于自然界中的原因。但为什么以中国为主的某些地区会发展出这么劳动密集型的大米农业呢？我认为答案在于人口密度、劳动力充足、政府稳定、战争不频繁等原因。如果社会动荡，人们就不会去建造灌溉系统。这对我来说非常有意思，因为这和大米农业本身是一个干扰因素。因为，在我所有研究过的地方，这些因素都是存在的。我没能把我的样本和任何不存在足够的稳定性和人口密度却种植大米的地区进行比较。我也认为在山地上种植大米是一个地区具有稳定性和人口密度、劳动力充足的证据，因为如果不是这样的话，人们就不会费工夫去开垦山地，对吧？所以我认为这个领域可以继续深挖。

《心理新青年》：That got me thinking, now we have a lot of migrant workers move into the cities. Many people quit farming and replaced labor with machines, which boosted the efficiency. Also, Yuan Longping developed the hybrid rice, which made it possible for lots of farmers to quit farming while allowing for sufficient rice supply. Do you think this new change and new phenomenon would have a profound influence on our culture, esepcially for future generations?

由此联想到一个问题，现在有很多农民不种地而去了城市打工，很多先进的机器代替了劳动力，产量也大大提升了。另外，袁隆平发明了杂交水稻，这让很多农民可以去务农，但同时能够保证中国人民的粮食供给。不知道这些新的变化和新的现象会不会对我们的文化造成影响，尤其对于未来几代而言？

Thomas: Yeah, I often think about whether culture would be passed down. Lots of people have stopped farming, and many students’ moms and dads work in office jobs now, whereas a lot of people worked in the fields 50 years ago. But another theory of this is, each culture has a core to it. A recent example of this is, a Muslim friend of a friend immigrated to the U.S. Their culture is more traditional than American culture, and everyday they would Skype their brothers and sisters. I think it’s intuitive to believe that technology will make us more modernized, more individualistic, and so on. But this personfrom a traditional culture is using technology in a way that reinforces the irtraditional culture. So if we put technology, GDP and so on into a regressionanalysis, its basic assumption is that GDP and technology would influence their behaviors. But who’s using that technology and spending that money? It’s people. Different people use and spend money in different ways, and that could be to support their existing values and cultural differences. Will we become more alike after we all have more money? Will the world culture be united? I think it’s possible that having more money could make us more different in some aspects. I think that’s an interesting idea worth thinking about.

我经常会思考文化会不会持续下去的问题。很多农民现在不种地了，很多现在的学生在五十年前都是他们的爸爸妈妈自己种地，但现在他们的爸爸妈妈是在办公室工作的。但是另一种理论是说每个文化都有一个核心。一个最近的例子是，我一个来自穆斯林国家的朋友移民到了美国，他们国家的文化比美国传统。这个人在美国每天用Skype跟家人打电话。我们经常会想科技会让我们更现代化，更个人主义等等。但是这个来自传统文化的人却会使用科技的方式来支持他的传统文化。所以如果我们把科技、GDP等因素都放到一个回归分析里面，它的基本一个假设是GDP、科技会影响这些人的行为。但是是谁在用钱？是人在用钱。不同的人会有不同的方式去花钱。他们花钱的方式可能是支持他们已经拥有的价值观、他们的文化差异。我们都有钱之后就会变得都一样吗？整个世界就会是一个文化吗？我觉得钱有可能会让我们在某些方面越来越不一样。我觉得这是一个值得思考的有趣的想法。

《心理新青年》：I totally agree. Another thing I’m curious about is, if there is some kind of persistence to cultural heritage, what are the accessible pathways to transmit it? Would there be multiple channels such as implicit cultural norms or the family dynamics? Which ones do you think are more plausible, or would you say there would be some mediators between rice farming and our psychological and behavioral patterns?

我很同意。我还很好奇的一点是，如果说文化传承的确存在某种延续性的话，它是通过什么样的渠道去传递的呢？比如说，內隐文化规范或者家庭互动中存在的文化习俗等。不知道哪些是你认为比较可能的，或者说，你认为大米种植和我们的心理与行为特征中间存在什么样的中介变量？

Thomas: I think that's a difficult question. I remember a professor asking me once after a talk of mine: then what do you think are the mediators? I need to be careful about this, because there are different definitions of mediators. One of the definitions would be, how is the culture passed on? For that, I don’t know! Is it genes? Is it institutions? Is it school? Is it parenting? It’s all of it, right? I would be surprised if there’s research that shows, for instance, it’s not parenting.  I would find that hard to believe—your measure might be problematic, or maybe you only looked at a part of the issue. All in all, I don’t really know the answer to that, and there are a lot of different ways to answer that question.

