Rice culture and the cushion hypothesis: Experimental evidence from incentivized risk taking tasks

Cumulative evidence points to the validity of the Hsee and Weber (1999) cushion hypothesis suggesting that people in a collectivist society, such as China, have greater capacity to take on risks than members of an individualistic society such as the United States, because they are more likely to receive help if they are in need (i.e., they could be ‘cushioned’), and consequently, less risk averse than those in an individualistic society. Rice theory Talhelm et al. (2014) points to a parallel between East–West​ difference and what differentiates the rice farming South from the wheat farming North in China in the individualism–collectivism dimension. These hypotheses jointly predict that people from China’s rice farming regions would be more risk tolerant than their counterparts from the wheat farming regions. Using incentivized decision making tasks, we find support for the cushion hypothesis being applicable within China in a large sample of subjects recruited in Beijing.