这是个很难回答的问题。我记得有一次我做演讲之后有一个教授提问：那你觉得中介变量是什么呢？我觉得需要谨慎一点，因为中介变量有不同的界定。其中一个定义是说，文化是如何传承的？这个问题，我不清楚！是基因吗？是机构吗？是学校吗？是爸爸妈妈的教育吗？这些可能都有吧，不是吗？如果你能做出一个研究说明，比如说，不是爸爸妈妈的教育，我会很惊讶，我会觉得很难相信，会认为可能你测量的方式有一些问题或者你只看了问题的某一部分等等。总而言之，我真的不清楚这个问题的答案。我认为回答这个问题有很多不同的方式。

《心理新青年》：And so maybe that can be some kind of promising future directions. 

所以也许这可以是一个很有前景的未来探索的研究方向。

Thomas: Yeah, that's for sure. One thing that I find interesting and would encourage people to do is stuff that we don't think about that much. I get a little bit of this from economists. I think of culture as a part of anthropology, psychology, maybe some sociology, but recently, economists have started studying culture. And there are a few economists that do really interesting work. And I love looking at what they do because their background, methods, and the way that they think about countries and cultures and societies are so different from ours. We can learn from them things that we didn’t think about. For one, they tend to think about institutions a lot more than we do now, including governments, policies, and how schools are set up. One of the cool things I noticed when I taught in Guangzhou was, one student would sit in this desk all day everyday, and the person who's sitting next tot hem sat there all day, every day for the whole year. Maybe between years they move desks. Yet, when I was in high school, it was totally different. I sat in a different chair every class, and the person sitting next to me was almost always different. We then go to different classes. And then all my classes were changed each semester. And the people sitting next to me were different. And so I think about that in terms of how do people make friends, how stable are people's friendships and so on. That was Masaki Yuki’s research on relational mobility right there. That was it. And that's an institution, a school. That is pretty fascinating.

Or take universities in Japan and America. A professor in the US that I know has spent a lot of time in Japan. I asked her, would you ever think about being a professor in Japan? And she said, yeah, I’d be interested, but the problem is that I basically can't. Because if I go to a university in Japan, I’ll have to start at the beginningwith a beginning salary, or else, if they somehow make me like a “medium level” professor, that's going to upset everybody else. Because the way that they do pay at these universities is based on how long you've been there. Unlike the US, where you can hire anybody at any level and give them the appropriate salary. Thus, while universities in Japan and the U.S. all have great research and everything, they are designed differently. The American system is very suited to moving, hiring, firing, rehiring, and changing. In Japan, it's just not done that way, and I imagine that mobility is a bit harder. So if we're looking at mechanisms to link earlier culture and earlier environments to now,I would encourage young social psychologists to get out there and think about stuff that's not in our journals a lot. Institutions are a cool area to think about.

是的，没错。有一个我觉得很有趣而且会鼓励其他人去跟进的是我们之前不太多去思考的方面。这个我是受经济学家一点影响的。我会从人类学、心理学、以及社会学的角度去思考文化，而且最近经济学家也开始研究文化了。有几个经济学家有了非常有趣的研究成果。我很喜欢看他们的研究，因为他们的背景、研究方法、以及他们思考国家、文化和社会的方式和我们太不同了。我们可以从他们身上学到我们之前没有的思考方式。举个例子，他们会比我们关注机构、制度多得多，其中包括政府、政策、学校等等的建立方式。我之前在广州教书的时候发现的很有趣的一点是，一个学生每天都会坐在同样一张桌子上，一整年。而他旁边的人（同桌）就会在他旁边坐上一整年。换座位可能是过了一年才有的事。可是我上高中的时候全然不同。我每节课都坐在不同的地方，我身边的人也几乎从来都不是同一个人。我们会去不同的班里上不同的课。每学期我们上的课也会换。我身边坐着的人总是会不一样。这就让我想到了人们是如何交朋友、人们的友谊的稳定性，等等问题。这就是Masaki Yuki的关系流动性的研究似乎完全再现。而且这就是在一个机构里，一个学校里。这是非常有意思的。

或者用日本和美国的大学差异为例。我认识的一个美国教授在日本呆了很久。我问他，你有没有考虑过去日本当教授？他说，我会感兴趣啊，但是这基本上没法实现。因为如果我要去一个日本的大学，我就得从头开始，从初级薪水开始。否则，假设他们同意我直接成为中级的教授，其他人就会都很不高兴，因为日本大学是按照在大学就职的年份来算的。美国就不同，你可以在任何层次随时雇用任何人并给他们相称的薪资待遇。所以，虽然日本和美国的大学都很出色，他们的组织结构却完全不同。美国的系统比较适合流动、雇人、裁员、再雇佣等等改变。而日本就截然不同，流动也应该会更困难一些。所以说，如果我们要探寻把以前的文化和环境和今天联系起来的机制的话，我会鼓励年轻的社会心理学家去多入世，思考学术期刊里找不到的东西。比如说我们刚才提到的机构就是一个很有意思的领域。

《心理新青年》：Cool. So let's move on to focusing a bit more on China. China’s undergone a dramatic cultural change during the past couple decades. Both social scientists and lay people want to figure out what has happened, what’s currently happening, and towards what kind of general direction we're going. What would you highlight as the most exciting component? And what may also be some depressing or sad aspects?

我们再次多聊聊中国吧。中国在过去几十年中经历了巨变。社会科学家和大众都很想知道发生了什么，正在经历着什么，以及我们正在向什么方向前进。你认为其中最激动人心的方面是什么？以及最令人沮丧或难过的部分是什么？

Thomas: Maybe I’ll start with something sad and then promising [laugh]. I think one thing that is sad that's happening in China is also happening in lots of places around the world. As much as I argue that cultures have this core that can survive into modernity, there are lots of parts of culture that are dying, for instance, dialectical differences. To me that’s a shame. Some people my age whose parents speak some sort of dialect won't speak that dialect to their kids because they want them to speak Mandarin. I don't blame those parents at all, because that's reasonable in this school system, but it does make me kind of sad. As someone who find these differences really interesting, I want them to stay. Similarly, around theworld, lots of languages are dying. I wish some dialects would stick around a little bit longer.

In terms of the exciting things, I’ve sometimes said before that we are entering the dawn of the “uncorrelated era.” Here’s the background to this: if you calculate the correlation between being Western (a binary variable: is a country Western country or not? And there's a definition, somebody somewhere defined “Western”) and being wealthy since the 1800s, with GDP data for different countries, the correlation is about .82. At one point, it almost gets up to .90. So, for the last 150 years, being Western has basically been synonymous with being wealthy on a global scale. For the longest time, researchers have wanted to know, does GDP, or does wealth, make cultures more individualistic? But how can we know when being Western and GDP are so confounded? The only way to know is to wait until countries that are not Western become wealthy. Japan was early, and now China is starting to get there. What’s really interesting is that, in the 1970s, that correlation starts going down. And that correlation is now at the lowest point in the last 150 years, which means that we now have more and more countries that are wealthy and non-Western. China is one of those countries. And I think that's super exciting as a researcher, because we basically get to answer this question that people, no matter what they wanted to do, could not answer for a hundred and fifty years, because now we get to see people who have a different cultural heritage get wealthy. And what do they do? Now we can test it. Andover the next fifty years we can get the answer. And China in particular is a great example of that. What do Chinese people do when they get wealthy? Some variables are going to be like America—for example, divorce rates rising, family size going down, lifespan increasing, and so on, because it’s almost an iron law in many different cultures where wealth increases. But my guess is that there will be areas of things that are not going to become Western, and that’s going to be the interesting thing. For instance, in Japan, surveys on the importance of family going back to the 1950s show that that has not changed for decades. If anything, it’s flat to up. That's fascinating.

我先说说令人难过的部分，然后再说说兴奋的部分吧（笑）。有一件在中国发生的令人难过的事，其实也在世界上的很多其他地区发生着。虽然我认为文化有能够留存至现代化的核心，但也有很多文化的部分正在死去，比如方言差异。对我来说，这十分令人抱憾。一些我的同龄人的父母自己说方言，但却不再对孩子说方言了，因为要让孩子说普通话。我不怪这些家长，因为这对于学校系统来说是合理的，但这仍然让我感到难过。作为一个喜欢这些语言差异的人，我希望它们能够得以留存。相似地，在世界范围内，有很多语言正在消亡。我希望一些方言能够留存更久一些。

说到令人激动的事情。我之前有时说，我们正在进入「无相关性误差的黎明」，由来是这样的：我曾经算过西方国家（对于西方国家的定义，这里是把每个国家以二元变量记为西方国家或非西方国家）和富裕程度的关联性，从1800年开始的GDP数据算，结果大约是 .82，并且一度到达了 .9。所以在过去的一百五十年里，在全球范围内，西方国家几乎就是富裕的代名词。这么长时间，研究者一直都想知道，GDP，或是说财富，是否会造成一个文化更加个人主义？但如果「是西方国家」这一点属性和GDP本身就造成干扰，我们怎么能知道答案呢？唯一的方法就是等，等到非西方国家的财富积累起来了才行。日本是率先开始的，我们现在离目标也越来越近了。70年代开始西方性和财富之间的关联性就开始下降了，而现在已经是过去150年内的历史新低。也就是说，有越来越多的国家是富裕但非西方的了。中国就是其中的一个。作为一个研究者来说，这是超级令人激动的事，因为我们能够回答之前的人150年内无论做什么都无法回答的问题。现在不同文化背景的人开始变得富裕了，那么他们会怎么做呢？那么我们就可以测量了，而这之后的五十年内我们就能看到结果。中国是个尤其好的例子。中国人有钱了会怎么样呢？有些方面，他们会和美国人一样，比如说离婚率上升，家庭规模变小，平均寿命延长，因为这些在各个不同的文化间几乎可以说是个铁律，不论哪里变富裕都会有这样的结果。但我猜想，在有些方面中国人会和西方人完全不同，这就是令人感兴趣的点。比如说，在日本，有从50年代起到现在的调查显示日本人对于家庭的重视在过去的几十年内不但没有降低，反而是不变或甚至提高了。这简直是太有意思了。

《心理新青年》：Interesting! So would you mind suggesting a couple topics that you think are really worth exploring for young Chinese social psychologists during this historical shift?

那么，你愿意给中国的年轻社会心理学家提出一些在这个历史性转变之际值得探究的话题的建议吗？

Thomas: One neat thing is, I love the debate in China about morality that's going on right now. People are just really fiercely debating this, and I think that's fascinating. In Foshan, a baby, Xiaoyueyue,was hit by a car, and then people didn't help her. And in Henan somebody got hit by a car on the street. And then supposedly people didn't help, although actually there was evidence that people did help, but the video looks bad. I love that because I sometimes think that the more people are talking about something, the more the opposite is true, in the sense that what’s happening shows all this outrage about these behaviors. Let's look at both of those situations. The victim was always astranger, and the potential helper was somebody who didn't know these people. And the outcry in these situations is, “we should be kinder to strangers” or “we should be kind to people that we don't know.” To me, that is a sign of a culture that is moving from a morality that worked for a village into a morality that works for modern metropolises. For thousands of years, people lived in villages or small communities, and they had a morality that was based on relationships. And that made sense in that context. And now we're moving to a culture where so many people are moving to cities where most people you see on a daily basis are strangers. So we need to change the rules to adjust to that new situation. I think that people who are criticizing the Xiaoyueyue behavior are evidence thatwe care about strangers now. I love this idea that so many people think that people used to be good and moral, and it's just now that we're bad. I remember reading in a Fei Xiaotong's book about Yunnan. A laborer comes to town and he works there. He's not from the town, doesn't know anybody, and is not related to anybody. When he dies (maybe I exaggerated this in my mind), what do they do to the guy’s body? This is early 1900s, over a hundred years ago in a villagein Yunnan. They throw his body into a field, and then dogs eat the body. That would be pretty awful right now. Why did they do that? It hink partly because the rules around death and funerals were based on relationships. There were duties that you had if it was your parents or a sibling who died, but that person didn't fit in that system, so they didn't have a responsibility to him. My guess is that if that happens in modern China, the way you'll be treated is probably better than it was in that town in Yunnan.

有一个很不错的话题是，我很喜欢现在中国正在进行的道德辩论。人们对这些话题进行如此激烈的争论，我认为这简直太有意思了。在佛山，一个小孩，小悦悦，被车撞了，结果发现人们没有去帮助这个孩子。河南有个人在街上被车撞了，虽然有证据表明当时是有人去帮忙的，但是结果录像产生的表象是没人帮忙。我很喜欢这些争议，因为我认为人们越去讨论某件事，反而说明事实是相反的，因为人们对于这些行为表现出了如此激愤的情绪。在这两个事件中，受害者都是一个陌生人，而那些潜在的帮助者也是不认识他们的。而群众对这些事件表现的呼声是：我们应该对陌生人、我们不认识的人更友善。

对我来说，这是一个文化在从乡村道德转型的表现。上千年来，人们都在乡村和小集体中生活，而他们的道德观是建立在人际关系上的。这在他们的角度是合理的。而现在我们的文化在转型，因为很多人都移入了城市，我们每天看到的人们大部分都是陌生人。我们需要改变规则来适应新的情况。我们认为人们指责小悦悦事件中的人是因为我们现在对陌生人有关怀了。看到很多人认为我们曾经是好的、道德的，而现在我们道德感变差了，这一点我很喜欢。我曾在一本费孝通的书中读到一个云南的事件。一个务工人员来到了一个镇上，在那里劳作。他不是那个镇的人，也不认识那里的人，也不是谁的亲戚。结果当他去世的时候（也许这一点在我记忆里夸大了，可能不准确），人们把他的尸体丢到了一个空场，被狗给吃了。这在现在来看是很可怕的事情。为什么他们会那样做呢？我认为一部分原因是由于在那里死亡和丧葬的习俗规矩都是建立在关系上的。如果是你的父母、兄弟姐妹，你就会有这样那样的责任等等。然而那个人没有进入这个系统，所以他们对他就没有任何责任。我猜测如果这件事在现在的中国发生的话，人们对待你的方式恐怕会比当时在云南的那个镇要好。

《心理新青年》：That’s really interesting. Many people mentioned about the moral decline in China, and some people said that this could be an illusion. Some people are just nostalgic about how great their old time was. This can create an illusion of moral decline when people's moral standards are changing and when people try to judge newer moral phenomenon with older morality.

这太有意思了。很多人谈论中国的道德滑坡的问题，有些人却说这可能是一种幻觉。可能由于人们喜欢怀旧，人们认为过去的时代多么美好。这可能会造成一种道德滑坡的幻觉，尤其是当人们的道德标准发生变化的时候，或者使用旧的道德标准来评判新的道德事件的时候。

Thomas: Yeah, I think that’s exactly right. I’m not sure if people are becoming better or worse, but just changing. My guess is that the extent to which we think we should always help strangers may come with a cost of helping family and attachment to parents, and so on. I wonder if somebody from an old time would be shocked how people treat their parents these days, but my guess is we’re probably nicer to strangers than we used to be. So “bette ror worse” may not be the right way to think about it, but just different.

是的，你说的没错。我不觉得人们是在变好或者变坏，而只是变化了。我猜我们对陌生人有多好是以我们对家庭有多关心、帮助、和家长之间的纽带等等为代价的。我想也许从过去来的人会惊讶于人们现在如何对待他们的父母，但我猜我们现在对陌生人是比以前更好的。所以在这个问题上，讨论「更好」或「更坏」可能是不恰当的，我们只是变得「不同」而已。

(未完待续，敬请期待)

下期预告：

《心理新青年》对话美国芝加哥大学商学院Thomas Talhelm博士（下篇）：

中国学生应大胆探索自己感兴趣的问题

文化是一种复杂的现象，种植小麦、种植水稻的区别不能解释一切文化差异，只能解释农耕方式所导致的一部分差异，导致南北方人心理与行为差异还有很多其他原因。Thomas告诉大家，如果感兴趣研究中国社会内部的文化心理差异，后续还会出现更多更复杂的版本。他认为这个领域还有很多值得挖掘的东西，希望未来有更多的研究者深入探究，开展深度的交流与合作。专访下篇我们将继续邀请到Thomas Talhelm博士面向人格与社会心理学领域的年轻学子们和大家分享学术训练与文章写作等实用技巧。精彩内容，敬请期待！

4. 采访团队

胡晓檬

清华大学心理系博士后

研究领域：跨文化道德心理学、全球化与文化变迁                   

吴珏彧

美国普林斯顿大学心理系博士生

研究领域：群体动态、行为决策、社会影响以及行为改变、行为经济学

王浥濛

美国耶鲁大学心理系博士生

研究领域：潜意识行为、消费行为、跨文化决策、具身认知           

孙卉

美国西北大学商学院博士生

研究领域：计算认知科学、知识社会学、社会网络、组织理论

徐以安

美国东北大学心理系博士生

研究领域：跨文化视野下的认知偏误、心理本质主义、法律心理学                

徐艺姗

美国弗吉尼亚大学临床心理学博士

研究领域：临床心理干预、睡眠失调、压力应对、自我同情与关怀                     

杨涛

清华大学心理系博士后

研究领域：认知年老化、跨文化、情绪与认知神经科学

5. 特别声明

本次心理学家专访由《心理新青年》编辑部制作呈现。具体分工如下：胡晓檬、杨涛起草提纲、实施采访，王浥濛、胡晓檬转录文本、编辑修改，Thomas Talhelm博士审校，编辑部其他成员徐以安、吴珏彧、孙卉、徐艺珊对此文亦有贡献。本文知识产权归《心理新青年》编辑部所有，未经授权，严禁转载。如需转载，请联系编辑部商讨授权事宜。

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